Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [16]
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EVEN AS MANY MASTERS and mistresses struck a pose of confidence and equanimity, few were unaware of the slaves’ demonstrated capacity for evasiveness and dissimulation in the presence of whites. No matter how often slave owners kept reassuring themselves, the doubts and apprehensions were bound to surface. With each passing month, as the issues became clearer and the position of the Confederacy deteriorated, the ambiguities in the slave response would tend to dissolve and the whites who had proclaimed the loudest the faithfulness of their blacks were among those forced to reassess their perceptions in accordance with personal experiences. If the shock of recognition did not come easily for a people who had always claimed an intimate knowledge of the black personality, neither was it altogether unexpected; some whites, in fact, thought they knew their slaves too well to harbor any illusions about the future. “The tenants act pretty well towards us,” a Virginia woman wrote early in 1862, “but that doesn’t prevent our being pretty certain of their intention to stampede when they get a good chance—I, for one, won’t care one straw—but for the expense of having to hire ‘help.’ They are nothing but an ungrateful, discontented lot & I don’t care how soon I get rid of mine.”36
To endure, perhaps even to survive, many slaves had learned from experience to anticipate the white man’s moods and whims, to know his expectations, to placate his fears, to flatter his vanity, and to feed his feelings of superiority. As a slave, Henry Bibb recalled, he had come to realize the folly of openly resisting the white man. “The only weapon of self defence that I could use successfully, was that of deception.” With considerable relish, a former Tennessee slave remembered the death of a particularly cruel mistress. The slaves on the plantation did what was expected of them when one of their “white folks” died; they solemnly filed into the Big House to pay their final respects, covering their faces with their hands as if to hide their tears and stifle their sobs. Once they were outside, however, the slaves made their feelings known to each other. “Old God damn son-of-a-bitch,” one of them murmured, “she gone on down to hell.”37
During the Civil War, when the master’s temperament often experienced violent fluctuations, the slave had even more urgent reason to adhere to the time-tested imperatives: that he never appear to be too well informed, that he remain circumspect in his views, that he mask any feelings of hostility, that he feign stupidity at the right moment, that he “act the nigger” when the situation demanded it and punctuate his responses to whites with the proper comic mannerisms and facial expressions—the shuffling of the feet, the scratching of the head, the grin denoting incomprehension. The black man who invokes the “darky act,” Ralph Ellison has suggested, is not so much “a ‘smart-man-playing-dumb’ as a weak man who knows the nature of his oppressors’ weakness.… [H]is mask of meekness conceals the wisdom of one who has learned the secret of saying the ‘yes’ which accomplishes the expressive ‘no.’ ” Although some slaves may well have internalized the ritual of deference, few whites could know for certain and that was a problem that would plague them throughout the war. “Oh, yes, massa!” a Virginia slave responded in 1863 when asked by a northern clergyman if she had heard of the Emancipation Proclamation, “we all knows about it; only we darsn’t let on. We pretends not to know. I said to my ole massa, ‘What’s this Massa Lincoln is going to do to the poor nigger? I hear he is going to cut ’em up awful bad. How is it, massa?’ I just pretended foolish, sort of.” At the first opportunity, this slave fled to the Union lines.38
When questioned