Dixie After the War

“It is heart-breaking,” her mistress wrote, “to see how she watches for him. She is at the depot every day, scanning the face of every coloured passenger getting off. I’ve been to the Bureau making inquiries. The Agent says if he could catch the rascal, the robber, he would string him up by the thumbs, but her description fits any strolling private. He says: ‘Any woman who would trust a stranger so with her money deserves to be fooled. I wouldn’t trouble about it, Madam!’ Yankees do not understand our coloured people and us. How can I help being troubled by anything that troubles Mammy Lisbeth?”

Here is another old letter: “Cousin mine: I came home from school a few days ago. Railroads all broken up and it took several days to make the journey in the carriage, stopping over-night along the route. At most houses, there was hardly anything to offer but shelter, but hospitality was perfect. Only cornbread and sassafras tea at one place; no servants to render attention; silver gone; family portraits punctured with bayonets; furniture and mirrors broken. Reaching home, found everything strange because of great change in domestic regime. Our cook, who has reigned in our kitchen for thirty years, is in Richmond, coining money out of a restaurant. Most of our servants have gone to the city. Our old butler and Mammy abide. I think it would have killed me had Mammy gone!

“I cannot tell you how it oppressed me to miss the familiar black faces I have loved all my life, and to feel that our negroes cared so little for us, and left at the first invitation. I have something strange to tell you. Mammy has been free since before I was born. I never knew till now. I was utterly wretched, and exclaimed: ‘Well, Mammy, I reckon you’ll go too!’ She took it as a deadly insult; I had to humble myself. While she was mad, the secret burst out: ‘Ef I’d wanted to go, I could ha’ gone long time ago. No Yankees sot me free! My marster sot me free.’ She showed me her manumission papers in grandfather’s hand, which she has worn for I don’t know how long, in a little oil-silk bag around her neck, never caring to use them. Domestic cares are making me gray! But I get some fun trying to do things I never did before, while Mammy scolds me for ‘demeaning’ myself.” There was honour in the “gritty” way the Southern housewife adapted herself to the situation, humour in the way spoiled maidens played the part of milkmaid or of Bridget.

“Do you know how to make lightbread?” one of our friends inquired, and proceeded to brag of her new accomplishments, adding: “I had never gotten a meal in my life until the morning after the Yankees passed, when I woke to find not a single servant on the place. There was a lone cow left. I essayed to milk her, but retired in dire confusion. I couldn’t make the milk go in the pail to save my life! It squirted in my face and eyes and all over my hair. The cow switched her tail around and cut my countenance, made demonstrations with her hind feet, and I retired. One of my daughters sat on the milking-stool and milked away as if she had been born to it.”

“The first meal I got,” another friend wrote, “my sons cooked. They learned how in the army. I thought the house was coming down while they were beating the biscuit! They drove me from the kitchen. ‘We don’t hate the Yankees for thrashing us,’ they said, ‘but God knows we hate them for turning our women into hewers of wood and drawers of water.’ Now, I’m as good a cook as my boys. Can do everything domestic except kill a chicken. I turn the chicken loose every time.”

“I write in a merry vein,” was another recital, “because it is no good to write in any other. But I have the heart-break over things. I see this big plantation, once so beautifully kept up, going to rack and ruin. I see the negroes I trained so carefully deteriorating every day. We suffer from theft, are humiliated by impertinence; and cannot help ourselves. Negroes call upon me daily for services that I, in Christian duty, must render whether I am able or not. And I cannot call upon them for one thing but I must pay twice over – and I have nothing to pay with. This is the first rule in their lesson of freedom – to get all they can out of white folks and give as little as possible in return.”

Letters teemed with experiences like this: “We went to sleep one night with a plantation full of negroes, and woke to find not one on the place – every servant gone to Sherman in Atlanta. Negroes are camped out all around that city. We had thought there was a strong bond of affection on their side as well as ours! We have ministered to them in sickness, infancy, and age. But poor creatures! they don’t know what freedom is, and they are crazy. They think it the opening of the door of Heaven. Some put me in mind of birds born and raised in a cage and suddenly turned loose and helpless; others, of hawks, minks and weasels, released to do mischief.

