Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [190]
With some exceptions, the men and women who had once owned slaves evinced no urgent desire to alter the traditional forms of deference and recognition. If nothing else, whites clung to social usages which reminded them of happier and more orderly times. The language and demeanor of the blacks had always defined their place in society and their relationship with whites, and in the chaotic postwar years, many whites preferred to think that a semblance of sanity and good manners might have survived emancipation. Louis Manigault, the Georgia planter, thus confessed his pleasure at being called “Maussa” and at seeing his former slaves “still showing respect by taking off their caps.” Some planters even went so far as to stipulate in the labor contracts they drew up with the freedmen that they be addressed as “master.” Seeking to accommodate himself to emancipation, Thomas Dabney, the prosperous Mississippi planter, advised his ex-slaves they no longer had to call him “master,” but he seemed reassured by the chorus of “Yes, marster” that greeted his admonition. “They seem to bring in ‘master’ and say it oftener than they ever did,” he observed, and Dabney preferred to accept it in good faith as a sign of affection; indeed, as his daughter noted, the term “seemed to grow into a term of endearment,” and former slaves Dabney had never known became tenants on the plantation and also called him “master.” With equal pride, a Mississippi white woman displayed her “little Confederate nigger,” as she called her, to a northern visitor. “She is the only one I have been able to keep, and I only have her because her parents haven’t yet been able to coax her away.” The young black girl still called her “Missey,” and the mistress proclaimed this fact with unconcealed delight, as if it were a singular achievement in the post-emancipation South. Perhaps it was. “All the niggers have been trying to break her of that, but they can’t. They tell her to call me Miss Lizzie, but she says ‘she may be your Miss Lizzie, but she’s my Missey.’ ” One day in church, her servant left the other blacks, declaring loudly for everyone to hear that she preferred to sit with her “Missey.” That created quite a stir, the mistress conceded. “You should have seen everybody’s head turning to see who it was, in these sorrowful times, that was still fortunate enough to be called Missey!”67
Dismayed by the post-emancipation behavior of her fellow servants, particularly their truckling manner and continued use of terms like “master” and “mistress,” a Mississippi black woman admonished them in the very presence of the white family to change their ways. They had “no master or mistress on earth,” she informed them, and “they were fools” to act as though they did. But the old habits proved difficult to break, even as the old fears of the power wielded by their former masters proved difficult to surmount. “My master would kill any-body who called any-body but a white person Missis,” a Virginia freedwoman declared. How blacks addressed each other often prompted equal dismay among black clergymen and northern white emissaries. Seeking to check the frequent use of the term “nigger,” Colonel Higginson, the well-intentioned commander of a black regiment, instructed his white officers to address the black soldiers by their full names. But he found that the blacks themselves used derogatory terms like “nigger” with little hesitation,