Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [19]
The local courthouse and post office, favorite meeting places for whites, were obvious and much-exploited sources of information and rumor. Like the body servants and conscripted laborers who brought home news from the front lines, slaves in town on errands for the master found it relatively easy to acquire information and form impressions about the progress of the war. The slaves who picked up the mail for their masters became in some instances couriers to the larger slave community. The post office, Booker T. Washington recalled, was located about three miles from the plantation, and the slave who was sent there lingered about long enough to catch the drift of the conversation of the many whites who gathered there and who invariably exchanged views about recent developments. On his way home, the mail carrier would share what he had heard with other slaves, and in this way, Washington claimed, blacks often heard the news before it reached the Big House. In Forsyth County, Georgia, young Edward Glenn fetched the newspaper for his mistress, and each day Walter Raleigh, the local black preacher, waited for him by the road and read the paper before the slave took it to the house. On the day Glenn would never forget, the preacher threw the newspaper on the ground after reading it, hollered “I’m free as a frog!” and ran away. The slave dutifully took the paper to his mistress, who read it and began to cry. “I didn’t say no more,” Glenn recalled.46
Although most slaves were illiterate, nearly every neighborhood contained at least one or more who had acquired reading and writing skills. Immediately after the war, when freed blacks no longer felt the need to conceal such matters, many a master would learn to his astonishment (often during contract negotiations) that a slave he had assumed to be illiterate had known for some time how to read. While in bondage, however, some slaves thought it impolitic to reveal such skills. Squires Jackson, a Florida slave who had kept his literacy from the whites, recalled how the master walked in upon him unexpectedly while he was reading the newspaper and demanded to know what he was doing. Equal to the moment, Jackson immediately turned the newspaper upside down and declared, “Confederates done won the war.” The master laughed and left the room, and once again a slave had used the “darky act” to extricate himself from a precarious situation.47
Few plantation whites were fully aware of the inventiveness with which their slaves transmitted information to other blacks. Extensive black communication networks, feeding on a variety of sources, sped information from plantation to plantation, county to county, often with remarkable secrecy and accuracy. What slaves called the “grapevine telegraph” frequently employed code words that enabled them to carry on conversations about forbidden subjects in the very presence of their masters and mistresses. Although whites often failed to grasp the mechanics or vocabulary of slave communication, they did come to suspect that their slaves knew more than they revealed. With the outbreak of the war, slaveholders tried to curtail interplantation contacts between blacks, lest such fraternization—which had been generally tolerated—encourage a wide dissemination of news and permit concerted plans for flight to the Union lines. “When I first heard talk about the War,” Mary Grayson recalled, “the slaves were allowed to go and see one another sometimes and often they were sent on errands several miles with a wagon or on a horse, but pretty soon we were all kept at home, and nobody was allowed to come around and talk to us.” Despite these restrictions, she added, “we heard what was going on.”48
Under wartime conditions, suspicions were more easily aroused and previously tolerated slave practices came under much closer scrutiny. Not long after the outbreak of war, for example, a black congregation in Savannah sang with particular fervor