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Fear, toil and the lash, hard words and a little ash cake and
bacon, and fields stretching around the world--this was life for
most slaves, day in and day out, season after season, with a half-day off on Saturday perhaps and a whole day on Sunday," writes
Lerone Bennett Jr., in Before the Mayflower: A History of the
Negro in America 1619-1964. Why did they do it? he asks rhetorically. And why didn't they
revolt? Why didn't they run away? Commit suicide? Or stand like
a man and be cut down?"Slaves did all of these," Bennett says, "and more." They did them so often that it is nothing short of amazing, he says, that the myth of the docile Negro persists.
Young and old ran, Mulattoes and pure Blacks, Uncle Toms (in the modern sense) and radicals ran. Following the North Star, some made their way to the North and on to Canada. Some succumbed to slavery's endless assault but some refused to be broken. Many were sent to 'professional Negro breakers' and were broken. Many persisted hardened in their resistance. "They poisoned masters and mistresses with arsenic," Bennett reports, "ground glass and 'spiders beaten up in buttermilk.' They chopped them [slaveholders] to pieces with axes and burned their houses, gins and barns to the ground." "The court records of the slavery period, Bennett says, yield ample evidence that a large number of slaves refused to play the game of slavery: they would neither smile nor bow. Some bowed but would not smile. Many, perhaps the majority, went through the ritual of obeisance. And these, according to some historians, carried on a passive resistance: "They worked no harder than they had to, put on deliberate slowdowns, staged sitdown strikes and fled to the swamps en masse at cotton picking time. They broke implements, trampled the crops and 'took' silver, wine, money, corn, cotton and machines." |
Lucy "[My mother's] boss went off deer hunting. While he was gone, the overseer tried to whip her. She knocked him down and tore his face up so that the doctor had to 'tend to him.' When [the master] came back the overseer told him that he went down to the field to whip the hands and that he just thought he would hit Lucy a few licks, but she jumped on him and like to tore him up. [The master] said to him, 'Well, if that is the best you could do with her, damned if you won't just have to take it.' She could do more work than any two men. There wasn't no use for no one man to try to do nothing with her. No overseer never downed her."
The Stono Rebellion happened southwest of Charleston in Stono, South Carolina. It was the most serious revolt in the Colonial period. Sixty-five Black and White people died. Stono started with 20 Black men marching southwest toward St. Augustine with 'colors flying and two drums beating.'
"Mary Armstrong never forgave her mistress, Polly, for beating her sister to death and eventually 'got some even.' One day when Polly tried to give her 'a lick our in the yard,' she picked up a rock 'bout as big as half your fist and hits her right in the eye and busted the eyeball, and tells her 'that's for whippin' my baby sister to death.' You could hear her holler for five miles." |
There were repeated insurrections and there is solid evidence
that the South lived in constant fear of the 'docile' slaves.
Bondsmen ran away in droves. They fled to Canada and Mexica and
to Florida and Louisiana before these territories became a part
of the United States of America; they fled to the Indians and
joined them in their wars against the White man.