Been in the Storm So Long Read online

  RALPH ELLISON1

  ROBERT MURRAY could already sense the change in his “white folks.” As a young slave, dividing his time between running errands and tending the horses, he had been treated tolerably well. “Massa” had been generous in providing food and clothing, “missus” had ignored both law and custom to teach several of the slaves to read, and the slave children had usually found a warm welcome in the Big House. “Been treat us like we’s one de fambly,” Murray recalled. “Jus’ so we treat de white folks ’spectable an’ wu’k ha’hd.” After the election of Abraham Lincoln, however, “it all diffrunt.” The easy familiarity of the master and mistress gave way to suspicious glances, and the slaves were permitted less freedom of movement around the place. When the children ventured up to the Big House, as they had done so often in the past, the master or mistress now barred their way and offered excuses for not inviting them inside. “Don’ go in de Big House no mo’, chillun,” Robert Murray’s mother advised them. “I know whut de trouble. Dey s’pose we all wants ter be free.”2

  On the eve of the Civil War, the more than four million slaves and free blacks comprised nearly 40 percent of the population of the South. Although most slaveholders owned less than ten slaves, the majority of slaves worked as field hands on plantation-size units which held more than twenty slaves, and at least a quarter of the slave force lived in units of more than fifty slaves. Even without the added disruption of war, the awesome presence of so many blacks could seldom be ignored. While to the occasional visitor they might blend picturesquely into the landscape and seem almost inseparable from it, native whites were preoccupied with their reality. Oftentimes, in fact, they could talk of little else. Wavering between moods of condescension, suspicion, and hostility, slaveholding families acknowledged by their conversations and daily conduct a relationship with their blacks that was riddled with ambiguity. When the Civil War broke out, with the attendant problems of military invasion and plantations stripped of their white males, that ambiguity would assume worrisome dimensions for some, it would lure others into a false sense of security, and it would drive still more into fits of anguish.

  Within easy earshot of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, Mary Boykin Chesnut, whose husband was an extensive planter and political leader in South Carolina, tried in vain to penetrate behind the inscrutable faces of her servants. Why did they not betray some emotion or interest? How could they go about their daily chores seemingly unconcerned that their own destiny might be in the balance but a few miles away? “Not by one word or look can we detect any change in the demeanor of these Negro servants. Lawrence sits at our door, as sleepy and as respectful and as profoundly indifferent. So are they all. They carry it too far. You could not tell that they even hear the awful noise that is going on in the bay, though it is dinning in their ears night and day. And people talk before them as if they were chairs and tables, and they make no sign.” This almost studied indifference obviously troubled Mary Chesnut as much as it might have comforted and reassured her. “Are they stolidly stupid,” she wondered, “or wiser than we are, silent and strong, biding their time?”3

  The slaves were no less observant of their “white folks.” Although blacks had always been aware of frailties in their owners, the system of slavery had been based on the acknowledged power of the white man. But the Civil War introduced tensions and tragedies into the lives of masters and mistresses that made them seem less than omnipotent, perhaps even suddenly human in ways blacks had thought impossible. Rarely had slaves perceived their owners so utterly at the mercy of circumstances over which they had no control. Never before had they seemed so vulnerable, so beleaguered, so helpless. Unprecedented in the disruptions, stresses, and trauma it generated among both whites and blacks, the Civil War threatened to undermine traditional relationships and dissolve long-held assumptions and illusions. Even if many slaves evinced a human compassion for masters and mistresses caught in the terrible plight of war, invasion, and death, how long before these same slaves came to recognize that in the very suffering of their “white folks” lay their own freedom and salvation?