“We heard that there was much suffering in the camps; presently our negroes were all back, some ill from exposure. Maum Lucindy sent word for us to send for her, she was sick. Without a vehicle or team on the place, it looked like an impossible proposition, but my little boys patched up the relics of an old cart, borrowed the only steer in the neighbourhood, and got Maum Lucindy back. The raiders swept us clean of everything. We are unable to feed ourselves. How we shall feed and clothe the negroes when we cannot make them work, I do not know.”

My cousin, Mrs. Meredith, of Brunswick, Virginia, congratulated herself, when only one of her servants deserted his post to join Sheridan’s trail of camp-followers. A week after Simeon’s departure, she woke one morning to discover that six women had decamped, one leaving her two little children in her cabin from which came pitiful wails of “Mammy!” “Mammy!” Simeon had come in the night, and related of Black’s and White’s (now Blackstone) where a garrison had been established, that calico dresses were as plentiful as leaves on trees and that coloured women were parading the streets with white soldiers for beaux. My cousin, Mrs. White, said a whole wagon-load of negro women passed her house going to Blackstone, and that one of them insisted upon presenting her with a four-year-old child, declaring it too much trouble. It was not an unknown thing for negro mothers to leave their children along the roadsides.

Blackstone drew recruits until there was just one woman-servant remaining with the Merediths. Why she stayed was a mystery, but as she was “the only pebble on the beach,” everything was done to make home attractive. One day she asked permission (why, could not be imagined) to go visiting. She did not return. Shortly, Captain Meredith was haled before the Freedmen’s Bureau at Black’s and White’s to answer the charge of thrashing Viny. Marched into court, he took a chair. “Get up,” said the Bureau Agent, “and give the lady a seat.” He rose, and Viny dropped into it. She was shamefaced and brazen by turns; finally, burst into tears and begged “Mars Tawm’s” pardon, saying she had brought the charge because she had “no ’scuse for leavin’” and had to invent one; “nevver knowed Mars Tawm was gwi be brung in cote ’bout it.”

The early stirrings of the social equality problem were curious. Adventurous Aunt Susan tried the experiment of “eatin’ wid white folks.” She was bursting to tell us about it, yet loath to reveal her degradation – “White folks dat’ll eat wid me ain’t fitten fuh me to eat wid,” being the negro position. “But dese folks was rale quality, Miss,” Susan said when murder was out. “I kinder skittish when dee fus’ ax me to set down wid ’em. I couldn’ eat na’er mouthful wid white folks a-lookin’ at me an’ a rale nice white gal handin’ vittles. An’ presen’ly, mum, ef I didn’ see dat white gal settin’ in de kitchen eatin’ her vittles by herse’f. Rale nice white gal! I say, ‘Huccum you didn’ eat wid tur white folks?’ She say, ‘I de servant.’”

Mrs. Betts, of Halifax (Va.), was in her kitchen, her cook, who was in her debt, having failed to put in an appearance. The cook’s husband approached the verandah and requested a dollar. “Where is Jane?” he was asked. “Why hasn’t she been here to do her work?” “She are keepin’ parlour.” “What is that?” “Settin’ up in de house hol’in’ her han’s. De Civilise Bill done been fulfill an’ niggers an’ white folks jes alike now.”

Coloured applicant for menial position would say to the door-opener: “Tell dat white ’oman in dar a cullud lady out here want to hire.” “De cullud lady” was capricious. My sister in Atlanta engaged one for every day in one month, in fact, engaged more than that average, engaged every one applying, hoping if ten promised to come in time to get breakfast, one might appear.

With two hundred black trial justices, South Carolina had more than her share of funny happenings, as of tragic. A gentleman who had to appear before some tribunal, wrote us: “Whom do you suppose I found in the seat of law? Pete, my erstwhile stable-boy. He does not know A from Z, had not the faintest idea of what was to be done. ‘Mars Charles,’ he said, ‘you jes fix ’tup, please, suh. You jes write down whut you think orter be wroted, an’ I’ll put my mark anywhar you tell me.’”

