Belinda Hurmence - My Folks Dont Want Me to Talk about Slavery: Personal Accounts of Slavery in North Carolina

MY FOLKS

DONT WANT ME

TO TALK ABOUT

SLAVERY

OTHER BOOKS BY BELINDA HURMENCE

TOUGH TIFFANY

A GIRL CALLED BOY

TANCY

Copyright 1984 by Belinda Hurmence

Printed in the United States of America

All rights reserved

Twentieth Printing, 2005

Cover photograph of W. L. Bost
courtesy of The Library of Congress

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Main entry under title:

My folks dont want me to talk about slavery.

Bibliography: p.

1. SlavesNorth CarolinaBiography. 2. Afro-AmericansNorth CarolinaBiography. 3. North CarolinaBiography. 4. Oral history.

I. Hurmence, Belinda.

E445.N8M9 1984 975.600496073'00922 [B] 84-46891

ISBN 0-89587-039-8

COVER DESIGN BY DEBRA LONG HAMPTON

For my parents

Eula and Warren Watson

Contents

S ARAH DEBRO, once a slave in Orange County, North Carolina, put it bluntly: My folks dont want me to talk about slavery. Theys shame niggers ever was slaves.

Sarahs folks are not alone in their embarrassment. Many Americans, white and black, prefer to overlook Sarahs role in that period of United States history. After all, we arent the ones to blame for her enslavement. Why bring it up now? Why talk about slavery?

The answer is Sarah. To ignore her life under slavery is to ignore black pioneering in the United Statesand, in effect, to deny Sarahs humanity, as it was denied in slavery time. That is why Sarah must be allowed to speak for herself. That is why it is important to talk about slavery.

From the time the new republic came into being, Americans wrestled with the problem of Sarah. Her very existence mocked the validity of a government that guaranteed liberty and justice for the nations people. One argument maintained that Sarah was property, not a person. The Bible was cited as proof of her inferiority. The argument prevailed, for economic reasons, and a system of government grew up around Sarah that provided for her liability under the law without providing her with protection under that same law. She could not vote; she could not marry; any children she bore became the property of her master.

The system worked well enough that millions of slaves remained in bondage for 246 years in America. It worked poorly enough that increasingly restrictive Slave Codes had to be written to keep the human property under control. Slaves must not be allowed to read and write. Slaves must not be allowed to buy and sell merchandise. There must be no guns, no riding horses without permission, no gambling, no liquor, no preaching or holding religious services or other meetings, no slandering a free white person, no insolence to a free white personthe list grew longer with each new Code. Yet the slaves persisted in behaving like human beings. They experienced the same passions as their masters: joy and sorrow, love and hatred, generosity and greed. They had dreams and hopes, and they were aware of their dreams and hopes in the way that all people are aware. The Code that governed them never succeeded in eradicating their humanity.

When freedom came to blacks in 1865, hard times came too. Some former slaves complained that their sufferings had not ended with the War Between the States. At least in the old days there had been certainty of food, clothing, shelter. Now there was no certainty, and nobody would listen to their problems.

It was true that nobody wanted to listen. The defeated, smarting South had troubles of its own, and a stunned North, the victor, suddenly had four million needy new citizens clamoring for jobs, education, some land of their own. North and South, so lately enemies, united in bewilderment. The slaves had been set free; why werent they more grateful? Their unseemly grievances tarnished Americas image. If they wouldnt put their past behind them, they ought at least, for historys sake, to keep quiet about it.

And in fact, it took little to silence them. Their children, like Sarah Debros folks, had stopped listening to slavery stories. Besides, the ex-slaves were accustomed to going unheard, just as though they did not exist. Before long they actually would not exist, for they were growing old. Soon everybody who had experienced slavery would be dead, forever silenced.

Then, unexpectedly, in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, a government agency urged them to speak up, to tell what they remembered of life under slavery. The Federal Writers Project, created to provide work for jobless writers and researchers, initiated a program in which field workers interviewed ex-slaves wherever they might be found. More than two thousand former slaves participated in the program. Of these, 176 were North Carolinians, among them Sarah Debro.

The ex-slaves talked; the field workers wrote down what they said. Ten thousand typewritten pages of oral histories, assembled under the heading Slave Narratives, were deposited in the Library of Congress. There the manuscript remains intact, save for those portions claimed by individual state archives.

Several years ago, I set out to read Slave Narratives. Captivated by a world the history books had never told me about, I marveled at the treasure that lay in our countrys library-storehouse. The people came alive in the Narratives, and their unique memoir gave me a fresh look at pioneering in the United States and at frontier life in my own state of North Carolina. Slaves could not legally own land as a white homesteader could, but in the sense of the self-sufficiency for which Americans admire their forebearsworking the land, building houses, growing and preparing foodslaves were genuine homesteaders. They not only did the work; they endured through bondage to freedom. The idea for My Folks Dont Want Me to Talk about Slavery grew out of my admiration of those very real pioneers, and the book is here presented in acknowledgment of the black contribution to the nations development, and to the development of North Carolina in particular.

Some readers may find it puzzling that the people of My Folks can speak of their former masters with affection, can even declare, as the ex-slave Mary Anderson does, I think slavery was a mighty good thing for Mother, Father, me, and the other members of the family. Such a statement is almost incomprehensible to students educated after the civil rights advances of the 1960s.

The reader needs to keep in mind that these oral histories were collected half a century ago, in a time of depression and deep poverty for many whites and most blacks. The entire nation looked backward with nostalgia during the 1930s. To an aging, destitute black person, bondage may well have seemed less onerous in retrospect, particularly if coupled with memories of an easygoing master, a full stomach, the energy of childhood.

Also, some of the accounts may have been skewed, as all oral histories are likely to be to some extent, by the subjects telling what they believed their questioners wanted to hear. And the fact that many of the interviewers were white may have constrained some of those interviewed to represent slavery as more benign than it actually was.