Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [256]
Where planters, overseers, and managers failed to induce the blacks to maintain the old pace of labor, the black drivers fared little better, provided they were tolerated at all. On a Louisiana sugar plantation, Jim had long held the position of driver, and he was proud of the way he had exercised his duties—no prouder than his master, who thought him the most intelligent and skillful slave he had ever known. After the war, however, Jim found his people unresponsive to his demands, and he could only shake his head in disbelief:
I sposed, now we’s all free, dey’d jump into de work keen, to make all de money dey could. But it was juss no work at all. I got so ‘scouraged sometimes I’s ready to gib it all up, and tell ’em to starve if dey wanted to. Why, sah, after I’d ring de bell in the mornin’ ’twould be hour, or hour ’n half ’fore a man ’d get into de fiel’. Den dey’d work along maybe an hour, maybe half hour more; and den dey’d say, “Jim, aint it time to quit?” I say, “No, you lazy dog, taint ten o’clock.” Den dey’d say, “Jim, I’s mighty tired,” and next thing I’d know, dey’d be pokin’ off to de quarters. When I scold and swear at ’em, dey say, “We’s free now, and we’s not work unless we pleases.” Sah, I got so sick of deir wuflessness dat I sometimes almost wished it was old slavery times again.
That was the driver’s view of how matters stood; the remaining field hands, however, thought him a hard taskmaster—“harder on them than white folks.” Few of them, moreover, expected to contract for a new year unless they were accorded certain privileges, like their own tracts of land to cultivate for their own benefit. Nevertheless, the driver expected that in time these freedmen would come to their senses, particularly with a white overseer now on the premises. “Dey wants a white man to gib orders,” he explained. “Dey wouldn’t min’ me las’ yeah, ’cause I’s nigger like demselves. I tink dey do better dis yeah.”16
Although the rate of “desertion” appears to have been lower in the fields than in the households, few planters could assume in mid-1865 that any of their hands would be on the same plantation at the end of the year. Within a period of five months, the Beaver Bend plantation, a once flourishing enterprise, was brought to a point of virtual ruin. Before the war, Hugh Davis had reaped substantial profits out of his 5,000 acres of rich Black Belt land; in 1862, he died of an apoplectic stroke, and an administrator and overseer managed the plantation while Hugh Davis, Jr., eighteen years old when the war broke out, served in the Confederate Army. After the war, Davis found that the slaves in this region had “all become monomaniacs on the subject of freedom,” thousands of them flocking to Selma “to be free” and “to embrace the nigger lovers,” only to discover Yankee freedom to be a “delusion” and to hasten back to the old plantation. Of the seventy-eight Davis slaves, some thirteen men and thirteen women were persuaded to remain and contract to work “as they have heretofore done” for provisions and a share (one fifth) of the crop. Within several weeks after Davis’ return to the plantation, continual movement and malingering among the former slaves seriously interfered with the completion of the crop. “Negroes will not work for pay, the lash is all I fear that will make them,” he wrote on May 30, 1865. Five weeks later, the same problems plagued him, with seventeen of his “best hands” having left for Selma. The Davis plantation, like so many others, experienced a turbulent period in which freedmen—both the old hands and the newly hired workers—came and departed