Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [168]
But what this discouraged black youth had suggested, in her own unique way, were simply the dimensions of the problem her people now faced. Despite emancipation, she realized that to be free was not to be like everyone else. With equal clarity, she perceived that to be white in American society was to be something, perhaps everything. That was a doctrine more fundamental and far-reaching in its implications than scores of emancipation proclamations, constitutional amendments, legislative enactments, and court decisions. George G. King, a former South Carolina slave, knew that only too well from his own experience. Born on a plantation appropriately called “two-hundred acres of Hell,” he had been subjected to a “devil overseer,” a “she-devil Mistress,” and a master who “talked hard words.” He would never forget the sight of his mistress walking away laughing while his mother screamed and groaned after a brutal whipping. Having witnessed and endured all of this, how much could he have expected of emancipation? His master had tried to allay any initial misconceptions. “The Master he says we are all free,” King recalled of that day, “but it don’t mean we is white. And it don’t mean we is equal. Just equal for to work and earn our own living and not depend on him for no more meats and clothes.”7
Although emancipation left skin hues unaltered, freedmen might still wish to fashion their aspirations and way of life after those who had always enjoyed freedom and whose comforts, diversions, and manners they had observed for so many years. To be free invited flights into fantasy, grandiose visions of a new life, not a life in which oppression and exploitation are vanquished but in which the roles are reversed and the blacks find themselves in the seats of power and the whites are relegated to the kitchens and fields.
Hurrah, hurrah fer freedom!
It makes de head spin ’roun’
De nigga’ in de saddle
An’ de white man on de groun’.
After all, only a few years before, who would have thought it conceivable that slaves would be armed and would march through the countryside to do battle with their “masters”? Nothing seemed impossible any longer, not even the division of the master’s lands among his former slaves. “It’s de white man’s turn ter labor now,” an ex-slave preacher told a torch rally near the Lester plantation in Florida, and that was as it should be.
When de white man set on de piazzy an’ de Nigger sweated in de sun—when de white man rode it through de sand—when de Nigger made de cotton, an’ de white man spen’ de money—now, Glory, halleluyer, dere ain’t no marster an’ dere ain’t no slave! Glory, halleluyer! From now on, my brudders an’ my sisters, old things have passed away an’ all things is bekum new.
The elderly slave woman in South Carolina who had welcomed the Yankees with visions of “settin’ at de white folks’ table, a eating off de white folks’ table, and a rocking in de big rocking chair” might have witnessed such scenes by visiting the plantations and town houses abandoned by the owners and occupied by former slaves. Whatever had induced such visions was less important than the way in which freed blacks chose to manifest them. The housemaid who had experienced a lifetime of reprimands, the field hands who knew no other routines, the urban laborers whose earnings had been pocketed by their owners might now aspire to something different. After still another scolding for her alleged incompetence, a servant finally turned on her mistress and retorted, “I expect the white folks to be waiting on me before long!”8
To indulge in such fantasies might be momentarily satisfying but it did nothing to resolve the slave’s immediate predicament after emancipation. At some point, he would have to appraise his position realistically and define for himself the content