After the war, her mother immediately came to claim her. But Sarah refused to leave, crying and holding on to the dress of her mistress, who pleaded for the right to retain her. Despite the tears and pleas, Sarah’s mother remained firm and reminded the mistress that only her callousness had made this scene possible. “You took her away from me an’ didn’ pay no mind to my cryin’, so now I’se takin’ her back home. We’s free now, Mis’ Polly, we ain’t gwine be slaves no more to nobody.” With those words, she dragged her daughter out of the house. “I can see how Mis’ Polly looked now,” Sarah Debro recollected. “She didn’ say nothin’ but she looked hard at Mammy an’ her face was white.” That night, in the windowless “mud house” to which they moved, Sarah lay on her straw mattress and looked up through the cracks in the roof. “I could see de stars, an’ de sky shinin’ through de cracks looked like long blue splinters stretched ’cross de rafters. I lay dare an’ cried kaze I wanted to go back to Mis’ Polly.”31
The close relationships that sometimes developed between slave children and the white mistress could be even more psychologically damaging than separation by sale. Where a master or mistress made “pets” out of certain favorites, indulging them in ways their parents could not, a conflict of loyalties became highly possible. Jane Sutton, a former Mississippi slave, contrasted her master, who provided the blacks with “plenty t’eat an’ wear” and gave the children candy and presents when he returned from town, with her father, who belonged to a neighboring planter and visited on weekends. “He jus’ come on Satu’d’y night an’ us don’ see much of’im. Us call him ‘dat man.’ Mammy tol’ us to be more ’spectful to ’im ’cause he was us daddy, but us aint care nothin’ ’bout ’im. He aint never brung us no candy or nothin’.” Rather than live with her father after emancipation, Jane ran away and returned to the old plantation. With equally conflicting emotions, Lizzie Hill, who had been a slave in Alabama, ran away from her mother three times after the war in order to return to the plantation where she had been accorded the same food and clothes as the white children with whom she had played and slept. Nor could Lou Turner easily give up the life she had led as a young slave on a Texas plantation, where the mistress had fed her well, dressed her in nice clothes, and insisted on her sleeping in the same room. “Old missy have seven li’l nigger chillen what belong to her slaves, but dey mammies and daddys come git ’em. I didn’t own my own mammy. I own my old missy and call her ‘mama.’ Us cry and cry when us have to go with us mammy.”32
But for most young blacks and children, slavery had been something less than a playground. The examples of brutal treatment, abuse, and neglect were no mere figments of the abolitionist imagination. If some absorbed the cultural ethos of the white family from constant contact with it, the vast majority of black children formed their view of the world in the quarters and usually within their own family groupings. More often than not, the child’s teacher, school, and family were all the same, and the values and warnings with which he or she was inculcated reflected the experience of parents and grandparents who had themselves learned these lessons in the same way. In the absence of parents, the child was still more likely to obtain the love and learning he needed from other blacks than from his “white folks.”33 Not only did many black youths embrace the chance to sever the ties with their master and mistress but those who had been separated from loved ones often took the initiative to find them. After learning of her freedom in 1863, for example, Mary Armstrong, a seventeen-year-old Missouri youth, went in search of her mother, who had been sold and taken to Texas. Several years later, she tracked her down in Wharton County. “Law me, talk ’bout cryin’ and singin’ and cryin’ some more, we sure done it,” she recalled of their reunion. Whatever the wishes of parents or children, some dispossessed masters insisted on keeping the young blacks until the age of twenty-one. The various state apprenticeship laws came close to legalized kidnapping in many instances, depriving parents of children if a white judge deemed it “better for the habits and comfort” of a child to be bound out to a white guardian. Protests over arbitrary apprenticeship mounted in the postwar years, with parents frequently appealing to the local provost marshal or the Freedmen’s Bureau for custodial rights to their children.34
Few memories of bondage elicited greater pain in black parents than the humiliation they had suffered in watching their children whipped or abused by a member of the white family. After emancipation, if they decided to remain with the same master or if they hired out elsewhere, freedmen families often made their labor contingent on the abolition of such practices and a recognition of their exclusive right to manage and discipline their own children. Employers who violated that understanding were apt to find themselves with fewer laborers the next morning or when the time came to renew a contract. With equal fervor, parents committed themselves in the immediate aftermath of emancipation to provide an education for their children, not only in the numerous schools established by northern whites but in schools which employers were forced to establish on their plantations in order to retain and attract a labor force.
