Been in the Storm So Long (56 page)

Dismayed by the post-emancipation behavior of her fellow servants, particularly their truckling manner and continued use of terms like “master” and “mistress,” a Mississippi black woman admonished them in the very presence of the white family to change their ways. They had “no master or mistress on earth,” she informed them, and “they were fools” to act as though they did. But the old habits proved difficult to break, even as the old fears of the power wielded by their former masters proved difficult to surmount. “My master would kill any-body who called
any-body
but a white person Missis,” a Virginia freedwoman declared. How blacks addressed each other often prompted equal dismay among black clergymen and northern white emissaries. Seeking to check the frequent use of the term “nigger,” Colonel Higginson, the well-intentioned commander of a black regiment, instructed his white officers to address the black soldiers by their full names. But he found that the blacks themselves used derogatory terms like “nigger” with little hesitation, and he was at a loss to know how to combat such behavior. “They have meekly accepted it,” he sighed. To a postwar English visitor, the derogatory terms used by blacks reflected the value they placed on color. “White was the tint of nobility; black the symbol of degradation. If one coloured man wanted to insult another, he called him a nigger. To call him ‘a charcoal nigger’ was the blackest insult of all, making him the furthest remove from the nobility of whiteness.” Based upon his experiences in postwar South Carolina, Sidney Andrews, a northern correspondent, offered a more positive view of black terminology. He discovered that the terms “cousin” and “brother” were commonly used and “seem to be expressive of equality.” Although “the older and more trusted blacks” on the plantation seldom referred to a field hand as “cousin,” the field hands themselves frequently addressed each other as “Bro’ Bob, Bro’ John, Co’n Sally, Co’ Pete, &c.” What Andrews described, however, was less a phenomenon of emancipation than the continuation of traditional practices.
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The term “nigger,” as used by blacks, had varying inflections, implications, and definitions, ranging from a description of slavish personalities to an expression of endearment. To a South Carolina freedman, the term had class connotations and suggested dependency on the white man. “Dey be niggers still, and dey will be for great many year, and dey no lib togeder widout de white man to look arter ’em. You take ten colored folks an tree of ’em may stop being nigger, but de rest allers be nigger and dere chil’n be nigger.” Whatever blacks meant by the term, they almost all detested
its use by whites, but the very fact of emancipation appears to have increased its popularity in white circles. Early in 1865, Mary Chesnut claimed to have heard the word used for the first time “by people
comme il faut
. Now it is in everybody’s mouth, but I have never become accustomed to it.” No doubt the term became more popular as whites searched for ways to address those who had been slaves. Ethelred Philips, a Florida physician and farmer, stubbornly refused to call them “freedmen” or even “colored people,” a term which they preferred to “negroes.” “I never will call them ‘colored people,’ ” Philips vowed. “It sounds too much like a Yankee, besides, they are but negroes and never can be anything else.”
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Responding to a sympathetic Quaker missionary from Massachusetts who had rebuked her for referring to the freedmen as “niggers,” an elderly black woman in Savannah defended her use of the term as appropriate to the condition of her people. No matter what they might be called, she suggested, and regardless of what emancipation might bring, deeply entrenched views would not be easily given up. “We
are
niggers,” she insisted. “We always was niggers, and we always shall be; nigger here, and nigger there, nigger do this, and nigger do that. We’ve got no souls, we are animals. We are black and so is the evil one.” The missionary interrupted her at this point to explain that nothing in the Bible indicated that the devil might be black. “Well, white folks say so,” the freedwoman replied, “and we’se bound to believe ’em, cause we’se nothing but animals and niggers. Yes, we’se niggers! niggers! niggers!” Whether this Quaker missionary understood what the black woman was trying to tell her is not clear. Fortunately for the well-meaning emissary from New England, she could turn to some of the more attractive features of Savannah, like the “excellent music in a fine colored church,” to take her mind off this unpleasant encounter with “an old cotton-picking ‘auntie.’ ”
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W
HILE PROBING
the limits of their freedom, black people quickly discovered that the line between impudence and the traditional subservience expected of them was perilously narrow, that matters of racial etiquette could seldom be compromised, and that whites were more sensitive than usual to any behavior which suggested social equality or manifested an unbecoming assertiveness, familiarity, or lack of respect. To have lost the war and suffered the humiliation of Yankee occupation had been penance enough. “It is hard to have to lay our loved ones in the grave, to have them fall by thousands on the battle-field, to be stripped of everything,” a Savannah white woman declared, “but the hardest of all is nigger equality, and I won’t submit to it.”
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That did not mean, as a farmer in North Carolina assured two northern
visitors, whites in the South wished to return the blacks to slavery, only that they had no desire to mix with them socially. He expected any white man in the country could readily appreciate that principle without ascribing evil intent or inhumanity to those who merely wished to implement it in day-to-day life,