  2

  DURING THE EARLY MONTHS, neither the whites nor the blacks appeared to grasp fully the nature of this war. The mobilization took on an almost festive air, exposing the slaves to unusual sights and sounds and affording them a welcome diversion from their day-to-day chores. They watched the military drills with fascination, learned the words of the patriotic songs, and stood with whites in the courthouse square to listen to the bombastic and confident speeches. “You’d thought the Confederates goin’ win the War,” John Wright speculated, after hearing Jefferson Davis address an enthusiastic crowd in Montgomery, Alabama. “But I notice Massa Wright look right solemn when we go back home. Don’ believe he ever was sure the South goin’ win.” When the soldiers prepared to leave for the front, the festivities gave way to sobering farewells that made a deep impression on some of the blacks. “Mis’ Polly an’ de ladies got to cryin’,” recalled Sarah Debro, who spent the war years as a young house slave in a North Carolina family. “I was so sad dat I got over in de corner an’ cried too.”4

  The patriotic fervor and martial displays suggested a quick and glorious triumph. So confident was a North Carolina planter that he had his son candidly explain the issues to the slaves: “There is a war commenced between the North and the South. If the North whups, you will be as free a man as I is. If the South whups, you will be a slave all your days.” Before leaving, the master jokingly told the slaves that he expected to “whup the North” and be back for dinner. “He went away,” one of his slaves recalled, “and it wuz four long years before he cum back to dinner. De table wuz shore set a long time for him. A lot of de white folks said dey wouldn’t be much war, dey could whup dem so easy. Many of dem never did come back to dinner.”5

  Neither white nor black Southerners were unaffected by the physical and emotional demands of the war. Scarcities of food and clothing, for example, imposed hardships on both races. But the slaves and their masters did not share these privations equally; black families could ill afford any reduction in their daily allowances, and they observed with growing bitterness that provisions needed to sustain them were often dispatched to the Army or hoarded for the comfort of their “white folks.” Reduced diets opened the way for all kinds of ailments in weak and undernourished bodies, and yet there was no corresponding reduction in the hours of labor demanded of the slaves or in the diligence with which they were expected to carry out their assigned tasks. Later in the war, depredations committed by both Confederate and Union soldiers nearly exhausted the food supplies in some regions, and many a slave repeated the complaint made by Pauline Grice of Georgia: “De year ’fore surrender, us am short of rations and sometime us hongry.… Dey [the soldiers] done took all de rations and us couldn’t eat de cotton.” Even earlier, the shortage of food had driven slaves to the point of desperation; incidents of theft mounted steadily, some slaves went out on foraging missions (with the tacit consent of their owners), while still others preferred to risk flight to the Yankees rather than experience constant hunger. When asked if the Emancipation Proclamation had prompted his flight to the nearest Union camp, one slave responded, “No, missus, we never hear nothing like it. We’s starvin’, and we come to get somfin’ to eat. Dat’s what we come for.”6

  Despite the wartime shortages, slaves were reluctant to surrender the traditional privileges they had wrested from their owners. Any master, for example, who decided to dispense with the usual Saturday-night dances, the annual barbecue, the “big supper” expected after a slave wedding, or the Christmas holiday festivities might find himself unable to command the respect and labor of his slaves. Nor did servants who enjoyed dressing up in their master’s or mistress’s cast-off finery to attend church believe that the Confederacy’s strictures on extravagance and ostentatious display applied to them. But no matter how disagreeable patriotic whites now found these displays, many slaveholders thought it best to tole
rate them as a way of maintaining and rewarding loyalty in their blacks. When slaves dressed up in fine clothes, one white woman observed, they became “merry, noisy, loquacious creatures, wholly unconscious of care or anxiety.” Such diversions presumably took their minds off the larger implications of the war and rendered them more content with their position—at least, many whites preferred to think so.7

  The extent of the slaves’ exposure to the war varied considerably, with those residing in the threatened and occupied regions obviously bearing the brunt of the disruptions along with the white families they served. In some sections of the South, however, life went on as usual, there were ample provisions, the white men remained at home, the slaves performed their daily routines, and the fighting remained distant. “The War didn’t change nothin’,” Felix Haywood of Texas recalled. “Sometimes you didn’t knowed it was goin’ on. It was the endin’ of it that made the difference.” By sharp contrast, a former Mississippi slave remembered feeling as though “the world was come to the end,” and Emma Hurley, who had been a slave in Georgia, recalled the war years as “the hardest an’ the saddest days” she had ever experienced. “Everybody went ’round like this [she took up her apron and buried her face in it]—they kivered their face with what-somever they had in their hands that would ketch the tears. Sorrow an’ sadness wuz on every side.”8

  Even if the issues at stake were sometimes unclear, slaves could only marvel at a war that sent white men off to kill other white men, made a battleground of the southern countryside, and threatened to maim or destroy an entire generation of young free men. Recalling his most vivid impressions of the war, William Rose, who had been a slave in South Carolina, told of a troop train he had seen carrying Confederate soldiers to the front lines.

