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Frances: “Le’s take a walk out to Camp.”

The two young women then vanished into the darkness. Several months after their conversation, without saying anything to the former owner, every freed slave on the plantation had left for new jobs and places. The day on which they made their mass exodus seemed somehow appropriate: New Year’s Day 1866, the third anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Several of them would soon return, however, their bodies lean with hunger and ravished by disease, their expectations shattered and their hopes deferred. Frances and Bethiah were apparently not among them, but they, too, like so many others, were bound to discover that “revolutions may go backward.”3

2

EVEN AS SLAVES, black people had often tried to conceptualize for themselves a life outside of bondage and beyond the plantations and farms which constituted the only world they knew. After learning of their freedom, however, the conversations in the quarters, in the fields, and in the kitchens turned to alternatives that were suddenly real, to new ways of living and working, and to aspirations they might hope to satisfy in their own lifetimes. To talk about the possibilities could be downright exhilarating, even infectious. But when it came to acting out these feelings, the old fears and insecurities and the still pervasive dependency on their former owners would first have to be surmounted. That came easily for some but not for most. “They were like a bird let out of a cage,” a Virginia freedman explained. “You know how a bird that has been long in a cage will act when the door is opened; he makes a curious fluttering for a little while. It was just so with the colored people. They didn’t know at first what to do with themselves. But they got sobered pretty soon.” That same imagery of birds freed from a cage occurred to a white Georgian, but she could think only of birds who were “helpless” and others, like the hawk, whose release would most likely inflict “mischief” on everyone.4

The Confederacy lay in ruins. The white South, however, demonstrated remarkable intransigence and evinced few signs of repentance or enlightenment. Rather than rethink their values and assumptions, most whites preferred to romanticize about the martyred Lost Cause. Although resigned to legal emancipation for nearly four million black men and women, most whites clung even more tenaciously to traditional notions of racial solidarity and black inferiority. Whatever “mischief” emancipation unleashed, what it could not do, as a Georgia editor suggested, was far more crucial: it could not transform the Negro into a white man.

The different races of man, like different coins at a mint, were stamped at their true value by the Almighty in the beginning. No contact with each other—no amount of legislation or education—can convert the negro into a white man. Until that can be done—until you can take the kinks out of his wool and make his skull thinner—until all these things and abundantly more have been done, the negro cannot claim equality with the white race.

Even the white conquerors of the South might not have thought to question the universal wisdom of that comforting observation. The Cincinnati Enquirer, in fact, offered its own variant of a popular theme: “Slavery is dead, the negro is not, there is the misfortune. For the sake of all parties, would that he were.”5

To what, then, could freed blacks aspire in a society dominated by white men and women intent on using any means to perpetuate that domination? For any freedman or freedwoman to linger too long over that question might be both demoralizing and self-deprecating. If emancipation by itself could touch their lives and destinies in any significant way, some blacks expressed the hope that it would turn them white. In one Virginia household, a young servant expressed her disappointment over the failure of emancipation to do precisely that. Nor did the reassuring words of her mistress—“You must not be ashamed