Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [162]
Who says I’se free? I warn’t neber no slabe. I libed wid qual’ty an’ was one ob de fambly. Take dis bandanna off? No, ‘deedy! dats the las’ semblance I’se got ob de good ole times. S’pose I is brack, I cyan’t he’p it. If mah mammy and pappy chose for me ter be brack, I ain’t gwine ter be lak some white folks I knows an’ blame de Lord for all de ’flictions dat comes ’pon ’em. I’se put up wid dis brackness now, ’cordin’ to ol’ Mis’s Bible, for nigh on ter ninety years, an’ t’ank de good Lord, dat eberlastin’ day is mos’ come when I’ll be white as Mis’ Chloe for eber mo’! [Her mistress had died some years before.] What’s dat, honey? How I knows I’se gwine ter be white? Why, honey, I’se s’prised! Do you s’pose ’cause Mammy’s face is brack, her soul is brack too? Whar’s yo’ larnin’ gone to?
Many of the freed slaves who viewed emancipation apprehensively readily confessed that they had escaped the worst aspects of bondage. “I ain’t never had no mother ’ceptin’ only Mis’ Patsey,” a Florida freedwoman remarked, “an’ I ain’t never felt lak’ a bond slave what’s been pressed—dat’s what dem soldiers say we all is.”88
The mixed emotions with which slaves greeted their freedom also reflected a natural fear of the unknown, along with the knowledge that “they’s alius ’pend on Old Marse to look after them.” For many blacks, this was the only life they had known and the world ended at the boundaries of the plantation. To think that they no longer had a master or mistress, while it brought exuberance and relief to many, struck others with dismay. “Whar we gwine eat an’ sleep?” they demanded to know. And realizing they could not depend on the law or on other whites for protection, who would now stand between them and the dreaded patrollers and “po’ buckra”? After hearing of their freedom, Silas Smith recalled, “de awfulest feeling” pervaded the slave quarters that night as they contemplated a future without masters or mistresses. “You felt jes’ like you had done strayed off a-fishing and got lost.” Fifteen years after emancipation, Parke Johnston, a former Virginia slave, vividly recalled “how wild and upset and dreadful everything was in them times.”
It came so sudden on ’em they wasn’t prepared for it. Just think of whole droves of people, that had always been kept so close, and hardly ever left the plantation before, turned loose all at once, with nothing in the world, but what they had on their backs, and often little enough of that; men, women and children that had left their homes when they found out they were free, walking along the road with no where to go.89
Since emancipation threatened to undermine the mutual obligations implicit in the master-slave relationship, some freed blacks responded with cries of ingratitude and betrayal that matched in fury the similar reactions of white families to the wartime behavior of certain slaves. When Yankee soldiers told an elderly South Carolina slave that she no longer had a master or mistress, the woman responded as though she had been insulted: “I ain’ no free nigger! I is got a marster an’ mistiss! Dee right dar in de great house. Ef you don’ b’lieve me, you go dar an’ see.” Like so many of the older slaves, this woman felt that her services and devotion to the “white folks” over many years had more than fulfilled her part of the relationship. For the family to abandon her now and deprive her of the security, care, and protection she clearly thought she had earned would be, in her view, the rankest form of ingratitude. On a plantation in South Carolina, the oldest black on the place reacted with downright indignation when his former master read the terms of a proposed labor contract; indeed, few blacks expressed the idea of mutual obligations more clearly:
Missis belonged to him, & he belonged to Missis, & he was not going to leave her.… Massa had brought him up here to take care of him, & he had known when Missis’ grandmother was born & she was ‘bliged to take care of