Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [180]
Dat yo’ wife
Dat yo’ husban’
Ise yo’ Marser
She yo’ Missus
You’re married.
If they achieved nothing else, the mock wedding rites, highlighted by “jumping the broomstick,” sanctioned such marriages in the eyes of the man and woman and their fellow slaves. But the white owner determined the longevity of their relationship, and the forcible breakup of slave marriages occurred with sufficient regularity to warrant the casualness of the ceremony, the fears of the couple, and some bitter recollections:
One night a couple married an’ de next mornin’ de boss sell de wife. De gal ma got in de street an’ cursed de white woman fur all she could find. She said: “dat damn white, pale-face bastard sell my daughter who jus’ married las’ night,” an other t’ings.
The police had to be summoned to restrain the grief-stricken mother and remove her to the local workhouse.38
No sooner had emancipation been acknowledged than thousands of “married” couples, with the encouragement of black preachers and northern white missionaries, hastened to secure their marital vows, both legally and spiritually. “My husband and I have lived together fifteen years,” the mother of a large family remarked, “and we wants to be married over again now.” Mildred Graves, a former Virginia house servant, remembered her courtship, the broomstick ceremony, and the cast-off dress her mistress gave her as a wedding present; nevertheless, after the war, she also recalled, “we had a real sho’ nuff weddin’ wid a preacher. Dat cost a dollar.”39 The insistence of teachers, missionaries, and Freedmen’s Bureau officers that blacks formalize their marriages stemmed from the notion that legal sanction was necessary for sexual and moral restraint and that ex-slaves had to be inculcated with “the obligations of the married state in civilized life.” But many of the couples themselves, who needed no instruction in such matters, agreed to participate in formalizations of their unions for more practical reasons—to legitimize their children, to qualify for soldiers’ pensions, to share in the rumored forthcoming division of the lands, and to exercise their newly won civil rights. Whatever the most compelling reason, mass wedding ceremonies involving as many as seventy couples at a time became a common sight in the postwar South.
One evening four couples came to the schoolhouse to meet “the parson” who was to perform the marriage ceremony for them. They came straight from the field, in their working-clothes; the women, as was their custom, walking behind the men.… When they left the schoolhouse the women all took their places by the side of the men, showing that they felt they were equal in the eyes of the law.40
Native whites looked upon these spectacles with a mixture of amusement, disdain, and indifference. Having forbidden legal marriages, condoned the breakup of families, and demeaned family relationships, some former masters and mistresses now mocked the efforts of ex-slaves to dignify with proper ceremony and affidavit marital ties of long standing. “They take the white man’s notions as they copy his manners, not for what they are but for the impression that’s made by them on the world,” a South Carolina white woman observed of the interest taken by blacks in solemnizing their marriage relationship.
Now what [is] more common than to hear “I must go with my wife,” not because they have investigated the matter and seen the right of the thing, but such is the view of the white and the view suits present circumstances, and is therefore adopted by the negro. One wife is as good as another to them …
Like most whites, she seemed incapable of explaining the actions of the freedmen except