The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  “It was the fourth day of June in 1865 I begins to live, and I gwine take the picture of that old man in the big black hat and long whiskers, sitting on the gallery and talking kind to us, clean into my grave with me.”

  Eda Harper, Pine Bluff, Ark.:

  “When the war ended, white man come into the field and tell my mother-in-law she free as he is. She dropped her hoe and danced up to the turn road and danced right up into Old Master’s parlor. She went so fast a bird could have sat on her dress tail. That was in June. That night she sent and got all her neighbors, and they danced all night long.”

  Margaret Hughes, of Columbia, S. C.:

  “My old aunty was glad to hear ’bout the Yankees coming. She just set and talk ’bout what a good time we was going to have after the Yankees come. She’d say, ‘Child, we going to have such a good time a-setting at the white folks’ table, a-eating off the white folks table, and a-rocking in the big rocking chair.’

  “Something awful happen to one of the slaves though when the Yankees did come. One of the young gals tell the Yankees where missus had her silver, money, and jewelry hid, and they got it all. What do you think happened to the poor gal? After the Yankees had gone, the missus and massa had the poor gal hung till she die. It was something awful to see.

  “When the slaves were freed the most of them didn’t had nowhere to go, so we just stayed with the massa and missus. I wishes sometimes I was a slave again, ’cause I likes being a slave, didn’t have nothing to worry ’bout then.”

  Cheney Cross was a young house slave on a prosperous plantation in Alabama when the war came. Her mistress was Mary Fields—“Miss Mary”—and “I was brung up in the house with my white folks. I slept on the little trundler bed what pushed under the big bed during the day. I watched over them chillun day and night. I washed ’em, and fed ’em, and played with ’em.”

  When news came that Union soldiers were expected to raid that part of Alabama, “my mistress took me down to the spring at the back of the house. Down there was a hollow tree stump, taller than you is. She tell me to climb up to the top of that hollow tree, then she hand me a big heavy bundle, all wrapped up and tied tight. It sure was heavy! Then she say, ‘Drop it in, Cheney.’ I didn’t know what she’s up to, but that was the silver and jewelry she was hiding?

  The day the soldiers arrived, “I’s sitting there in the loom room, and Mr. Thad Watt’s little girl, Louise, she’s standing at the window. She say, ‘O-o-h! Nannie! Just look down yonder!’ ‘Baby, what is that?’ I says. ‘Them’s the Yankees coming!’ ‘God help us!’ I says, and before I can catch my breath the place is covered. When they pass on by me, they nigh shook me out of my skin. ‘Where’s the mens?’ they say, and shake me up. ‘Where’s the arms?’ They shake me till my eyeballs loosen up. ‘Where’s the silver?’ Lord! Was my teeths dropping out? They didn’t give me time to catch my breath. All the time, Miss Mary just look ’em in the eye and say nothing.

  “They took them Enfield rifles, half as long as that door, and bust in the smokehouse window. They jack me up offen my feet and drag me up the ladder and say, ‘Get that meat out.’ I kept on throwing out Miss Mary’s hams and sausages till they holler, ‘Stop.’ I come backing down that ladder like a squirrel, and I ain’t stopped backing till I reach Miss Mary.

  “Yes, Lord! Them Yankees loaded up a wagon full of meat and took the whole barrel of ’lasses. Taking that ’lasses killed us children, our mainest amusement was making ‘lasses candy—then us cakewalk round it. Now that was all gone. Look like them soldiers had to sharpen their swords on everything in sight. The big crepe mullen bush by the parlor window was blooming so pink and pretty, and they just stood there and whack off them blooms like folks’ heads dropping on the ground.

  “I seed the sergeant when he run his bayonet clean through Miss Mary’s bestest feather bed and rip it slam open. With that, a wind blowed up and took them feathers every whichaway for Sunday. You couldn’t see where you’s at. The sergeant, he just throwed back his head and laugh fit to kill hisself. Then first thing next, he done suck a feather down his windpipe. Lord, honey, that white man sure struggled! Them soldiers throwed water in his face. They shook him and beat him and roll him over, and all the time he’s getting limberer and bluerer. Then they jack him up by his feets and stand him on his head. Then they pump him up and down. Then they shook him till he spit. Then he come to.

