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By Root 1239 0

the semblance of organized effort, freed slaves began the arduous process of ascertaining the boundaries of freedom. If few of them indulged in land seizures, arson, or physical attacks on whites, this suggests that most blacks perceived the need to exercise their freedom with some degree of appreciation for where the power still rested in their communities. But whatever action a freedman deemed appropriate, no matter how restrained or insignificant it may have appeared to others, the objective remained essentially the same—to achieve some recognition, even if only grudgingly given, of that new sense of dignity and self-respect which emancipation encouraged in them. Few expressed it more graphically than an elderly freedman in South Carolina when he explained to a black schoolteacher why he rejoiced over his new status: “Don’t hab me feelins hurt now. Used to hab me feelins hurt all de time. But don’t hab em hurt now, no more.” Whenever he reflected back on slavery, Stephen McCray testified many years later, he thought invariably of the story of the coon and the dog. “The coon said to the dog: ‘Why is it you’re so fat and I am so poor, and we is both animals?’ The dog said: ‘I lay round Master’s house and let him kick me and he gives me a piece of bread right on.’ Said the coon to the dog: ‘Better then that I stay poor.’ Them’s my sentiment. I’m lak the coon. I don’t believe in ‘buse.”14

To dwell only on the most dramatic manifestations of freedom would distort the experience entirely. If a former slave should decide, for example, to change his employer, that might simply entail a move from his old plantation to the next one down the road. This was not about to alter in any significant degree his day-to-day life but to many a freedman, as to Ambus Gray of Alabama, that had been the “one difference” between freedom and bondage: “You could change places and work for different men.” Even if a slave chose to stay with his master after emancipation, even if his demeanor remained unchanged, even if his fidelity to the “white folks” stood unshaken, this did not necessarily mean that nothing had happened to him or that he failed to grasp the meaning of his freedom. “When you’all had de power you was good to me,” an elderly black man told his former master in May 1865, “and I’ll protect you now. No niggers nor Yankees shall touch you. If you want anything, call for Sambo. I mean, call for Mr. Samuel—that’s my name now.”15

To determine the “one difference” between freedom and bondage, the ex-slaves found themselves driven in many directions at the same time. But the distance they placed between themselves and their old status could not be measured by how far they traveled or even if they left the old plantation. That “difference” could most often be perceived in the choices now available to them, in the securing of families and the location of loved ones who had been sold away, in the sanctification of marital ties, in the taking of a new surname or the revelation of an old one, in the opportunity to achieve literacy, in the chance to move their religious services from “down in the hollow” to their own churches, in sitting where they pleased in public places, in working where the rewards were commensurate with their labor. What emancipation introduced into the lives of many black people was not only the element of choice but a leap of confidence in the ability to effect changes in their own lives without deferring to whites. “What I likes bes, to be slave or free?” Margrett Nillin, a former Texas slave, pondered over that question many decades after her emancipation. “Well, it’s dis way,” she answered. “In slavery I owns nothin’ and never owns nothin’. In freedom I’s own de home and raise de family. All dat cause me worryment and in slavery I has no worryment, but I takes de freedom.”16

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NOTHING EXHILARATED Charlie Barbour more in the aftermath of emancipation than to know “dat I won’t wake up some mornin’ ter fin’ dat my mammy or some ob de rest of my family am done sold.” With even more vivid memories, Jacob Thomas, who