Deprived of any legal standing, stripped of any means to protect itself, faced always with the specter of forced breakup, the black family under slavery needed to demonstrate remarkable resiliency to withstand the often debilitating and debasing experience of white ownership. While some slaveholders recognized and encouraged strong family ties for the stabilizing influence they exerted, many others were either indifferent, thought their blacks to be emotionally incapable of sustaining the necessary affection, or resented any attempts by them to ape the social norms of their superiors. “I was once whipped,” a black servant in New Orleans remarked, “because I said to missis, ‘My mother sent me.’ We were not allowed to call our mammies ‘mother.’ It made it come too near the way of the white folks.” Whatever the prevailing attitudes of individual masters or mistresses, every black family had to find ways to counter the sense of powerlessness imparted by white ownership. Not only did they lack control over separation by sale but the people who owned them were free to inflict indignities, both physical and verbal, as their moods dictated, and they were apt to do so in the presence of the entire family. To calculate the brutalities of the “peculiar institution” by counting the number of whippings meted out by a master or overseer would be to miss the point altogether, as nearly every slave who wrote about his or her experience would testify.35
Although some slave families were disrupted, by irreparable psychic damage if not by sale, what seems so remarkable is that most of them endured the experience of bondage. On most plantations and farms, the lives of the slaves—field hands, house servants, and artisans alike—revolved around family units, the two-parent household predominated, and the black husband and father exerted in his own way the dominant influence in that household. If he could not always provide for his family as he wished, he tried to supplement their diets by hunting, fishing, and theft. If he could not always protect his family as he wished, he often managed to lay down a line of tolerated behavior beyond which masters and overseers proceeded at their own risk. Sam Watkins, a Tennessee planter, was among those who flagrantly crossed that line once too often.
He would ship their husbands (slaves) out of bed and get in with their wives. One man said he stood it as long as he could and one morning he just stood outside, and when he got with his wife he just choked him to death. He said he knew it was death, but it was death anyhow; so he just killed him. They hanged him.36
Few wives expected their husbands to sacrifice their lives in this way. Fully aware of the master’s power, most couples made the necessary accommodation. That reflected not indifference to family ties but the simple resolve to keep the family together and alive. The same consideration would impede escape until the proximity of the Union Army enabled entire families to leave the plantations.
During the Civil War, the black family had to withstand attacks from various sources. Numbers of slaves who accompanied their masters t
o the front lines never returned, nor did many of those impressed into Confederate labor battalions. “Father wus sent to Manassas Gap at the beginning of de war,” a former Virginia slave recalled, “and I do not ’member ever seein’ him.” When freedmen attempted to trace lost family members after emancipation, the trail often started and ended with the information that he was last seen in “a gang [that] was taken away de firs year of de war.” The wartime decisions to remove slaves to Texas or to some “safe” place in the interior resulted in still further disruptions, with the women, children, and elderly blacks often left on the old place. Nor did the coming of the Union Army necessarily secure black families; instead, some of the men enlisted or were forcibly impressed into service as military laborers and soldiers. Whatever the commitment of slaves to the Union cause, many of them feared that service in the Union Army would place their wives and children in immediate jeopardy from hostile whites and deprive them of necessary support. Such fears were not illusory. Enraged over losing any of their slaves, particularly to the Union Army, masters were known to avenge themselves on the soldiers’ wives and children, either by abusing them, refusing to support them, or expelling them from the premises. Only after strong pressure from black soldiers who threatened mutiny and desertion did the Federal government belatedly guarantee freedom to the families of black volunteers, make them eligible for rations, and try to ensure their safety. By this time, however, numerous families had already been disrupted.37
When weighed against the enormous tensions to which slave marital ties were subjected, the prospects for success under any circumstances might have seemed dim. The very words by which marriages were solemnized indicated their vulnerability. “Don’t mean nothin’ less you say, ‘What God done jined, cain’t no man pull asunder,’ ” a former Virginia slave observed. “But dey never would say dat. Jus’ say, ‘Now you married.’ ” The classic account of the slave preacher in Kentucky who united couples “until death or distance do you part” had its equivalent in the Virginia master who, as one of his former slaves recalled, devised his own marriage vows by which he united slave couples:
Dat yo’ wife
Dat yo’ husban’
Ise yo’ Marser
She yo’ Missus
You’re married.