  “They didn’t cut no more mattresses. And they didn’t cut nothing much up in the parlor, but when they left the next day, the whole place was strewed with mutilation.”

  Sarah Debro, who had been “born some time back in the fifties,” had been a privileged young house servant at the start of the war, living with the rich Cain family of Orange County, North Carolina. “Marse Cain was good to his niggers. He didn’t whip them like some owners did, but if they done mean, he sold them. They knew this so they minded him.”

  Mrs. Cain was generally spoken of as Miss Polly.

  “Whenever she seed a child down in the quarters that she wanted to raise by hand, she took them up to the big house and trained them. I was to be a housemaid. The day she took me, my mammy cried, ’cause she knew I would never be allowed to live at the cabin with her no more. Miss Polly was big and fat and she made us niggers mind, and we had to keep clean. My dresses and aprons was starched stiff. I had a clean apron everyday. We had white sheets on the beds, and we niggers had plenty to eat too, even ham. When Miss Polly went to ride, she took me in the carriage with her. The driver set way up high, and me and Miss Polly set way down low. They was two hosses with shiny harness. I toted Miss Polly’s bags and bundles, and if she dropped her handkerchief, I picked it up. I loved Miss Polly and loved staying at the big house.

  “The first cannon I heard scared me near about to death. We could hear them going Boom! Boom! I thought it was thunder, then Miss Polly say, ‘Listen, Sarah. Hear them cannons? They’s killing our mens.’ Then she began to cry. I run in the kitchen where Aunt Charity was cooking and told her Miss Polly was crying. She said, ‘She ain’t crying ’cause the Yankees killing the mens. She’s doing all that crying ’cause she scared we’s going to be set free.’ Then I got mad and told her Miss Polly wasn’t like that.

  “I remember when Wheeler’s Cavalry come through. They was ’Federates, but they was mean as the Yankees. They stole everything they could find and killed a pile of niggers. They come around checking. They asked the niggers if they wanted to be free. If they say yes, then they shot them down, but if they say no, they let them alone. They took three of my uncles out in the woods and shot they faces off.

  “I remember the first time the Yankees come. They come galloping down the road, jumping over the palings, trompling down the rose bushes and messing up the flower beds. They stomped all over the house, in the kitchen, pantries, smokehouse and everywhere, but they didn’t find much, ’cause near about everything done been hid. I was setting on the steps when a big Yankee come up. He had on a cap, and his eyes was mean. ‘Where did they hide the gold and silver, nigger?’ he yelled at me.

  “I was scared, and my hands was ashy, but I told him I didn’t know nothing about nothing; that if anybody done hid things, they hid it while I was asleep.

  “When the war was over, the Yankees was all around the place, telling the niggers what to do. They told them they was free, that they didn’t have to slave for the white folks no more. My folks all left Marse Cain and went to live in houses that the Yankees built. They was like poor white folks’ houses, little shacks made out of sticks and mud, with sticks-and-mud chimneys. They wasn’t like Marse Cain’s cabins, planked up and warm.

  “One day my mammy come to the big house after me. I didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay with Miss Polly. I begun to cry, and Mammy caught hold of me. I grabbed Miss Polly and held on so tight that I tore her skirt binding loose. ‘Let her stay with me,’ Miss Polly said to Mammy.

  “But Mammy shook her head. ‘You took her away from me and didn’t pay no mind to
my crying, so now I’s taking her back home. We’s free now, Miss Polly, we ain’t going to be slaves no more to nobody.’ She dragged me away. I can see how Miss Polly looked now. She didn’t say nothing, but she looked hard at mammy, and her face was white.

  “I looks back and thinks. I ain’t never forgot them slavery days, and I ain’t never forgot Miss Polly and my white starched aprons.”

