Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [169]
Tain’t no mo’ sellin’ today,
Tain’t no mo’ hirin’ today,
Tain’t no pullin’ off shirts today,
It’s stomp down freedom today.
Stomp it down!
When she came to the words “Stomp it down!” the others began to shout along with her until they finally made up music to accompany their words. Like Sister Carrie’s chant, the initial attempts to define freedom drew largely on the most familiar images of slavery. If the future still seemed clouded with uncertainty, what blacks had experienced as slaves remained abundantly clear and vivid, so that freedom in its most immediate and meaningful sense could best be understood in terms of the limitations placed on white behavior. On the Sea Islands, slaves had interpreted the flight of their masters as meaning “no more driver, no more cotton, no more lickin’,” and with freedom they were “done wid massa’s hollerin’ ” and “done wid missus’ scoldin’.” The popular wartime spiritual “Many Thousand Go” similarly dwelled on freedom as a release from the most oppressive aspects of bondage: the inadequate rations, the whippings, the work routines, and the harassment—“No more peck o’corn for me,” “No more driver’s lash for me,” “No more pint o’salt for me,” “No more hundred lash for me,” and “No more mistress’ call for me.” Even the “hard times” and arduous labor that would characterize the postwar years in no way diminished the value ex-slaves placed on their freedom. “I’s mighty well pleased tu git my eatin’ by de ‘sweat o’ my face,’ ” a newly freed slave wrote his brother, “an’ all I ax o’ ole masser’s tu jes’ keep he hands off o’ de Lawd Almighty’s property, fur dat’s me.”9
Although former slaves chose to manifest their freedom in many different ways, with each individual acting on his or her own set of priorities, nearly all of them could subscribe to the underlying principle that emancipation had enabled them to become their own masters. And those were precisely the terms they most often employed to define their freedom. When the earliest contrabands reached Fortress Monroe, they testified that the most compelling idea in their minds had been “to belong to ourselves.” To the familiar question so often put to them as slaves, “Who do you b’long to, boy?” a Georgia freedman responded in 1865, “Ise don’t b’longs to nobody, Missus. Ise owns self, en b’longs to Macon.” For many of the emancipated slaves, freedom of action—the chance “to do something on their own account”—went to the very heart of their new condition. Not surprisingly, few other manifestations of black freedom would prove more irritating to their previous owners, many of whom failed to appreciate the importance of this concept in the lives of people whose actions they had tried so rigidly to control. “ ’Twould be amusing if it were not too pitiful to hear their idea of freedom,” sighed Grace Elmore, a South Carolina woman, after she discussed the question with one of her servants. “I asked Phillis if she likes the thought of being free. She said yes, tho she had always been treated with perfect kindness and could complain of nothing in her lot, but she had heard a woman who had bought her freedom from kind indulgent owners, say it was a very sweet thing to be able to do as she chose, to sit and do nothing, to work if she desired, or to go out as she liked, and ask nobody’s permission. And that was just her feeling. ‘She wished the power to do as she chose.’ ”10
When asked what price tag he now bore, an Alabama freedman replied, “I’s free. Ain’t wuf nuffin.” The northern visitor who asked the question did so after hearing that plantation hands in the Black Belt districts had no real understanding of freedom. Whatever remained vague about their new status,