Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [268]
To the women who had been accustomed to domestic help, self-reliance never came easily, if at all. The early exuberance and self-congratulation turned into deep resentment and cries of despair, reflecting both physical exhaustion and psychic humiliation. “I am tired—tired tonight, will all the days of the year be like this one?” the young mistress on a Florida plantation asked. “What are we going to do without the negroes?” Many years later, she could still recall “the wearisome hours, when only pride kept us up! … oh, the trials of those days to the housekeepers who had always been accustomed to first-class service!” The women who had derived such satisfaction from “trying to do things I never did before” turned before long to more somber reflections and more realistic appraisals. That brave talk about Anglo-Saxon adaptability and how it had been “a great relief to get rid of the horrid negroes” turned increasingly to nostalgic recollections of how much easier and simpler life had been before the disruption of the labor system and the loss of their servants.49
“Slavery was bad economy, I know,” a Tennessee woman conceded. “But oh,” she added, “it was glorious! I’d give a mint of money right now for servants like I once had,—to have one all my own! Ladies at the North, if they lose their servants, can do their own work; but we can’t, we can’t!” The housegirl who had once served her so faithfully had now taken up dressmaking in St. Louis. “She could read and write as well as I could. There was no kind of work that girl couldn’t do. And so faithful!—I trusted everything to her, and was never deceived.” Although revealing how dependent she had been on black labor, this woman thought emancipation had been a cruel blow to the slaves who had served their white folks so well. “Emancipation is a worse thing for our servants than for us. They can’t take care of themselves.”50
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RATHER THAN RENDERING THEM INDEPENDENT of their former slaves, the attempts of white families to hire white replacements or to work themselves only underscored their dependency. The incessant talk about ridding themselves of the ex-slaves may have impressed certain northern reporters but it never fooled the blacks. “Dey was glad to have a heap of colored people bout dem, cause white folks couldn’ work den no more den dey can work dese days like de colored people can,” recalled Josephine Bacchus, a former South Carolina slave. With equal cogency, a plantation mistress, in expressing gratitude for the blacks who had remained with her, acknowledged that “they can’t spare me, and I can’t spare them.”51
The sense of responsibility, obligation, and duty, invoked so often by the slaveholding class to justify keeping an “inferior, helpless and childlike” race in bondage, could obviously work both ways. The dependency of white families helps to explain the outrage and cries of ingratitude that greeted defecting and troublesome blacks, as it does the immense comfort those same families derived from some of their former slaves who chose to remain. Concerned for the welfare of her mother, Eliza Huger Smith of South Carolina went to considerable lengths to persuade a valuable servant to stay in the household after emancipation. “Hennie’s decision to remain with me,” she said afterwards, “is a great relief on Mamma’s account as she is as dependent on her as a baby—more so.” In a Georgia household, where all the servants had left, Hope L. Jones thought it a sad blow to her Aunt Bella, “since she is old and needs them more than ever.”52
Even as whites acknowledged, at least to themselves, the urgent need to retain their black laborers and servants, they recognized the continued importance of controlling that labor. With emancipation, the pecuniary loss had been difficult enough to absorb. But to lose control over their former slaves,