Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [154]
Although the “masters” weep with joy at the sight of their humble friends, and though one of them said he “should go away and cut his throat if they looked coldly upon him,” yet the people are only transiently touched by this manifestation of affection. They look very jealously and uneasily upon all who return, often ask why Government lets them come back to trouble the freedman.
Near Beaufort, a former owner visited the old place, shook the hands of his former slaves, pleaded his poverty, and asked for sympathy and spare change. After all, he told them, they should realize that he and his wife knew nothing of work and had never done any. The ex-slaves needed no reminder, nor did they respond favorably to his plight when it became clear that he coveted the return of his lands upon which they were now working.76
Whatever the mixed emotions with which freedmen viewed their former owners after emancipation, nothing could obliterate the slave experience from their minds, and it would continue to shape the attitudes and behavior of many of them long after their old masters and mistresses had passed from the scene. Some preferred to put the past behind them, if only to contain their emotions and memories. Nearly a decade after the war, an older student at Hampton Institute, a black college, told a teacher that he preferred not to talk about slavery times. “I feel as if folks mightn’t believe me, and then, if I think too much about them myself, I can’t keep feeling right, as I want to, toward my old masters. I’d do any thing for them I could, and I want to forget what they have done to me.” When in the twentieth century ex-slaves reminisced about the old days, they were apt to be less harsh in their judgments, though Martin Jackson, who recalled “good treatment,” suspected many of them deliberately refrained from telling everything they knew.
Lots of old slaves closes the door before they tell the truth about their days of slavery. When the door is open, they tell how kind their masters was and how rosy it all was. You can’t blame them for this, because they had plenty of early discipline, making them cautious about saying anything uncomplimentary about their masters. I, myself, was in a little different position than most slaves and, as a consequence, have no grudges or resentment. However, I can tell you the life of the average slave was not rosy. They were dealt out plenty of cruel suffering. Even with my good treatment, I spent most of my time planning and thinking of running away.
But in the immediate aftermath of the war, memories were quite short, in some instances as short as the tempers of ex-slaves. All that might be required to set them off was the casual pronouncement by some northern visitor or reporter that many masters had been kind to their slaves. “Kind!” one freedman cried, not believing the naiveté and ignorance of the person who made the observation of his former master. “Kind! I was dat man’s slave; and he sold my wife, and he sold my two chill’en … Kind! yes, he gib me corn enough, and he gib me pork enough, and he neber gib me one lick wid de whip, but whar’s my wife?—whar’s my chill’en? Take away de pork, I say; take away de corn, I can work and raise dese for myself, but gib me back de wife of my bosom, and gib me back my poor chill’en as was sold away!”77
To forgive their former masters and mistresses for past wrongs was to forget neither the wrongs nor the men and women who had inflicted them. Forgiveness, like compassion, could be extended only so far. For many former slaves, the teachings of Christianity and their recollections of bondage would never be easily reconciled. Harry Jarvis remembered working for “de meanest man on all de Easte’n sho’, and dat’s a heap to say.” Early in the war, he fled the plantation, eventually joined the Union Army, and lost a leg in the Battle of Folly Island. Some years later, two white schoolteachers