Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [222]
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THE FLAMES from a pitch-pine bonfire illuminated the woods near the Lester plantation in northern Florida. Hundreds of men, women, and children came from every direction to attend this late-night meeting, gathering around a makeshift speaker’s platform—the trunk of a fallen pine tree. Mounting that rostrum, Richard Edwards, a black preacher, looked out at the faces of these people only recently freed from bondage. With their cries of “Dat’s so” and loud “Amens” punctuating his remarks, he told them of the glories of their triumph. He welcomed the new era in which black men and women no longer cringed in the presence of the white man. He urged them to embrace their liberty. He insisted that only they—not the Yankees, not Lincoln, not the northern teachers—could make themselves free.
You ain’t, none o’ you, gwinter feel rale free till you shakes de dus’ ob de Ole Plantashun offen yore feet an’ goes ter a new place whey you kin live out o’ sight o’ de gret house. So long ez de shadder ob de gret house falls acrost you, you ain’t gwine ter feel lak no free man, an’ you ain’t gwine ter feel lak no free ‘oman. You mus’ all move—you mus’ move clar away from de ole places what you knows, ter de new places what you don’t know, whey you kin raise up yore head douten no fear o’ Marse Dis ur Marse Tudder. Take yore freedum, my brudders an’ my sisters. You-all is jis’ ez good ez ennybody, an’ you-all is jis’ ez free! Go whey you please—do what you please—furgit erbout de white folks—an’ now stan’ up on yore feet—lif’ up yore eyes—an’ shout wid me Glory, halleluyer! AMEN!6
Within the first year of freedom, thousands of blacks exercised that option in precisely that spirit. If they were truly free, they could walk off the plantation on which they had labored as slaves and never return. Whatever else they did, that remained the surest, the quickest way to demonstrate to themselves that their old masters and mistresses no longer owned or controlled them, that they were now free to make their own decisions. Although the black preacher in Florida had talked about “new places what you don’t know,” most of those who left preferred the localities they knew, where they could still retain their familial ties and friendships; they might simply move to the next plantation or to the nearest town. In separating themselves from their previous owners, not from the region itself, they had begun to feel like free men and women.
Explaining the movement of blacks in his region, a Florida planter and physician made the essential point. “The negroes don’t seem to feel free unless they leave their old homes,” he informed his cousin in North Carolina, “just to make it sure they can go when and where they choose.” Elsewhere in the South, white families and Federal officials observed the same phenomenon: many freedmen were acting on the assumption that to stay with their former masters was to remain slaves. Once a black man or woman made the critical decision to leave, not even the most handsome of offers from the former master was likely to keep them on the old place. In South Carolina, a white family proposed to pay their valuable cook nearly twice the amount she had been offered in the nearby village. But this woman, who had served the family faithfully for many years, could not be persuaded to stay. “No, Miss, I must go,” she insisted. When pressed to give some reason for spurning such a generous offer, the woman had little difficulty in making her motives absolutely clear: “If I stay here I’ll never know I am free.” Without even pretending to understand the deeply felt yearnings that prompted such behavior, some whites chose to dismiss the departures as foolish or even amusing, much as they previously had belittled the humanity of their slaves. “In almost every yard servants are leaving,” Emma Holmes observed in Camden, South Carolina, “but going to wait on other people for food merely, sometimes