Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [199]
Much of the furor over racial separation in public vehicles grew out of fears that white women and black men might otherwise find themselves seated next to each other. In the absence of restrictions, blacks would gain access to the “ladies’ car” (hitherto reserved for nonsmoking men and for women) on the railroads and to the sleeping compartments on the steamboats. The issue in both cases was eminently clear. On a Mississippi River steam packet running between Memphis and Vicksburg, the white passengers applauded the action of the captain in refusing to grant a stateroom to a black couple. Expressing his relief at the decision, one of the passengers posed the central question to a skeptical northern visitor, “How would you feel to know that your wife was sleeping in the next room to a nigger and his wife?” After reflecting over that question, the visitor realized soon enough that his fellow passengers expected no response. “The argument was unanswerable: it was an awful thought!” As for the unwelcome couple, they were cast ashore to wait for still another boat but their chances seemed dim. “They won’t find a boat that’ll take ’em,” the captain declared. “Anyhow, they can’t force their damned nigger equality on to me!”94
In playing upon postwar fears of miscegenation, whites seemed almost oblivious to the hypocrisy of their sudden concern for the survival of the Anglo-Saxon race. Among others, Mary Chesnut knew better than to press this argument too far. “Like the patriarchs of old,” she had confided to her diary in March 1861, “our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”95 Actually, whites made no attempt to deny the presence of a substantial mulatto population; those transgressions, however, had violated black women, not the prevailing racial code, and they had taken place in a rigidly controlled setting, with white men exercising a power which the prevailing relationships in their society permitted them. But in this same context, with men setting the sexual code and regulating their own behavior, black male sexuality assumed even more menacing proportions, precisely because it was deemed to be uncontrollable.
With so much evidence to the contrary around them, blacks found it hard to take seriously the white man’s sudden preoccupation with racial purity. But if whites were serious in their protestations, they were advised to direct that concern to the principal source of the problem—themselves. “The white man says he don’t want to be placed on equality with the negro,” Abraham H. Galloway, a mulatto, told a convention of freedmen in North Carolina in 1865. “Why, Sir, if you could only see him slipping around at night, trying to get into negro women’s houses, you would be astonished.” The other delegates indicated their agreement, one of them shouting out, “That’s the truth, Galloway.” The New Orleans Tribune thought it highly ironic that some of the most “devoted apostles of miscegenation” now proclaimed themselves as the principal defenders of the