Into a store in Wilmington sauntered a sable alderman whom the merchant had known from boyhood as “Sam.” “What’s the matter with Sam?” the merchant asked as Sam stalked out. Soon, Sam stalked back. “Suh, you didn’ treat me wid proper respecks.” “How, Sam?” “You called me ‘Sam,’ which my name is Mr. Gary.” “You’re a d – d fool! There’s the door!” Gary had the merchant up in the mayor’s court. “What’s the trouble?” asked the mayor. “Dis man consulted me.” “You ought to feel flattered! What did he do to you?” “He called me ‘Sam,’ suh.” “Ain’t that your name?” “My name’s Mr. Gary.” “Ain’t it Sam, too?” “Yessuh, but – ” “Well, there ain’t any law to compel a man to call another ‘Mister.’ Case dismissed.” “Dar gwi be a law ’bout dat,” muttered Sam.

Washington was the place of miracles. When Uncle Peter went there, some tricksters told him his wool could be made straight and his colour changed – “Said dee could make it jes lak white folks’ ha’r,” he informed his mistress mournfully, when he had paid the price – nearly his entire capital – and returned home with flaming red wool. His wife did not know him, or pretended not to, and drove him out of the house. He appealed to his mistress and she made Manda behave herself.

“Ole Miss,” asked my mother’s little handmaiden, “now, I’se free, is I gwi tu’n white lak white folks?” “You must not be ashamed of the skin God gave you, Patsy,” said her mistress kindly. “Your skin is all right.” “But I druther be white, Ole Miss.” And there was something pathetic in the aspiration.

Some of the older and more intelligent blacks held their children back from doffing with undignified haste old ways for new. But in most cases, the Simian quality showed itself promptly ascendant. Negroes did things they saw white people do, not because these things were right or seemly, but because white people did them, selecting for imitation trifles in conduct which they thought marked the social dividing line between white and black. As, for instance, they dropped the old sweet “Daddy” and “Mammy” for the dreadful “Pa” and “Ma,” or the infantile “Popper” and “Mommer” which white people inflict upon parents. It would be laughable to hear a big buck negro addressing his sire as “Popper.”

I have seen in a Southern street-car all blacks sitting and all whites standing; have seen a big black woman enter a car and flounce herself down almost into the lap of a white man; have seen white ladies pushed off sidewalks by black men. The new manners of the blacks were painful, revolting, absurd. The freedman’s misbehaviour was to be condoned only by pity that accepted his inferiority as excuse. Southerners had taken great pains and pride in teaching their negroes good manners; they wanted them to be courtly and polished, and it must be said for the negroes, they took polish well. It was with keen regret that their old preceptors saw them throw all their fine schooling in etiquette to the winds.

Interest in and affection for negroes made these new manners the more obnoxious. Here, in one woman’s statement, is the point illustrated: “I considered Mammy part of our family; my family pride would have been aggrieved, I would have tingled with mortification, to see her so far forget what was due herself as to push herself into places where she was not wanted. These are things she could not possibly do of herself, her own good taste, perfect breeding, and sturdy self-respect forbidding. But her husband and son quickly succumbed to the demoralisation of freedom and were vulgar and troublesome; we were in fear and trembling lest they should lead her into some situation in church, theatre, or car, where she would find herself conspicuous and from which she would not know how to withdraw until officially escorted out in the midst of trouble created by her men.”

Many worthy negroes, the old, infirm and children, lost needed protection. Negroes had not been permitted to get drunk – except around corn-shucking and Christmas. There was no such restraint now. Formerly, a negro, if so disposed, could not beat his child unmercifully. Now, women and children might feel a heavy hand unknown before. White people might not interfere in family disputes as formerly, though they continued, at personal risk, to do what they could. A case in point was that of Mr. R., a respected merchant of Petersburg, who ejected his cook’s drunken husband from the kitchen where the brute was cruelly maltreating her. The old gentleman was arrested and marched through the streets, as I have been told, by negro sergeants to trial before a negro magistrate.

A characteristic common to uncultured motherhood is over-indulgence and over-severity by turns. When provoked, the negro mother would descend like a fury upon her offspring, beating it as a former master would never have suffered her to abuse his property. A word or suggestion from a white would bring fresh blows upon the luckless wight, the mother thinking thus to demonstrate independence and ownership.

Under freedom, negroes developed bodily ills from which they had seemed immune. A consumptive of the race was rarely heard of before freedom. After freedom, they began to die of pulmonary complaints. There were frequent epidemics of typhoid fever, quarters not being well kept. “The race is dying out,” said prophets. Negroes began to grow mad. An insane negro was rarely heard of during slavery. Regular hours, regular work, chiefly out of doors, sobriety, freedom from care and responsibility, had kept the negro singularly exempt from insanity and various other afflictions that curse the white. Big lunatic asylums established for negroes soon after the war and their continual enlargement tell their own story.13

Freedom broke up families. Under stress of temptation, the young and strong deserted the aged, the feeble, the children, leaving these to shift for themselves or to remain a burden upon a master or mistress themselves impoverished and, perhaps, old and infirm.

