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independence and personal freedom, the betrayal of those expectations confirmed the persistence of the old dependency. The former slave found that all too little had changed. By resorting to a sharecropping arrangement, he had hoped to achieve a significant degree of autonomy; instead, he found himself plunged ever deeper into dependency and debt, pledging his future crops to sustain himself during the current crop. In that brief flurry of excitement and anticipation at the moment of freedom, there had been all kinds of talk about land and “living independently” and being able to do what the white folks did. But the talk was now of survival, their principal hopes remained unfulfilled, and some freedmen were certain they had been hopelessly betrayed. “We thought we was goin’ to get rich like the white folks,” recalled Felix Haywood, who had been a slave in Texas. “We thought we was goin’ to be richer than the white folks, ’cause we was stronger and knowed how to work, and the whites didn’t and they didn’t have us to work for them anymore. But it didn’t turn out that way. We soon found out that freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ’em rich.”136

More than seventy years after emancipation, Thomas Hall, who had been born a slave in Orange County, North Carolina, could still shake with anger when he thought about the way his people had been freed. “Lincoln got the praise for freeing us, but did he do it? He give us freedom without giving us any chance to live to ourselves and we still had to depend on the southern white man for work, food and clothing, and he held us through our necessity and want in a state of servitude but little better than slavery. Lincoln done but little for the negro race and from living standpoint nothing.” While relating a history of white betrayal, North and South, the bitterness overflowed and he finally turned it upon the white interviewer.

You are going around to get a story of slavery conditions and the persecutions of negroes before the civil war and the economic conditions concerning them since that war. You should have known before this late day all about that. Are you going to help us? No! you are only helping yourself. You say that my story may be put into a book, that you are from the Federal Writers’ Project. Well, the negro will not get anything out of it, no matter where you are from. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I didn’t like her book and I hate her. No matter where you are from I don’t want you to write my story cause the white folks have been and are now and always will be against the negro.137

Chapter Nine

THE GOSPEL AND THE PRIMER

Wealth, intelligence and godliness combined, make their possessors indispensable members of a community.

—ADDRESS OF THE BISHOPS OF THE AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH, MAY 2, 18661

Wat’s de use ob niggers pretendin’ to lurnin? Dey’s men on dis yeah plantation, old’s I am, studyin’ ober spellin’-book, an’ makin’ b’lieve ‘s if dey could larn. Wat’s de use? Wat’ll dey be but niggers wen dey gits through? Niggers good for nothin’ but to wuck in de fiel’an’ make cotton. Can’t make white folks ob you’selves, if you is free.

—BLACK DRIVER, FISH POND PLANTATION,

LOUISIANA, APRIL 18662

WHEN THE CIVIL WAR ENDED, Henry McNeal Turner sensed that his work had only begun. He thought he knew how and where he could best serve his people. Two years earlier, he had preached his farewell sermon as pastor of Israel Bethel Church in Washington, D.C., and within weeks he had returned to his native South as a chaplain assigned to the 1st Regiment, United States Colored Troops. While serving in that post, he manifested a racial pride that would distinguish his thoughts and actions for the remainder of his life. Never would he relent in the conviction that the African race possessed the capacity for intellectual and material greatness. “I claim for them,” he wrote in August 1865, “superior ability.” None of the renowned orators, ministers, and statesmen he had heard in the North, not even a Henry Ward Beecher or a Charles