If they achieved nothing else, the mock wedding rites, highlighted by “jumping the broomstick,” sanctioned such marriages in the eyes of the man and woman and their fellow slaves. But the white owner determined the longevity of their relationship, and the forcible breakup of slave marriages occurred with sufficient regularity to warrant the casualness of the ceremony, the fears of the couple, and some bitter recollections:
One night a couple married an’ de next mornin’ de boss sell de wife. De gal ma got in de street an’ cursed de white woman fur all she could find. She said: “dat damn white, pale-face bastard sell my daughter who jus’ married las’ night,” an other t’ings.
The police had to be summoned to restrain the grief-stricken mother and remove her to the local workhouse.38
No sooner had emancipation been acknowledged than thousands of “married” couples, with the encouragement of black preachers and northern white missionaries, hastened to secure their marital vows, both legally and spiritually. “My husband and I have lived together fifteen years,” the mother of a large family remarked, “and we wants to be married over again now.” Mildred Graves, a former Virginia house servant, remembered her courtship, the broomstick ceremony, and the cast-off dress her mistress gave her as a wedding present; nevertheless, after the war, she also recalled, “we had a real sho’ nuff weddin’ wid a preacher. Dat cost a dollar.”39 The insistence of teachers, missionaries, and Freedmen’s Bureau officers that blacks formalize their marriages stemmed from the notion that legal sanction was necessary for sexual and moral restraint and that ex-slaves had to be inculcated with “the obligations of the married state in civilized life.” But many of the couples themselves, who needed no instruction in such matters, agreed to participate in formalizations of their unions for more practical reasons—to legitimize their children, to qualify for soldiers’ pensions, to share in the rumored forthcoming division of the lands, and to exercise their newly won civil rights. Whatever the most compelling reason, mass wedding ceremonies involving as many as seventy couples at a time became a common sight in the postwar South.
One evening four couples came to the schoolhouse to meet “the parson” who was to perform the marriage ceremony for them. They came straight from the field, in their working-clothes; the women, as was their custom, walking behind the men.… When they left the schoolhouse the women all took their places by the side of the men, showing that they felt they were equal in the eyes of the law.40
Native whites looked upon these spectacles with a mixture of amusement, disdain, and indifference. Having forbidden legal marriages, condoned the breakup of families, and demeaned family relationships, some former masters and mistresses now mocked the efforts of ex-slaves to dignify with proper ceremony and affidavit marital ties of long standing. “They take the white man’s notions as they copy his manners, not for what they are but for the impression that’s made by them on the world,” a South Carolina white woman observed of the interest taken by blacks in solemnizing their marriage relationship.