  And they start to sing as they cross de trestle. One pick a banjo, one play de fiddle. They sing and whoop, they laugh; they holler to de people on de ground, and sing out, “Good-bye.” All going down to die.…

  De train still rumble by. One gang of soldier on de top been playing card. I see um hold up de card as plain as day, when de luck fall right. They going to face bullet, but yet they play card, and sing and laugh like they in their own house.… All going down to die.

  The scenes witnessed by slaves in the aftermath of battles fought near their homes would never be forgotten. Martha Cunningham, who had been raised near Knoxville, Tennessee, recalled walking over hundreds of dead soldiers lying on the ground and listening to the groans of the dying. William Walters and his mother, both of them fugitives from a plantation in Tennessee, watched the wounded being carried to a clearing across the road from where they had sought refuge—“fighting men with arms shot off, legs gone, faces blood smeared—some of them just laying there cussing God and Man with their dying breath!”9

  The tales of self-sacrifice and martial heroism that would inspire future generations hardly suggested the savagery, the destructiveness, the terrifying and dehumanizing dimensions of this war. The initial exultation and military pomp had barely ended before the streams of wounded and maimed returned to their homes. Few slaves were immune to the human tragedies that befell the families to whom they belonged. They had known them too well, too intimately not to be affected in some way. “Us wus boys togedder, me en Marse Hampton, en wus jist er bout de same size,” Abram Harris recalled. “Hit sho did hurt me when Marse Hampton got kilt kase I lubed dat white man.” The tragedies that befell the Lipscomb family in South Carolina provoked one of their slaves, Lorenza Ezell, beyond mere compassion to outright anger and a desire for revenge. As he would later remember that reaction:

  All four my young massas go to de war, all but Elias. He too old. Smith, he kilt at Manassas Junction. Nathan, he git he finger shot at de first round at Fort Sumter. But when Billy was wounded at Howard Gap in North Carolina and dey brung him home with he jaw split open, I so mad I could have kilt all de Yankees. I say I be happy iffen I could kill me jes’ one Yankee. I hated dem ’cause dey hurt my white people. Billy was disfigure awful when he jaw split and he teeth all shine through he cheek.

  The sight of a once powerful white man reduced to an emotional or physical cripple, returning home without a leg or an arm, looking “so ragged an’ onery” as to be barely recognizable, generated some strong and no doubt some mixed emotions in the slaves, as did the spectacle of the whites grieving over a death. That was the first time, Nancy Smith recalled, “I had ever seed our Mist’ess cry. She jus’ walked up and down in de yard a-wringin’ her hands and cryin’. ‘Poor Benny’s been killed,’ she would say over and over.” After witnessing such scenes, another ex-slave recalled, “you would cry some wid out lettin your white folks see you.”10

  If the plight of their masters moved some slaves to tears, that was by no means a universal reaction. Grief and the forced separation from loved ones were hardly new experiences in the lives of many slaves. To witness the discomfiture of white men and women suffering the same personal tragedies and disruptions they had inflicted on others might produce ambiguous feelings, at best, or even be a source of immense gratification. Delia Garlic, for example, was working as a field hand on a Louisiana plantation when the war broke out. Born in Virginia, and sold three times, she had been separated from the rest of her family. “Dem days was hell,” she would recall of her bondage.

  Babies was snatched from dere mother’s breas’ an’ sold to speculators. Chilluns was separated from sisters an’ brothers an’ never saw each other ag’in. Course dey cry; you think dey not cry when dey was sold lak cattle? … It’s bad to belong to folks dat own you soul an’ body; dat can tie you up to a tree, wid yo’ face to de tree an’ yo’ arms fastened tight aroun’ it; who take a long curlin’ whip an’ cut de blood ever’ lick. Folks a mile away could hear dem awful whippings. Dey was a turrible part of livin’.

