Been in the Storm So Long (51 page)

Although viewed as a post-emancipation phenomenon, the attempt to reunite with loved ones actually represented an ongoing impulse that had frequently manifested itself in the antebellum period. Except for punishment, no other factor had accounted for as many runaway slaves; indeed, a significant number of such escapes came immediately after a master had sold a spouse, a parent, or a child.
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Equally important, the strong commitment to family ties had kept thousands of slaves from resorting to flight. Emancipation made the search for lost relatives less perilous, though not necessarily more successful. Where contact had been maintained during the period of separation, either through letters or the “grapevine,” reunions were effected with little difficulty. The wartime contraband camps, by bringing together thousands of uprooted and “runaway” slaves, provided valuable information about separated families and reunited many of them.

For countless numbers of freed slaves, however, the attempt to find lost relatives became an arduous, time-consuming, and frustrating task, requiring long and often fruitless treks into unfamiliar country, the patience to track down every clue and follow up every rumor, and the determination to stay on a trail even when it suddenly appeared to vanish. “Dey was heaps of nigger families dat I know what was sep’rated in de time of bondage dat tried to find dey folkses what was gone,” Tines Kendricks recalled. “But de mostest of ’em never git togedder ag’in even after dey sot free ’cause dey don’t know where one or de other is.” Of the “dozens of children” Jennie
Hill knew who searched for parents “sold ‘down the river,’ ” as well as parents who looked frantically for their children, she could remember only one case in which the family was reunited. “Some perhaps were killed in the battles but in the majority of the cases the children of slaves lost their identity when they were taken from the place of their birth into a new county.” Martha Showvely, who was twenty-eight years old at the time of emancipation, had not seen her mother since they were separated by sale in 1846. After the war, she reached the county where her mother reportedly resided, only to learn that death had claimed her life three years earlier. The efforts to reunite with loved ones sometimes involved risks other than disappointment over failure. Hoping to find any members of his family, James Curry ventured back to the county in North Carolina from which he had escaped more than twenty years before the war; whether provoked by his earlier escape or by his association with northern abolitionists, enraged local whites assaulted him.
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Despite herculean efforts, the prospects for a successful reunion remained slim. Many years had passed since relatives had last seen each other and inevitable changes had altered physical appearances. The searcher usually carried with him only a visual image of what a spouse, a child, or a parent had looked like numerous years, even decades, earlier. No sooner had a missionary teacher in South Carolina returned from a trip to Virginia than an elderly black woman tearfully pleaded for any information she might have gathered about the whereabouts of her daughter.

The Freedmen’s Bureau did what it could to help, acting as a clearinghouse of information and providing free transportation in some cases; at the same time, northern teachers and missionaries, many of them stationed in the contraband camps, frequently spent entire days writing letters for ex-slaves who were trying to make contact with a relative, invariably on the basis of the scantiest information. “Ellen Cummins; least dat
was
her name, w’en dey dun toted her off to Florida,” an elderly black woman replied when asked for the address of her daughter, who had been sold away from her twenty years before at the age of four. Upon learning that his brother, whom he had not seen for twenty years, was in Virginia, a Mississippi freedman immediately dictated a letter in the hope of effecting an early reunion.

If the initial efforts proved unsuccessful, the search for family members might span several decades. Until well into the 1870s and 1880s, the newly established black newspapers, both in the South and in the North, abounded with advertisements in which relatives requested any information that might assist them. If physical descriptions were given at all, they tended to be sparse and badly outdated; more often, family members had to content themselves with listing whatever leads they had accumulated over the years about the location of loved ones.

Not only had physical features changed in the intervening years but new loyalties and emotional commitments had often replaced the old. Husbands and wives who had given up any hope of seeing each other again were apt to have remarried, and children sold away from their parents had been raised by other black women or by the white mistresses, creating innumerable post-emancipation complications. Even if the search for family members succeeded, then, the reunions might be less than joyous occasions, and some couples who had remarried thought it best to avoid seeing each other again. Few revealed the emotional torment raised by such problems more graphically than the husband of Laura Spicer. Several years after their forced separation, he had remarried in the belief that his
wife had died. When he learned after the war that she was still alive, the news stung him, prompting both joy and remorse. “I read your letters over and over again,” he wrote her. “I keep them always in my pocket. If you are married I don’t ever want to see you again.” But in other letters, he revised that hasty warning and urged her to remarry. “I would much rather you would get married to some good man, for every time I gits a letter from you it tears me all to pieces. The reason why I have not written you before, in a long time, is because your letters disturbed me so very much.” Even as he urged her to find another man, however, he professed his undying love for her.

Although they did not see each other, the correspondence continued. He requested her to send him locks of the children’s hair with their names attached. He again urged her to remarry, if only for the sake of the children. But whatever she did, he insisted, their love for each other would remain undiminished.

Perhaps as tragic were the “reunions” in which marital partners accused each other of betrayal, infidelity, and desertion since their forced separation. After four years of absence, a freedman in North Carolina located his wife, only to find that she had borne two children by her master. Refusing to support the children, the husband took the case to the Freedmen’s Bureau in Raleigh, which decided that the woman in such cases
could name the father and force him to assume paternal responsibility and support. “This decision is not yet generally known,” a reporter noted, “but when it is I fancy that it will create quite a flutter.” Near Woodville, Mississippi, Fanny Smart learned that her husband, Adam, whom she had presumed to be dead, was still alive. Although not displeased by this news, she had been hurt by his failure to contact her earlier and by his apparent indifference to the children he had fathered.

The circumstances surrounding their separation may have accounted for Adam Smart’s failure to contact his wife earlier, perhaps even for the rumor that he had died. At least, the man who had been his master suggested as much in the postscript he added to Fanny Smart’s letter.

Far more serious complications were introduced into postwar reunions by masters who had insisted that their slaves have marital partners, regardless of compatibility or depth of affection, and who had forbidden interplantation relationships. On some plantations, “marriages” were forced upon men and women who had spouses in other places from whom they had been separated by sale. Stephen Jordon, a former Louisiana slave who had been sold away from both his mother and his wife, found himself in such a predicament.

Even as Jordon and his second wife shared the same cabin, he wrote out passes that enabled her to slip out and visit her husband on a nearby plantation. When conditions “got to be so tight” that he could no longer see his wife as often as he wished, Jordon resolved to escape. Upon being apprehended, however, he was sold even further away from his wife until finally both of them remarried “during the long years of our enforced and hopeless separation.”
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Where husbands and wives had lived on separate but nearby plantations, their marital relationship rested on the willingness of two masters to permit weekend visitations. Understandably, as a former South Carolina slave explained, “a man dat had a wife off de place, see little peace or happiness. He could see de wife once a week, on a pass, and jealousy kep’ him ‘stracted de balance of de week, if he love her very much.” Such relationships, recalled Millie Barber, whose parents had lived five miles apart, often produced “confusion, mix-up, and heartaches.”