Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [160]
To the Allstons, as to Thomas Pinckney and others, the battles they waged and won to reclaim their lands could easily be viewed as a struggle of wills in which the character and superiority of white men and women inevitably prevailed. But to the blacks, the defeats they sustained resulted not from a failure of will but from the readiness of Federal authorities to back up the legal claims of whites to their land. Nevertheless, even if planters remained certain of their land titles, they came to fear the turbulence which so often marked the efforts to reestablish a semblance of authority over their former slaves. The range of receptions accorded white families returning to their homes after the war suggests only one dimension in the unraveling of the complex relationships that had made up the “peculiar institution.” On most plantations and farms, the whites had remained, along with their slaves, and the issue at the moment of freedom was not so much who owned the land and the crops but on whose land the newly freed slaves would continue to plant and harvest the crops.
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WHERE THE MASTER assembled the blacks to tell them they were no longer his slaves, the reactions he provoked gave rise to the legendary stories of a “Day of Jubilo,” in which crowds of ecstatically happy blacks shouted, sang, and danced their way into freedom. Large numbers of former slaves recalled no such celebration. Although not entirely myth, the notion of a Jubilee, with its suggestion of unrestrained, unthinking black hilarity, tends to neglect if not demean the wide range and depth of black responses to emancipation, including the trauma and fears the master’s announcement produced on some plantations. The very nature of the bondage they had endured, the myriad of experiences to which they had been exposed, the quality of the ties that had bound them to their “white folks,” and the ambivalence which had suffused those relationships were all bound to make for a diverse and complex reaction on the day the slaves were told they no longer had any masters or mistresses.
Capturing nearly the full range of responses, a former South Carolina slave recalled that on his plantation “some were sorry, some hurt, but a few were silent and glad.” From the perspective of the mistress of a Florida household, “some of the men cried, some spoke regretfully, [and] only two looked surly and had nothing to say.” Although celebrations seldom followed the master’s announcement, numerous blacks recalled taking the rest of the day off, if only to think through the implications of what they had been told. Still others, like Harriett Robinson, remembered that before the master could even finish his remarks, “over half them niggers was gone.” But the slaves on an Alabama plantation stood quietly, stunned by the news. “We didn’ hardly know what he means,” Jenny Proctor recalled. “We jes’ sort of huddle ’round together like scared rabbits, but after we knowed what he mean, didn’ many of us go, ’cause we didn’ know where to of went.” None of them knew what to expect from freedom and they interpreted it in many different ways, explained James Lucas, a former slave of Jefferson Davis, who achieved his freedom at the age of thirty-one.
Dey all had diffe’nt ways o’ thinkin’ ’bout it. Mos’ly though dey was jus’ lak me, dey didn’ know jus’ zackly what it meant. It was jus’ somp’n dat de white folks an’ slaves all de time talk ’bout. Dat’s all. Folks dat ain’ never been free don’ rightly know de feel of bein’ free. Dey don’ know de meanin’ of it. Slaves like us, what was owned by quality-folks, was sati’fìed an’ didn’ sing none of dem freedom songs.
How long that sensation of shock or incredulity lasted