In the face of so much distraction, demoralisation and disorder, the example of those negroes who were not affected by it shines out with greater clearness as witness for the best that is in the race. Thousands stood steadfastly to their posts, superior to temptations which might have shaken white people, performing their duties faithfully, caring for their children, sick and aged, shirking no debt of love and gratitude to past owners. Some negroes still live in families for which their ancestors worked, the bond of centuries never having been broken.

When this is true, the tie between white and black is yet strong, sweet and tender, like the tie of blood. The venerable “uncles” and “aunties” with their courtly manners, their good warm hearts, their love for the whites, are swiftly passing away, and their like will not be seen again. They were America’s black pearl; and America had as good reason to be proud of her faithful and efficient serving-class as of her Anglo-Saxons. They were needed; they filled an honourable and worthy place and filled it well.

This is not to justify slavery. Slavery was forced upon this country over Colonial protests, particularly from Southern sections fearing negroisation of territory; the slave-trade was profitable to the English Crown; our forefathers, coming into independence, faced a problem of awful magnitude in the light of Santo Domingo horrors; New England’s slave-ships and Eli Whitney’s cotton-gin complicated it; it is curious to read in the proceedings of the Sixth Congress how Mr. John Brown, of Rhode Island, urged that this Nation should not be deprived of a right, enjoyed by every civilised country, of bringing slaves from Africa14– particularly as transference to a Christian land was a benefit to Africans, a belief held by many who believed that the Bible sanctioned slavery. Through kindliness of temperament on both sides and the clan feeling fostered by the old plantation life of the South, the white man and the negro made the best they could of an evil thing. But the world has now well learned that a superior race cannot afford to take an inferior into such close company as slavery implies. For the service of the bond-slave the master ever pays to the uttermost in things precious as service, imparting refinements, ideals, standards, morals, manners, graces; in the end he pays that which he considers more precious than service; he pays his blood, and in more ways than one.

BACK TO VOODOOISM

CHAPTER XVII

Back to Voodooism

The average master and mistress of the old South were missionaries without the name. Religious instruction was a feature of the negro quarters on the Southern plantation – the social settlements for Africans in America.

Masters and mistresses, if themselves religious, usually held Sabbath services and Sunday schools for blacks. Some delegated this task, employing preachers and teachers. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney was the first rice planter to introduce systematic religious instruction among negroes on the Santee, influenced thereto by Bishop Capers. He subscribed to the Methodist Episcopal Mission for them, and a minister came every week to catechise the children and every Sabbath to preach at the negro church which Mr. Pinckney, with the assistance of his neighbours, established for the blacks on his own and neighbouring plantations. Soon fifty chapels on his model sprang up along the seaboard. In the Methodist churchyard in Columbia, a modest monument marks the grave of Bishop Capers, “Founder of the Mission to the Slaves.” Nearby sleeps Rev. William Martin, who was a distinguished preacher to whites and a faithful missionary to blacks. In Zion Presbyterian Church, Charleston, built largely through the efforts of Mr. Robert Adger, no less a preacher than Rev. Dr. Girardeau ministered to negroes. The South entrusted the spiritual care of her negroes to her best and ablest, and what she did for them is interwoven with all her history. You will hear to-day how the great clock on top of the church on Mr. Plowden Weston’s plantation kept time for plantations up and down the Waccamaw. In that chapel, Rev. Mr. Glenrie and an English catechist diligently taught the blacks. After Sherman’s visit to Columbia, Trinity (Episcopal) Church had no Communion service; the sacred vessels of precious metals belonging to the negro chapel on the Hampton place were borrowed for Trinity’s white congregation.

