Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [176]
I myself had my wife on another plantation. The woman my master gave me had a husband on another plantation. Every thing was mixed up. My other wife had two children for me, but the woman master gave me had no children. We were put in the same cabin, but both of us cried, me for my old wife and she for her old husband. As I could read and write I used to write out passes for myself, so I could go and see my old wife; and I wrote passes for the other men on the place, so they could go and see their wives that lived off the place.
Even as Jordon and his second wife shared the same cabin, he wrote out passes that enabled her to slip out and visit her husband on a nearby plantation. When conditions “got to be so tight” that he could no longer see his wife as often as he wished, Jordon resolved to escape. Upon being apprehended, however, he was sold even further away from his wife until finally both of them remarried “during the long years of our enforced and hopeless separation.”27
Where husbands and wives had lived on separate but nearby plantations, their marital relationship rested on the willingness of two masters to permit weekend visitations. Understandably, as a former South Carolina slave explained, “a man dat had a wife off de place, see little peace or happiness. He could see de wife once a week, on a pass, and jealousy kep’ him ‘stracted de balance of de week, if he love her very much.” Such relationships, recalled Millie Barber, whose parents had lived five miles apart, often produced “confusion, mix-up, and heartaches.”
My pa have to git a pass to come to see my mammy. He come sometimes widout de pass. Patrollers catch him way up de chimney hidin’ one night; they stripped him right befo’ mammy and give him thirty-nine lashes, wid her cryin’ and a hollerin’ louder than he did.
After emancipation, husbands and wives who had lived in this manner quickly seized the opportunity to spend more than weekends together and settled down, usually, on one or the other place.28
Upon learning of their freedom, a former slave recalled, the older blacks “knowed what it meant, but us young ones didn’t.” Many of them would learn soon enough, often in ways that proved to be quite memorable and traumatic. Husbands and wives not only located each other in the aftermath of emancipation but made what one Federal officer described as “superhuman efforts” to find the children who had been sold away from them; indeed, numerous ex-slaves would recall that their first realization of freedom came when a parent, a sibling, or an aunt or uncle suddenly appeared to take them away.29 Depending on the circumstances of their separation, such reunions could result in outbursts of unbounded joy or produce very mixed emotions, particularly in young blacks who had little or no recollection of their parents. Having been raised by someone else, to whom firm emotional commitments may have been made, the sudden appearance of a strange man or woman who claimed to be a father or mother was a terribly confusing and agonizing moment, even more so if faced with the prospect of separation from those they had grown to love.
Since infancy, when her mother had been sold away, Frankie Goole had been reared by her white mistress, slept in the same room with her, and she came to regard her with considerable affection. At the age of twelve, with the war over, Frankie found herself in a courtroom standing next to a woman who claimed to be her mother and facing a judge who asked her to verify it. “I dunno, she sezs she ez,” Frankie remembered having told him. Reflecting back on that moment many years later, she summed up the confusion