As if to underscore his decent instincts, the farmer reminded his guests that during slavery blacks had usually been tried by a jury of slaveholders. “That don’t look much as if we were inclined to be too hard on ’em, does it?” If blacks or Yankees tried to force equal rights upon the South, the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates warned, they would only poison the good feelings that now prevailed between the races. “There is no unkind feeling towards the negro in a position where he is not asserting an equality; but the best friend a negro ever had in the world, the kindest friend he ever had, a young boy or girl raised by a negro mammy, and devotedly attached to her, would become ferociously indignant if the old mammy were to claim equality for a moment.”
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To free the slaves did not make them equal. That was a maxim to which all classes of whites could subscribe, and any actions by freed blacks to the contrary broke the limits of toleration and invited not only condemnation but vigilant action. Recognizing the universality of that sentiment, many freedmen who were eager to test their freedom hesitated to provoke post-emancipation white sensitivities. Since the slightest deviation from “normal” behavior might be deemed impudent or presumptuous, they often found themselves forced to act with even greater caution than usual. But black tolerance, too, had its limits. Without necessarily flaunting their freedom, blacks demanded, at the very least, a respect that would be commensurate with their new status. In a hotel dining room in Knoxville, Tennessee, for example, a white guest requested service by calling out to the black waiter (who was about thirty years old), “Here, boy!” That familiar greeting had no doubt been uttered thousands of times in this setting, but the “boy’s” response had few if any precedents. “My name is Dick,” he announced. Whether irritated at being corrected or at the tone of the black man’s voice, the hotel guest quickly turned into an irate defender of his race. “You’ll answer to the name I call you,” he roared, “or I’ll blow a hole through you!” When the waiter ignored him and went about his business, the much-disgusted white man addressed the other dining-room patrons on the proper treatment of impudent freedmen:

Upon hearing his story, the other hotel guests “warmly applauded” his sentiments, except for one unenlightened white man who failed to perceive the impudence in the freedman’s response.
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Even if the ex-slave made no overt move to exercise his freedom, even if his demeanor remained virtually unchanged, that in itself might be greeted with suspicion, as though he were masking his real feelings behind the old “darky” façade. All too often, in fact, the freedman did not have to say anything in order to displease or raise suspicions in the whites; he only had to look a certain way or fail to exhibit the expected lowered head and shuffling feet. “They perceive insolence in a tone, a glance, a gesture, or failure to yield enough by two or three inches in meeting on the sidewalk,” a visitor to Wilmington, North Carolina, observed. Some of his fellow whites, a Virginian remarked, “can’t see a nigger go along the street now-a-days that they don’t damn him for putting on airs.” To defy the expectations of whites had always been a highly dangerous undertaking, even when no “offense” had been intended, but to do so in the wake of the recent military disaster and emancipation was to invite an even more volatile response.
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The behavior of white men and women underscored the tacit assumption most of them embraced with a kind of religious zeal—that neither the Civil War nor emancipation had in any way altered the time-honored etiquette of racial relations. “With us, the death of slavery is recognized,” affirmed a South Carolina Unionist and former slaveholder, “but we don’t believe that because the nigger is free he ought to be saucy; and we don’t mean to have any such nonsense as letting him vote. He’s helpless and ignorant, and dependent, and the old masters will still control him.” If anything, in fact—and innumerable whites testified to this effect—the need to maintain the traditional code regulating the relations between the races was now more urgent than ever before, perhaps even a matter of self-preservation. After all, a North Carolina farmer warned, seemingly unaware of the implications of what he was saying, “If we let a nigger git equal with us, the next thing we know he’ll be ahead of us. He’s so impudent and presumin’.”
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During slavery, custom and habit had largely defined the behavior expected of blacks, and the rules had been sufficiently understood to make special laws unnecessary. The slave addressed his owners in respectful terms; he never sat down or kept his hat on in the presence of whites; he never initiated a conversation with them unless first addressed; if he accompanied his master or mistress to town or to church, he walked several steps behind them; if he encountered any whites on the sidewalk, he made ample room for them to pass, stepping down into the street if necessary;
and he never suggested by any words, looks, or mannerisms anything less than the respect, humility, and cheerful obedience expected of him at all times. From his own experience, Frederick Douglass had described the circumscribed world of the slave:

And it was out of this world that the slave stepped into freedom and tried to define its dimensions.

Whether emancipation warranted deviations from the traditional code of racial etiquette prompted sharp differences among whites and blacks and invited immediate misunderstandings and confrontations. The way most whites chose to view these matters, any breaches of expected behavior or decorum in their former slaves, no matter how trivial they seemed, threatened to disrupt the entire fabric of a society based on racial subordination. What was permissible behavior for a white person, in other words, was not necessarily permissible behavior for a black man or woman. When freedmen declined to remove or touch their hats upon meeting a white person, or if they failed to stand while they spoke with whites, they were “growing too saucy for human endurance.” When freedmen took to promenading about the streets or public places, refusing to give up the sidewalks to every white who approached, that was “impudence” of the rankest sort. (“It is the first time in my life that I have ever had to give up the sidewalk to a man, much less to negroes!” Eliza Andrews wrote. “I was so indignant that I did not carry a devotional spirit to church.”) When black women attired themselves in fancy garments, carried parasols, and insisted upon being addressed as “ladies” (or “my lady” rather than “my ole woman”), that was “putting on airs”; and when black men dressed themselves conspicuously, that was sufficient provocation to cut the clothes from their backs. When white “gentlemen” engaged in hunting encountered freedmen “enjoying themselves in the same way” (with shotguns and a pack of dogs), that was called still another instance of “insubordination and insolence.” When freedmen staged parades, dances, and barbecues, like those scheduled to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation, whites invariably characterized them as “orgies” or “outrageous spectacles.” When
freedmen roamed about at night, disregarding the old curfew and refusing orders to return to their quarters, that was “a terrible state of insubordination” bordering on insurrection. And when freedmen attended meetings in which they openly talked about “perfect equality with the whites,” acquiring land, and even voting, that was an incitement to race war. “Such incendiary and revolutionary language,” a white Louisianan wrote of one such meeting in New Orleans, “was enough to freeze the blood. I fear they will have trouble there soon.”
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