The rule where negroes were not so numerous as to require separate churches was for both races to worship in one building. Slavery usages were modelled on manorial customs in England, where a section of church or chapel is set apart for the peasantry, another for gentry and nobility. The gallery, or some other section of our churches, was reserved for servants, who thus had the same religious teaching we had; there being more of them, they were often in larger evidence than whites at worship. After whites communed, they received the Sacrament from the same hands at the same altar. Their names were on our church rolls. Our pastors often officiated at their funerals; sometimes an old “exhorter” of their own colour did this; sometimes our pastors married them, but this ceremony was not infrequently performed by their masters.

The Old African Church, of Richmond, was once that city’s largest auditorium. In it great meetings were held by whites, and famous speakers and artists (Adelina Patti for one) were heard. One of Mr. Davis’ last addresses as President was made there. The regular congregation was black and their pastor was Rev. Robert Ryland, D. D., President of Richmond College; “Brother Ryland,” they called him. He taught them with utmost conscientiousness; they loved him and he them. When called upon for the marriage ceremony, he would go to the home of their owners, and marry them in the “white folks’ house” or on the lawn before a company of whites and blacks. Then, as fee, a large iced cake would be presented to him by a groomsman with great pomp.

After the war, the old church was pulled down, and a new one erected by the negroes with assistance of whites North and South. Then they wrote Dr. Ryland, who had gone to Kentucky, asking him to return and dedicate it. He answered affectionately, saying he appreciated greatly this evidence of their regard and that nothing would give him greater pleasure, but he was too poor to come; he would be with them in spirit. They replied that the question of expense was none of his business; it was theirs. He wrote that they must apply the sum thus set aside to current expenses, to meet which it would be needed. They answered that they would be hurt if he did not come; they wanted no one else to dedicate their church. So he came, stopping at Mr. Maury’s.

He was greatly touched when he met his old friends, the congregation receiving him standing. So much feeling was displayed on their part, such deep emotion experienced on his, that he had to retire to the study before he could command himself sufficiently to preach.

In religious life, after the war, the negro’s and the white man’s path parted quickly. Negro galleries in white churches soon stood empty. Negroes were being taught that they ought to sit cheek by jowl in the same pews with whites or stay away from white churches.

With freedom, the negro, en masse, relapsed promptly into the voodooism of Africa. Emotional extravaganzas, which for the sake of his health and sanity, if for nothing else, had been held in check by his owners, were indulged without restraint. It was as if a force long repressed burst forth. “Moans,” “shouts” and “trance meetings” could be heard for miles. It was weird. I have sat many a night in the window of our house on the big plantation and listened to shouting, jumping, stamping, dancing, in a cabin over a mile distant; in the gray dawn, negroes would come creeping back, exhausted, and unfit for duty.

In some localities, devil-dancing, as imported from Africa centuries ago, still continues. I have heard of one place in South Carolina where worshippers throw the trance-smitten into a creek, as the only measure sufficiently heroic to bring them out of coma. Devil-worship was rife in Louisiana just after the war.

One of my negro friends tells me: “Soon atter de war, dar wuz a trance-meetin’ in dis neighbourhood dat lasted a week. De cook at marster’s would git a answer jes befo’ dinner dat ef he didn’ bring a part uv evvything he cooked to de meetin’, ‘de Lawd would snatch de breath outen his body.’ He brung it. Young gals dee’d be layin’ ’roun’ in trances. A gal would come to meetin’ w’arin’ a jacket a white lady gin ’er. One uh de gals in a trance would say: ‘De Lawd say if sich an’ sich a one don’ pull dat jacket off, he gwi snatch de breath out dar body.’ One ole man broke dat meetin’ up. Two uv his gran’sons was lyin’ out in a trance. He come down dar, wid a han’-full uh hickory switches an’ laid de licks on dem gran’chillun. Evvybody took out an’ run. Dat broke de meetin’ up.

“Endurin’ slavery, dar marsters wouldn’ ’low niggers tuh do all dat foolishness. When freedom come, dee lis’n to bad advice an’ lef’ de white folks’ chu’ches an’ go to doin’ all sorts uh nawnsense. Now dee done learnt better again. Dee goin’ back sorter to de white folks’ chu’ches. Heap uh Pristopals lak dar use tuh be. In Furginny, Bishop Randolph come ’roun’ an’ confirm all our classes. An’ de Baptis’es dee talk ’bout takin’ de cullud Baptis’es under dar watch-keer. An’ all our folks dee done learnt heap better an’ all what I been tellin’ you. I don’ want you tuh put dat in no book lessen you say we-all done improved.”