Now what [is] more common than to hear “I must go with my wife,” not because they have investigated the matter and seen the right of the thing, but such is the view of the white and the view suits present circumstances, and is therefore adopted by the negro. One wife is as good as another to them …
Like most whites, she seemed incapable of explaining the actions of the freedmen except as a desire to imitate their superiors—and moral exemplars. Even the northern missionaries, who liked to think of themselves as rescuing the ex-slaves from the sins of concubinage, shared many of the prevailing assumptions about the moral depravity of blacks. Nevertheless, white Southerners and northern observers alike would hardly have disagreed with the potential benefits that flowed from stable black families. “Marital relations are invaluable as a means of promoting industry,” a northern correspondent wrote from Louisiana. “Morality encourages industry and prosperity. Immorality in the sexual relations produces idleness, intemperance, and apathy.”41
Not all slave couples hastened to legalize their marriages, at least not until they resolved the many complications stemming from multiple liaisons in a lifetime of bondage. The question facing numerous freedmen and freedwomen was not whether to formalize their slave marriage but which one should take precedence. With numerous spouses having remarried since their forced separation, that would frequently be a difficult and agonizing decision to make. Nor could they resolve the dilemma, as a South Carolina woman attempted to do, by alternating between two spouses on separate plantations. Newly enacted state laws usually validated unions between persons of color who were living together at the time of emancipation and required ex-slaves with multiple spouses to make an immediate decision about which “marriage” they wished to legitimate; Federal authorities, who tended to take these matters more seriously, recognized the right of a husband or wife to leave a childless marriage to return to a previous partner by whom they had had children. “Whenever a negro appears before me with two or three wives who have equal claim upon him,” a Freedmen’s Bureau officer in North Carolina reported, “I marry him to the woman who has the greatest number of helpless children who otherwise would become a charge on the Bureau.”42
Although black preachers, white missionaries, and Bureau officials helped some couples to resolve these difficulties, the final decision was generally made by the partners themselves, who would have to reconcile conflicting emotions compounded by the manner in which they had initially been separated and the presence of children. In the District of Columbia, for example, a man who had been separated from his first wife for twenty-two years resolved to annul his present marriage “and live with the first by whom he has several grown children.” On
the Sea Islands, Jane Ferguson, after hearing that her first husband had returned, had no hesitation in making a decision. “Martin Barnwell is my husband, ma’am,” she told a missionary teacher. “I am got no husband but he. W’en de secesh sell him off we nebber ’spect to see each odder more. He said, ‘Jane take good care of our boy, an’ w’en we git to hebben us will lib togedder to nebber part no more.’ ” When she subsequently married Ferguson, they had agreed that Martin’s return would annul their ties. “I told him I never ’spects Martin could come back, but if he did he would be my husband above all others.” But what if Ferguson refused to give her up? the teacher asked her. “Martin is my husband, ma’am, an’ the father of my child,” the woman replied; “and Ferguson is a man.” But the matter was not so easily resolved, as Ferguson, a Union soldier, pleaded with his wife not to abandon him: “Martin has not seen you for a long time. He cannot think of you as I do. O Jane! do not go to Charleston. Come to Jacksonville. I will get a house and we will live here. Never mind what the people say. Come to me, Jane.” But Jane dictated a response that terminated both the correspondence and their marriage: “Tell him, I say I’m sorry he finds it so hard to do his duty. But as he does, I shall do mine, an’ I shall always pray de Lord to bless him.… I shall never write to him no more. But tell him I wish him well.”43
Emancipation functioned in some cases as an instant and convenient divorce, enabling a couple to dissolve their marriage by mutually agreeing not to formalize it. Some freedmen and freedwomen seized the chance to annul an incompatible and loveless marriage, which in several instances had been forced upon them by their owner. In a “divorce” case argued before a Union officer in Louisiana, the husband claimed he had done everything in his power for the comfort of his wife and wished to retain her, but the woman declared she could now take care of herself and refused to stay with a man whom she did not love.44 Among families that had survived bondage intact, the difficult post-emancipation decision about whether to stay with their last master also produced conflicts which were sometimes resolved by divorce. More often than not, however, those who lived together at the end of the war did not avail themselves of the opportunity to dissolve those ties, suggesting the extent to which their marriages had been based on considerations other than the convenience of the master.
Been in the Storm So Long Page 39
