Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [8]
Babies was snatched from dere mother’s breas’ an’ sold to speculators. Chilluns was separated from sisters an’ brothers an’ never saw each other ag’in. Course dey cry; you think dey not cry when dey was sold lak cattle? … It’s bad to belong to folks dat own you soul an’ body; dat can tie you up to a tree, wid yo’ face to de tree an’ yo’ arms fastened tight aroun’ it; who take a long curlin’ whip an’ cut de blood ever’ lick. Folks a mile away could hear dem awful whippings. Dey was a turrible part of livin’.
The most vivid impression she retained of the war was the day the master’s two sons left for military service and the obvious grief that caused her owners. “When dey went off de Massa an’ missis cried, but it made us glad to see dem cry. Dey made us cry so much.” On the plantation in Alabama where Henry Baker spent his childhood, the news spread quickly through the slave quarters that Jeff Coleman, a local white man who once served on the detested slave patrols, had been killed in the war. “De ‘niggers’ jes shouted en shouted,” Baker recalled, “dey wuz so glad he wuz dead cause he wuz so mean tuh dem.”11
No matter how desperately white families might seek to hide or overcome their anguish and fear in the presence of the slaves, the pretense could not always be sustained. No one, after all, had more experience in reading their faces and discerning their emotions than the slaves with whom they had shared their lives. No one had a shrewder insight into their capacity for self-deception and dissembling. Even as the white South had mobilized for war, some slaves had sensed how a certain anxiety tempered the talk of Confederate invincibility. With each passing month, few slaves could have remained oblivious to the fact that the anticipated quick and easy victory had become instead a prolonged and costly slaughter. Nor could they fail to see with their own eyes how the realities of war had a way of mocking the rhetoric that celebrated its heroism, even robbing their once powerful “white folks” of the last remnants of human dignity. A former Tennessee slave remembered the death of Colonel McNairy, who had vowed to wade in blood before he would allow his family to perform the chores of servants. “He got blown to pieces in one of the first battles he fought in. They wasn’t sure it was him but you know they had special kinds of clothes and they found pieces of his clothes and they thought he was blown to pieces from that.” Bob Jones, who had been raised on a North Carolina plantation, would never forget the day some Confederate soldiers brought home the body of his master’s son who had been killed in action. “I doan ’member whar he wus killed but he had been dead so long dat he had turned dark, an’ Sambo, a little nigger, sez ter me, ‘I thought, Bob, dat I’ud turn white when I went ter heaben but hit ’pears ter me lak de white folkses am gwine ter turn black.’ ”12
Although embellished considerably by postwar writers, those classic wartime scenes which depicted the faithful slaves consoling the “white folks” in their bereavement were by no means rare. With everyone weeping so profusely, white and black alike, and some whites on the verge of hysteria, Louis Cain, a former North Carolina slave, thought it “a wonder we ever did git massa buried.” That blacks should have shared in the grief of the very whites who held them as slaves, in a war fought in large part over their freedom, underscored in so many ways the contradictions and ambivalence that characterized the “peculiar institution.” Many of these same slaves, after all, would later “betray” their owners and welcome the Yankees as liberators. As a young slave on a Virginia plantation, Booker T. Washington listened to the fervent prayers for freedom and shared the excitement with which his people awaited the arrival of the Union Army. Yet the news that “Mars’ Billy” had been killed in the war had profoundly affected these same slaves. “It was no sham sorrow,” Washington would later write, “but real. Some of the slaves had nursed ‘Mars’ Billy’; others had played