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By Root 1458 0

With even greater vigilance, slaveholders and local whites scrutinized the remaining blacks, looking for any actions, words, or changes in their demeanor that suggested Yankee influences. Eliza Evans, a former Alabama slave, could recall quite vividly the day she first used the surname which a Yankee soldier had persuaded her to assume. “Jest Liza,” she had told the soldier when he asked for her name. “I ain’t got no other names.” After ascertaining that she worked for a John Mixon, the Yankee had told her, “You are Liza Mixon. Next time anybody call you nigger you tell ’em dat you is a Negro and your name is Miss Liza Mixon.” The idea appealed to the young slave. “The more I thought of that the more I liked it and I made up my mind to do jest what he told me to.” Several days later, after the Yankees had withdrawn from the area, Eliza was tending the livestock when her master approached. “What you doin’, nigger?” he demanded to know. “I ain’t no nigger,” she replied. “I’se a Negro and I’m Miss Liza Mixon.” Startled by her response and sensitive to any signs of post-Yankee insolence, the master picked up a switch and ran after her. “Law’, but I was skeered!” she recalled. “I hadn’t never had no whipping so I ran fast as I can to Grandma Gracie.” She reached her grandmother about the same time her master did. “Gracie,” he charged, “dat little nigger sassed me.” When Eliza explained what had happened, revealing the conversation with the soldier, her grandmother decided to mete out the punishment herself. “Grandma Gracie took my dress and lift it over my head and pins my hands inside, and Lawsie, how she whipped me and I dassent holler loud either.” Still, as she recalled the incident many years later, Eliza Evans suggested that she had derived considerable self-pride from this initial assertion of freedom. “I jest said dat to de wrong person,” she concluded.20

What, then, was “freedom” and who was “free”? The fluctuating moods of individual masters, unexpected changes in the military situation, the constant movement of troops, and widespread doubts about the validity and enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation were bound to have a sobering effect on the slaves’ perceptions of their status and rights, leaving many of them quite confused if not thoroughly disillusioned. The sheer uncertainty of it all prompted blacks to weigh carefully their actions and utterances, as they had earlier in the war, even in some instances to disclaim any desire to be free or to deny what the Yankees told them. “Sho’ it ain’t no truf in what dem Yankees wuz a-sayin’,” Martha Colquitt recalled her mother telling her, “and us went right on living just like us always done ’til Marse Billie called us together and told us de war wuz over and us wuz free to go whar us wanted to go, and us could charge wages for our work.”21

Only with “the surrender,” as they came to call it, did many slaves begin to acknowledge the reality of emancipation. The fall of Richmond and the collapse of the Confederacy broke the final links in the chain. With freedom no longer hanging on every military skirmish, slaves who had shrewdly or fearfully refrained from any outward display of emotion suddenly felt free to release their feelings and to act on them. Ambrose Douglass, who claimed to have celebrated emancipation every time the Yankees came into Harnett County, North Carolina, sensed that this time it was different, and he proposed to make certain. “I was 21 when freedom finally came, and that time I didn’t take no chances on ’em taking it back again. I lit out for Florida.” The day the war ended, Prince Johnson recalled, “wagon loads o’ people rode all th’ough de place a-tellin’ us ’bout bein’ free.” When the news reached Oconee, Georgia, Ed McCree found himself so overcome that he refused to wait for his master to confirm the report of Lee’s surrender: “I runned ’round dat place a-shoutin’ to de top of my voice.”22

In the major cities and towns, far more than in the countryside, the post-Appomattox demonstrations resembled the Jubilees that would become so firmly