  The most vivid impression she retained of the war was the day the master’s two sons left for military service and the obvious grief that caused her owners. “When dey went off de Massa an’ missis cried, but it made us glad to see dem cry. Dey made us cry so much.” On the plantation in Alabama where Henry Baker spent his childhood, the news spread quickly through the slave quarters that Jeff Coleman, a local white man who once served on the detested slave patrols, had been killed in the war. “De ‘niggers’ jes shouted en shouted,” Baker recalled, “dey wuz so glad he wuz dead cause he wuz so mean tuh dem.”11

  No matter how desperately white families might seek to hide or overcome their anguish and fear in the presence of the slaves, the pretense could not always be sustained. No one, after all, had more experience in reading their faces and discerning their emotions than the slaves with whom they had shared their lives. No one had a shrewder insight into their capacity for self-deception and dissembling. Even as the white South had mobilized for war, some slaves had sensed how a certain anxiety tempered the talk of Confederate invincibility. With each passing month, few slaves could have remained oblivious to the fact that the anticipated quick and easy victory had become instead a prolonged and costly slaughter. Nor could they fail to see with their own eyes how the realities of war had a way of mocking the rhetoric that celebrated its heroism, even robbing their once powerful “white folks” of the last remnants of human dignity. A former Tennessee slave remembered the death of Colonel McNairy, who had vowed to wade in blood before he would allow his family to perform the chores of servants. “He got blown to pieces in one of the first battles he fought in. They wasn’t sure it was him but you know they had special kinds of clothes and they found pieces of his clothes and they thought he was blown to pieces from that.” Bob Jones, who had been raised on a North Carolina plantation, would never forget the day some Confederate soldiers brought home the body of his master’s son who had been killed in action. “I doan ’member whar he wus killed but he had been dead so long dat he had turned dark, an’ Sambo, a little nigger, sez ter me, ‘I thought, Bob, dat I’ud turn white when I went ter heaben but hit ’pears ter me lak de white folkses am gwine t
er turn black.’ ”12

  Although embellished considerably by postwar writers, those classic wartime scenes which depicted the faithful slaves consoling the “white folks” in their bereavement were by no means rare. With everyone weeping so profusely, white and black alike, and some whites on the verge of hysteria, Louis Cain, a former North Carolina slave, thought it “a wonder we ever did git massa buried.” That blacks should have shared in the grief of the very whites who held them as slaves, in a war fought in large part over their freedom, underscored in so many ways the contradictions and ambivalence that characterized the “peculiar institution.” Many of these same slaves, after all, would later “betray” their owners and welcome the Yankees as liberators. As a young slave on a Virginia plantation, Booker T. Washington listened to the fervent prayers for freedom and shared the excitement with which his people awaited the arrival of the Union Army. Yet the news that “Mars’ Billy” had been killed in the war had profoundly affected these same slaves. “It was no sham sorrow,” Washington would later write, “but real. Some of the slaves had nursed ‘Mars’ Billy’; others had played with him when he was a child. ‘Mars’ Billy’ had begged for mercy in the case of others when the overseer or master was thrashing them. The sorrow in the slave quarter was only second to that in the ‘big house.’ ” When two of the master’s sons subsequently returned home with severe wounds, the slaves were anxious to assist them, some volunteering to sit up through the night to attend them. To Washington, there was nothing strange or contradictory about such behavior; the slaves had simply demonstrated their “kindly and generous nature” and refused to betray a trust. On the plantation in Alabama where she labored under a tyrannical master and mistress, a young black woman who had been separated by sale from three of her own four children grieved over the death of the master’s son. “Marster Ben, deir son, were good, and it used to hurt him to see us ’bused. When de war came Marster Ben went—no, der ole man didn’t go—an’ he were killed dere. When he died, I cried.… He were a kind chile. But de oders, oh, dear.”13