Anita and All,
If you check Steven Hahn's recent book, A Nation Under Our Feet, you
will find the fascinating counterpoint of southern whites believing that
blacks planned to massacre them in mass on Christmas, 1865; while at the
same time, southern blacks believed that the US Gov't was going to open a
great document on January 1, 1866 that announced the general distribution of
land to freedmen. I have read letters from Freedmen's Bureau agents, who
had been assigned to question Virginia blacks on their intentions for
Christmas, and they replied innocuously about supper and presents for the
family, etc. For some reason whites and blacks lived in a kind of vacuum,
psychologically isolated from each other, for at least a short while after
Appomattox.
I think the tendency to stay close to the home place runs parallel to
other freedpeople moving back to places from which they had been sold: the
primary of kinship. The place--plantation, farm, even saw mill--that was
perceived as the locus of family served as a magnet for those near and far
and may even have been sacralized in a certain sense; the places of
baptism, the resting place of the ancestors. The experience of diaspora
from the South has on the whole not been an easy experience for most
African-Americans. What was once called "homecoming," when those who had
moved North return in the late summer for revival, family gatherings,
clearing the ancestral grave sites have not died, they have just been
renamed family reunions. While some of these reunions take place in the
North, they are much more likely to take place in the South. For the older
generation, alas of which I am a part, if you were born in the South it is
quite likely that you will be return south to the ancestral graveyard if
there is one.
Moreover, African-Americans were truly farmers. Farming for them in the
19th century was not chiefly a commercial proposition it was more, it was a
way of life. The most violent and thoroughly political memoirs we have of
rural black people--I am thinking of All God's Dangers: the Life of Nate
Shaw--also functions as a pastoral. Shaw accepted farming as his destiny
and tried to make as good a living as possible for his family in
east-central Alabama. As late as the 1880s, African-Americans constituted
one of America's most rural ethnic groups. By the 1980s, that demographic
pattern had been reversed.
Certainly a merchantile sense, a capitalist sense penetrated the black
community but a somewhat more communal sense prevailed and prevails among
most African-Americans. The work ethic of the craft worker is much stronger
among blacks, I would argue, that the ethic of investment and management.
But this is chiefly a guess on my part and sociological data about a rapidly
changing community may overturn this latter surmise.
Harold S. Forsythe
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anita L. Henderson" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 9:15 PM
Subject: Re: WPA slave narratives, etc.
In a message dated 3/1/07 11:18:20 AM, [log in to unmask] writes:
> Second, the point about forgiveness among African-Americans should be seen
> for what it is: the direct expression of Christian piety. The erection of
> myriad black-run churches in the aftermath of Emancipation helps
> demonstrate
> the point. African-Americans had become thoroughly Christian by the
> mid-19th
> century. Blacks were of course aware of the bitter fruits of bondage for
> themselves but they, especially in Virginia where half the Civil War
> battles
> were fought, saw the bitter fruit harvested by white Virginians, too.
> Moses and
> the Children of Israel did not revel in the death of all the firstborn of
> Egypt nor did they pray for the death of the second-born. (Another way to
> see
> this is that black people do not don blue uniforms and march through say
> Atlanta or Richmond every year, saying we kicked your butts in the 1860s
> and you
> should never forget it. Think Orangemen marched through the north of
> Ireland!! Instead, there were and still are many Emancipation Day
> celebrations.)
>
Dear Harold:
This is an interesting point that you made about Christian piety and the
lack
of revenge expressed by the new freedmen in the South toward their former
white owners and society. I do believe you are correct in this regard. I
had
a conversation regarding the Civil War with a white acquaintance in MD who
was
in her late 50s about a decade ago remarked that thank goodness black people
were Christian or there would have been a bloody debacle in the postwar
years
in the South. I think this is one important factor. Another one that
people overlook is that even in the midst of slavery black people had
embraced the
idea of being American even in its' most rudimentary form, of going out and
seeking one's fortune for the more adventuresome freedmen. Witness the
migration to the cities of the South and the North, the westward migration
into
Kansas and the rest of the West, the establishment of their own businesses
and
farms for those who had the economic resources, etc. Of course the
majority
still stayed tied to the farms and plantations they had lived on during
slavery
times out of fear and the instability of the early reconstruction era.
Remember there were roving gangs of nightriders, famine, disease and
dislocation in
the immediate years after the war in the South. Many freedmen opted to
stay
put out of survival mode than risk migration on the road. Regardless of
the
choice they made, the new freedmen chose to look forward rather than look
back
and attempt to join American society even though that society (North and
South) was reluctant at best to accept them.
Anita L. Henderson
**************************************
AOL now offers free
email to everyone. Find out more about what's free from AOL at
http://www.aol.com.
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe, please see the instructions
at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html
|
