Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [89]
With Union soldiers already in the vicinity, Emma Holmes, a twenty-six-year-old white woman of “aristocratic” tastes and breeding, calmly attended the Methodist services in Camden, South Carolina. On that day, the Reverend Pritchard delivered a “thoroughly practical sermon” to the slaves in the audience, drawing his illustrations from “daily life,” warning them about lying, stealing, cursing, and quarreling, and telling them that the Yankees had been “sent by the devil.” But, like Job, they were all to bear their losses. Overhearing her servants discuss the sermon afterwards, Emma Holmes was both “amused” and “interested,” and concluded “that good seed had been sowed and was bearing fruit.” The attire worn by many of the black women at the service, however, deeply distressed her. Rather than wear “the respectable and becoming handkerchief turban,” they had appeared “in the most ludicrous and disgustingly tawdry mixture of old finery, aping their betters most nauseatingly—round hats, gloves and even lace veils.” They would do best to adopt “a plain, neat dress for the working classes, as in other countries, and indeed among our country negroes formerly.” Even as the death of slavery appeared imminent, the thoughts uppermost in this woman’s mind after attending church that day hardly conceded as much. “If I ever own negroes, I shall carry out my father’s plan and never allow them to indulge in dress—it is ruin body and soul to them.”24
The appearance of the first Yankee soldier symbolized far more than the humiliation of military defeat. No matter how certain they were of their own slaves, nearly every master and mistress sensed that the old loyalties and mutual dependencies were about to become irrelevant. “Negro slavery is about played out,” John H. Bills, the Tennessee planter, observed, “we being deprived of that Control needful to make them happy and prosperous.” And Sarah Morgan, the daughter of a slaveholding family, could find solace only in recalling the past. “No more cotton, sugarcane, or rice!” she lamented. “No more old black aunties or uncles! No more rides in mule teams, no more songs in the cane-field, no more steaming kettles, no more black faces and shining teeth around the furnace fires!” The previous night, she had sat around the fire with a crowd of family slaves, singing with them, enjoying their company. “Poor oppressed devils!” she thought. “Why did you not chunk us with the burning logs instead of looking happy, and laughing like fools?”25
Preparing to abandon the family plantation, as the Yankees approached, Eliza Andrews took time to note in her journal: “There is no telling what may happen before we come back; the Yankees may have put an end to our glorious old plantation life forever.” That night, she paid a final visit to the slave quarters to bid her blacks farewell. “Poor things, I may never see any of them again, and even if I do, everything will be different. We all went to bed crying …” Four months later, returning to her home, she confided to her journal: “It is necessary to have some nickname to use when we talk before the servants, and to speak very carefully, even then, for every black man is a possible spy. Father says we must not even trust mammy too far.”26
3
Don’t you see the lightning flashing in the cane brakes,
Looks like we gonna have a storm
Although you’re mistaken it’s the Yankee soldiers
Going to fight for Uncle Sam.
Old master was a colonel in the Rebel army
Just before he had to run away—
Look out the battle is a-falling
The darkies gonna occupy the land.27
THE LONG, often excruciating wait was nearly over. On plantations and farms in the path of the Union Army, the tension and uneasiness, albeit in different degrees, pervaded both the Big House and the slave quarters. Mary Brodie, a thirteen-year-old slave