  Martha Colquist, of Athens, Georgia:

  “My grandma was a powerful Christian woman, and she did love to sing and shout. That’s how come Marse Billy had her locked up in the loom room when the Yankee mens come to our plantation. Grandma would get to shouting so loud she would make so much fuss nobody in the church could hear the preacher, and she would wander off from the gallery and go downstairs and try to go down the white folks’ aisle to get to the altar where the preacher was, and they was always locking her up for ‘sturbing worship, but they never could break her from that shouting.

  “Them Yankee soldiers rode up in the big house yard and ‘gun to ask me questions about where Marse Billy was and where everything on the place was kept, but I was too scared to say nothing. Everything was quiet and still as could be, ‘cept for Grandma a-singing and shouting up in the loom house all by herself. One of them Yankees tried the door, and he asked me how come it was locked. I told him it was ’cause Grandma had ’sturbed the Baptist meeting with her shouting. Them mens grabbed the axe from the woodpile and busted the door down. They went in and got Grandma. They asked her about how come she was locked up, and she told ’em the same thing I had told ’em. They asked if she was hungry, and she said she was. They took Grandma to the kitchen and told Ma to give her some of the white folks’ dinner. Ma said, ‘But the white folkses ain’t ate yet.’ ‘Go right on,’ the Yankees said, ‘and give it to her, the best in the pot, and if they’s anything left when she gets through, maybe us will let the white folkses have some of it.’

  After the Yankees was done gone off, Grandma ‘gun to fuss: ‘Now, them soldiers was telling us what ain’t so, ’cause ain’t nobody got no right to take what belongs to Master and Mistress.’ And Ma joined in: ‘Sure it ain’t no truth in what them Yankees was a-saying,’ and us went right on living just like us always done till Marse Billy called us together and told us the war was over and us was free.”

  William Colbert, of Georgia:

  “Massa had three boys to go to war, but there wasn’t one to come home. All the chillun he had was killed. Massa, he lost all his money and the house soon begin droppin’ away to nothin’. Us niggers one by one left the old place, and the last time I seed the home plantation I was a-standing on a hill. I looked back on it for the last time through a patch of scrub pines and it look so lonely. There wasn’t but one person in sight, the massa. He was a-setting in a wicker chair in the yard lookin’ out over a small field of cotton and corn. There was four crosses in the graveyard in the side lawn where he was a-settin’—the fourth one was his wife.”

  As a boy, Primus Smith, of Virginia, had served in the household of Robert E. Lee, “swishing the flies off the table with a brush” while his master was “eating dinner and talking about how some day it looked like the South was going to have to go to war against the North.” By the time that war came, he had a different master, who went off to fight, leaving “us darkies in charge of an overseer. This overseer’s name was John Ashby, and he had a terrible temper. One day us darkies was cuttin’ cane and Ashby got mad at my uncle and gave him a flogging ‘til the blood run down his back. My uncle said, ‘Some day I will get free, and some day I will get you for this, John Ashby.’

  “Well, sir, years later me and my uncle were free, and we were a-settin’ on the river bank talking. This same John Ashby came ridin’ by on a horse, and he recognized us. He got off his horse, and came over like he wanted to be friendly. My uncle didn’t say a word, but he picked up John Ashby and threw him out in the river. Every time John Ashby would start to crawl up on the bank, my uncle would hit him on the head with a stick and throw him back in the river. Finally he drowned. It was kind of wicked, but I saw it with my own eyes.”

  In her Reminiscences, Annie Burton, who had been born into slavery, recalled this anecdote from her childhood in Clayton, Alabama. The war had recently ended, bringing “a sad, sad change on the old plantation; and the beautiful, proud Sunny South, with its masters and mistresses, was bowed beneath the sin brought about by slavery.” After a long separation, the family had just been reunited and “my mother had got settled in her hut, with her little brood hovered around her, from which she had been so long absent.” The brood was composed of five small children, and the hut, made of logs, “had one door, and an opening in one wall, with an inside shutter, was the only window. The door was fastened with a latch. Our beds were some straw.

