Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [185]
No matter how they manifested their freedom, black men and women found themselves in a better position to defend their marital fidelity, to maintain their family ties, and to control their own children. That in itself ensured an enhanced dignity and pride as a family that slavery had so often compromised. But nothing could erase the still vivid memories of the fear and experience of forced separation from loved ones and the innumerable tragedies and complications which such separations, as well as the day-to-day indignities of slave life, had inflicted upon their families. More than the memories of those years remained to haunt them. Near Norfolk, Virginia, a long-separated couple found each other near the end of the war. “Twas like a stroke of death to me,” the woman said afterwards. “We threw ourselves into each others arms and cried. His wife looked on and was jealous, but she needn’t have been. My husband is so kind, I shouldn’t leave him if he hadn’t had another wife, and of course I shouldn’t now. Yes, my husband’s very kind, but I ain’t happy.” The momentary reunion had been painful for both of them. Reflecting back upon her first marriage, the days a mule. “He told me never to go by any name except Banner. That was all the mule they ever give me.” Midway through the war, Federal officials expressed some consternation over the number of contrabands who gave them false names. “Perhaps, after all, no false motive influences them,” a white missionary teacher tried to explain, “as they may bear many names in a lifetime.” Still, she found herself repeatedly frustrated in trying to ascertain the full names of the freedmen and freedwomen she encountered. “They are Judith or John, and nothing more.” Not at all hesitant about adopting or revealing surnames were scores of ex-slaves who considered this step necessary to demonstrate and ensure their newly won freedom. “No man thought he was perfectly free,” the overseer on a Louisiana plantation observed, “unless he had changed his name and taken a family name. Precious few of ’em ever took that of their old masters.” If any doubts remained about the validity of emancipation, some freed slaves came up with the ingenious idea that a new name might be a useful device to retain their freedom and avoid re-enslavement. “When us black folks got set free,” Alice Wilkins recalled, “us’n change our names, so effen the white folks get together and change their minds and don’t let us be free any more, then they have a hard time finding us.”58
The notion that blacks marked their emancipation by repudiating their slave names distorts the significance those names had assumed for large numbers of slaves, particularly the ways in which they often reflected a deeply felt familial consciousness. Although some freedmen quickly dropped the whimsical names their masters had bestowed on them, nearly everyone else retained his or her previous given name. This had been their sole identity during bondage, often the only remaining link to parents from whom they had been separated and who had initially named them. No matter how harsh a bondage they had endured, few freed slaves revealed any desire to obliterate their entire past or family heritage, and those whose given names or surnames reflected kinship ties tended to guard them zealously. Many freedmen, on the other hand, adopted surnames for the first time, often choosing a name that would set them off as a discrete family, some began to use openly the surnames they had assumed as slaves, and still others slightly altered their names to symbolize their right to do so. Once they knew of their freedom, Lee Guidon recollected, “a heap of people say they was going to name their selves over. They named their selves big names.… Some of the names