Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [161]
Suspicious as they might be of the white man’s pronouncements, some blacks were initially skeptical, thinking it might all be a ruse, still another piece of deception calculated to test their fidelity. With that in mind, some thought it best to feign remorse at the announcement, while others needed to determine the master’s veracity and sought confirmation elsewhere, often in the nearest town, at the local office of the Freedmen’s Bureau, or on another plantation. When his master explained to him that he was now a free man, Tom Robinson refused to believe him (“ ‘You’re jokin’ me,’ I says”) until he spoke with some slave neighbors. “I wanted to find out if they was free too. I just couldn’t take it all in. I couldn’t believe we was all free alike.”85
Although most slaves welcomed freedom with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the sense of confusion and uncertainty that prevailed in many quarters was not easily dispelled. The first thought of sixteen-year-old Sallie Crane of Arkansas was that she had been sold, and her mistress’s reassurance that she would soon be reunited with her mother did little to comfort her. “I cried because I thought they was carrying me to see my mother before they would send me to be sold in Louisiana.” The impression deliberately cultivated by some masters that the Yankees intended to sell freed slaves to Cuba to help defray war costs may have had some impact. No matter what they were told, a former North Carolina slave recalled of the master’s announcement, he and his mother were simply too frightened to leave the premises. “Jes like tarpins or turtles after ’mancipation. Jes stick our heads out to see how the land lay.”86
Nor did some slaves necessarily welcome the news when they fully understood its implications for their own lives. The sorrow which some displayed was not always pretense. To those who were reasonably satisfied with their positions and the relations they enjoyed with the white family, freedom offered no immediate cause for rejoicing. “I was a-farin’ pretty well in de kitchen,” Aleck Trimble remarked. “I didn’ t’ink I eber see better times dan what dem was, and I ain’t.” That was how Mollie Tillman also recalled the advent of freedom, since, as she boasted, “I warn’t no common eve’yday slave,” and her mistress refused to let her work in the fields. “I wuz happy den, but since ’mancipation I has jes’ had to scuffle an’ work an’ do de bes’ I kin.” To Moses Lyles, a former South Carolina slave, emancipation undermined the mutual dependency upon which slavery had rested and neither class benefited from the severance of those ties. “De nigger was de right arm of de buckra class. De buckra was de horn of plenty for de nigger. Both suffer in consequence of freedom.”87
Standing on the porch of the Big House and watching her fellow slaves celebrate their emancipation, Sara Brown wondered why they thought the event worthy of such festivities. “I been free all de time,” she thought. This insistence that they were already as free as they wanted to be repeated an old article of faith which some slaves had recited almost habitually in antebellum days when northern visitors pressed them on the subject of slavery. Disillusionment and “hard times” in the post-emancipation period helped to keep this perception of slavery alive. But for certain ex-slaves, the attachments went much deeper, and neither “good times” nor a bountiful freedom would most likely have altered the relationships and position they had come to cherish. To some of the strong-willed “mammies,” whose dominance in the white household was seldom questioned and whose pride and self-respect remained undiminished, emancipation threatened to disrupt the only world and the only ties that really mattered to them and they clung all the more stubbornly to the past.