Made In America - Bill Bryson [100]
Slaves were commonly wrenched from their partners – about a quarter ended up so separated – and mothers divided from their children. A typical advertisement of the time read: ‘NEGROES FOR SALE. – A negro woman 24 years of age, and two children, one eight and the other three years. Said negroes will be sold separately or together as desired.‘50 In a thousand ways they were daily reminded of their subhuman status. As the words of a slave song had it:
We bake de bread,
Dey gib us de crust,
We sif de meal,
Dey gib us de huss ...
We skim de pot,
Dey gib us de liquor
An say dat’s good enough for nigger51
Almost everywhere they were kept in a state of profound ignorance. Learning of any sort was assumed to be an invitation to insubordination. As Joel Chandler Harris had his fictional creation Uncle Remus say: ‘Put a spellin-book in a nigger’s han’s, en right den an dar’ you loozes a plowhand. I kin take a bar’l stave an fling mo’ sense inter a nigger in one minnit dan all de schoolhouses betwixt dis en de state er Midgigin.‘52 In consequence, their awareness of the world beyond the plantation bounds was stupefyingly limited. Frederick Douglass recounted in his autobiography that until he secured his freedom he had never even heard of New York and Massachusetts.53
Even if they managed to secure their freedom, they scarcely enjoyed the fruits of democracy. By 1820 America had 233,000 freed blacks, but they weren’t in any meaningful sense free. White workmen refused to work alongside blacks or to allow them apprenticeships, so their prospects of worthwhile employment, much less advancement, were exceedingly meagre. Iowa, Illinois and Indiana would not allow even free blacks to settle within their boundaries. Even where they were allowed to settle, blacks were subjected to constant indignities which they had to suffer in silence. Every white child knew that he could pelt a black person with a snowball without fear of reprisal. Even in the case of the most serious grievances, blacks were often denied the privileges of habeas corpus, trial by jury or even the freedom to testify in their own behalf. Almost nowhere were they allowed to testify against whites.
Though slavery was widely detested in the North, only a handful of idealistic eccentrics saw abolition as a prelude to equality of opportunity. Even Lincoln, in his debates with Stephen Douglas, made his position clear: ‘I am not; nor ever have been, in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races ... I am not, nor ever have been, in favour of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.‘54
Most preferred to think of blacks as happy-go-lucky, childlike creatures who wanted nothing more from life than something good to eat and a chance to sing and dance. It appears never to have occurred to them that that was as much as the average freed black could hope for. The popular image was captured in the song ‘Jim Crow’, popularized by Thomas D. Rice in the mid-1830s:
Come, listen all you gals and boys,
I’se just from Tucky hoe;
I’m goin’ to sing a litle song,
My name’s Jim Crow.
What is remarkable is how durable this perception remained right up to modern times. Well into the 1940s, Time magazine was still commonly referring to blacks as ‘pickaninnies’ and revelling in news snippets in which black people fell down wells or otherwise came amusingly a cropper. Hollywood roles for blacks were largely limited to the shuffling, eye-rolling, perennially timorous and befuddled types as played by actors like Stepin Fetchit and Buckwheat Thomas. The 1950s saw the stereotype extended with television characters like Amos ‘n’ Andy and the faithful Rochester on the Jack Benny Show, while in the