  “The first day in the hut was a rainy day, and as night drew near it grew more fierce, and we children had gathered some little fagots to make a fire by the time mother came home with something for us to eat. It was only corn meal and pease and ham-bone and skins. She started a little fire, and swung the pot over the fire, and filled it with the pease and ham-bone and skins. Then she seated her little brood around the fire on pieces of blanket, where we watched with all our eyes. She took down an old broken earthen bowl, and tossed into it the little meal she had brought, stirring it up with water, making a hoe cake.” Then “all at once there came a knock at the door. My mother answered the knock. When she opened the door, there stood a white woman and three little children, all dripping with the rain. My mother said, ‘In the name of the Lord, where are you going on such a night with these children?’ The woman said, ‘Auntie, I am traveling. Will you please let me stop here tonight, out of the rain, with my children?’ My mother said, ‘Yes, honey. I ain’t got much, but what I have got I will share with you.’ ‘God bless you!’ They all came in. We children looked in wonder at what had come, but my mother scattered her own little brood and made a place for the forlorn wanderers. She said, ‘Wait, honey, let me turn over that hoe cake.’ Then the two women fell to talking, each telling a tale of woe.

  “My mother said to the woman, ‘Honey, ain’t you got no husband?’ She said, ‘No, my husband got killed in the war.’ My mother replied, ‘Well, my husband died right after the war. But with God’s help, I can get along.’” They talked, and the white woman explained that she was on her way to her kinsfolk, who lived about fifty miles away, “‘up in the country. I am on my way there now.’

  “We hoped the talk was most ended, for we were anxiously watching that pot. Pretty soon my mother exclaimed, ‘My Lord! I suppose the little children are nearly starved. Are those pease done, young ones?’ She turned and said to the white woman, ‘Have you-all had anything to eat?’ ‘We stopped at a house about dinner time, but the woman didn’t have anything but some bread and buttermilk.’ My mother said, ‘Well, honey, I ain’t got but a little, but I will divide with you.’ The woman said, ‘Thank you, Auntie. You just give my children a little; I can do without it.’

  “Then came the dividing. We all watched with all our eyes to see what the shares would be. My mother broke a mouthful of bread and put it on each of the tin plates. Then she took the old spoon and equally divided the pea soup. We children were seated round the fire, with some little wooden spoons. But the wooden spoons didn’t quite go round, and some of us had to eat with our fingers. Our share of the meal was so small that we were as hungry when we finished as when we began.”

  After supper “my mother said ‘One of you go and pull that straw out of the corner and get ready to go to bed.’ We all lay down on the straw, the white children with us, and my mother covered us with the blanket. We were soon in ‘the Land of Nod’, forgetting our empty stomachs. The two mothers still continued to talk, sitting down on the only seats.

  “Bright and early in the morning we were called up, and the rest of the hoe cake was eaten for breakfast. The little wanderers and their mother shared our meal and then they started again on their
journey towards their home among their kinsfolk, and we never saw them again. My mother said, ‘God bless you! I wish you all good luck. I hope you will reach your home safely.’”

  With the war’s end, regiments disbanded. In September, 1865, the New-York Tribune ran this story:

  “The Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers was welcomed back to Boston on Saturday. There was a public reception, a review by the Governor and Council at the State House, another on the Common by the Mayor, an address to his officers and men by Colonel Hallowell; and then the regiment was disbanded. The demonstrations of respect were rather more than have usually been awarded to returning regiments, even in Massachusetts, which cherishes her soldiers with an unforgetting affection. They were so honored in this case, we presume, because the regiment is a representative one. There were regiments from that State which had seen more fighting than this, though none which had done any better fighting when occasion offered; none which had a higher reputation for discipline, patient endurance, and impetuous valor. But the true reason why Massachusetts singled out this regiment for peculiar honor is because this was the first colored regiment organized in the North, and was that one on whose good conduct depended for a long time the success of the whole experiment of arming black citizens in defense of the Republic. It is not too much to say that if this Massachusetts Fifty-fourth had faltered when its trial came, two hundred thousand colored troops for whom it was a pioneer would never have been put into the field … But it did not falter. It made Fort Wagner such a name to the colored race as Bunker Hill has been for ninety years to the white Yankees.