Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [10]
The specter of emancipation, along with the increased demands of the war, had a way of dissolving the posture of beneficence on the plantation. Fearful of losing his slaves, a master might work them incessantly, determined to drain everything he could from his suddenly precarious investment. “Massa Jeems cussed and ’bused us niggers more’n ever,” Wes Brady recalled, “but he took sick and died and stepped off to Hell ’bout six months ’fore we got free.” It had been bad enough before the war, Harry Jarvis said of the plantation on which he worked, “but arter de war come, it war wus nor eber. Fin’ly, he [the master] shot at me one day, ’n I reckoned I’d stood it ’bout’s long’s I could, so I tuk to der woods. I lay out dere for three weeks.” Charlie Moses, who had been a slave in Mississippi, remembered only that his master, after spending a year in the Army, returned home “even meaner than before.”16
If a master chose to serve in the war, his absence from the plantation for extended periods of time created a critical vacuum in authority. Although slaves might seek to exploit such a situation to their own advantage, the alteration of power relationships on the plantation did not always redound to their benefit. Unaccustomed to her new responsibilities, the plantation mistress was apt to be even more easily moved to ill temper than the master, possessing neither the patience nor the experience of her husband in dealing on a day-to-day basis with field slaves and work routines. “I tell [you] candidly,” a South Carolina woman wrote her husband in the Confederate Congress, “this attention to farming is up hill work with me. I can give orders first-rate, but when I am not obeyed, I can’t keep my temper.… I am ever ready to give you a helping hand, but I must say I am heartily tired of trying to manage free negroes.” Equally dismayed at the “follies & sins” committed by black servants, a South Carolina widow thought the day might come when they would have to be eliminated “as rats & cockroaches are by all sorts of means whenever they become unbearable.”17
If close contact had led some slaves to identify with the master or mistress, it had afforded others an education in the devious ways of their “white folks” and how even the best-intentioned and kindest of them could be transformed and degraded by the power they wielded. This was no less true of the mistress than the master. The gracious and maternal lady of southern legend, who reputedly tempered the harshness of slavery, was not entirely the figment of chivalrous white imaginations, but from the perspective of many black slaves, abnormal wartime conditions in some instances only exacerbated previously unstable personalities. It seemed to Lulu Wilson that her mistress “studied ’bout meanness” more than her master, and she blamed the blindness in her later life on the snuff her mistress had occasionally rubbed in her eyes as a punishment. With the master away during the war, the mistress’s disposition only worsened. “Wash Hodges was gone away four years and Missus Hodges was meaner’n the devil all the time. Seems like she jus’ hated us worser than ever. She said blabber-mouth niggers done cause a war.”18
Confronted with a mistress who was “a demon, just like her husband,” Esther Easter may not have been unique in the satisfaction she derived from playing one “demon” against the other. Taking advantage of the wartime disruptions and her access to the Big House, she finally found a way to even the score.
While Master Jim is out fighting the Yanks, the Mistress is fiddling round with a neighbor man, Mister Headsmith. I is young then, but I knows enough that Master Jim’s going be mighty mad when he hears about it.
The Mistress didn’t know I knows her secret, and I’m fixing to even up for some of them