Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [27]
The wagon trains carrying the planter families and household goods, with the slaves, cattle, and horses trailing behind them, would become a familiar sight in parts of the wartime South. The fall of New Orleans and exposure to Federal raiding parties precipitated the largest exodus, with more than 150,000 slaves sent out of Louisiana and Mississippi, choking the roads and towns leading into Texas. “It look like everybody in the world was going to Texas,” Allen Manning recalled. “When we would be going down the road we would have to walk along the side all the time to let the wagons go past, all loaded with folks going to Texas.” The slaves who made these treks would long recall the crowded roads, the inhospitable towns, the mothers toting the children on their backs, the fathers tending the wagons and livestock, and the many difficult detours that were ordered to avoid Yankee raiding parties. “Dat was de awfullest trip any man ever make!” Charley Williams, a former Louisiana slave, recalled. “We had to hide from everybody until we find out if dey Yankees or Sesesh, and we go along little old back roads and up one mountain and down another, through de woods all de way.” Virginia Newman remembered how “us all walk barefeets and our feets break and run they so sore, and blister for months. It cold and hot sometime and rain and us got no house or no tent.” To compensate for the drudgery of the journey, the slaves invented some appropriate songs and sang them to the slow steps of the oxen pulling the wagons.
Walk, walk, you nigger, walk!
De road am dusty, de road am tough,
Dust in de eye, dust in de tuft;
Dust in de mouth, yous can’t talk—
Walk, you niggers, don’t you balk.
Walk, walk, you nigger, walk!
De road am dusty, de road am rough.
Walk ’til we reach dere, walk or bust—
De road am long, we be dere by and by.
“We’uns don’t sing it many times,” Bill Homer remembered, “ ’til de missy come and sit in de back of de wagon, facin’ we’uns [who were walking], and she begin to beat de slow time and sing wid we’uns. Dat please Missy Mary to sing with us and she laugh and laugh.”70
Although many of the elderly slaves had been left behind on the old plantations, relocation would take its toll in exhaustion, disrupted families, and lives. After two years on the road, the Miles family of Richmond, Virginia, finally reached Franklin, Texas, but not before the master had sold and traded both slaves and livestock along the way, retaining only his personal servants. Elvira Boles, who had been a slave in Mississippi, left her baby buried “somewhere on dat road” to Texas. Louis Love of Louisiana recalled the death of his brother before they reached the Trinity River. A North Carolina planter, who “didn’ want to part with his niggers,” failed to survive the trip to Arkansas, as did three of the slaves. “We buried the slaves there [on the road],” Millie Evans remembered, “but we camped while ol’ master was carried back to North Carolina. When ol’ mistress come back we started on to Arkansas an’ reached here safe but when we got here we foun’ freedom here too.”71
Whether on the road or in the makeshift camps at night, the slaves had ample time to reflect over their situation—the places they had left behind, the breakup of families, the growing distance between themselves and the nearest Union troops, the uncertainty of what lay ahead. Their brooding boded only disastrous results for some slaveholders. Rarely a morning passed without the discovery that still more slaves had fled during the night, perhaps to the Union lines, perhaps even back to the old plantation. The difficulty in controlling their slaves on the road forced some owners to turn back; others simply tried to minimize their