Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [265]
If a Grace Elmore still insisted that the “separate” interests of blacks and whites doomed the Negro as the principal laborer of the post-emancipation South, the argument made little sense to planters who chose to view the entire matter in businesslike terms. “There is now nothing between me and the nigger but the dollar—the almighty dollar,” a Florida planter declared, “and I shall make out of him the most I can at the least expense.” That was a principle to which any nineteenth-century American employer could have readily subscribed.39
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TO DISCOVER ONE DAY, as did so many white women, that “I have not one human being in the wide world to whom I can say ‘do this for me’ ” had to be a most disheartening realization. “We have truly said good bye to being ladies of leisure,” Grace Elmore lamented, as she sought to adjust to her new daily routine. “My time seems fully occupied and often I do not have time to sleep even. My hour for rising is 5 o’clock.” Embittered by the continuing defection of their servants, exasperated by the behavior of those who remained, and unable to find satisfactory replacements, many families found themselves forced into the unfamiliar role of doing the housework themselves. No matter how they rationalized this change in their lives, and whatever the orgy of self-congratulation that often accompanied the assumption of household responsibilities, the unprecedented nature of their predicament provoked considerable dismay and disbelief.40
To assume responsibility for the daily chores—to cook a meal, to dust and sweep, to wash the clothes, to feed the horses and milk the cows—was to undertake tasks they had previously watched their black folk perform. “I always had thirty or forty niggers,” the wife of a Louisiana planter declared. “I never even so much as washed out a pocket handkerchief with my own hands, and now I have to do all my work.” With considerable anguish, a Virginia woman admitted to her cousins in the North that it would require “some time for us to get fixed to do our own house work or to do with a few servants”; if nothing else, she noted, the distances separating the kitchen, the spring, and the dining room seemed all too formidable. Like so many “ladies” she knew, Gertrude Thomas found herself sharing the household chores with the few remaining servants. The sheer novelty of the experience struck her with wonderment. Not only did she assist in washing the breakfast dishes—“a thing I never remember to have done except once or twice in my life”—but she startled one of the servants by announcing that she intended to do the ironing. “It was amusing to see his look of astonishment but indeed the necessity for it appeared qu[i]te im[m]inent.” That night, she described the experience in her journal, concluding, “I am tired and sleepy.”41
To hear white families relate their experiences, the initiation into domestic labor had its moments of self-satisfaction and even triumph. The spectacle of “fragile women,” left without any servants, “cooking and washing without a murmur,” moved Emma Holmes to extol the “heroism and spirit” of southern womanhood. With less flourish, a Virginia woman described how she missed “the familiar black faces” she had grown to love. “Domestic cares are making me gray! But I get some fun trying to do things I never did before.” Eva Jones had to tell her mother-in-law how she expected “to become a very efficient chambermaid and seamstress,” though she confessed that the sewing came “very hard to my poor unused fingers.”42
The first days of performing domestic chores could even be an exhilarating experience. Charlotte S. J. Ravenel took pride in “how nicely” she had prepared a meal, while another South Carolina woman, after scrubbing the wash “until my poor hands are skinned,” took some consolation in how “white and clean” the clothes looked. None of these women, however, matched in exuberance the triumph felt by William Heyward,