Strategies for Survival: Recollections of Bondage in Antebellum Virginia

Chapter 14: Oppression and Self-Determination

207 14 Oppression and Self-Determination Perhaps the strongest impression left by Virginia’s WPA interviewees is the heartening sense that the morale of these old people had not been broken by their experiences of slavery. They felt pride in how they and their ancestors had responded to oppression . Stories abounded of the slaves’ spirited dissidence. The slaves’ religion sustained belief in the ultimate triumph of justice. Personal loyalties were deep, especially to mothers, but also to many fathers, siblings, and other members of extended families. A substantial number of interviewees had managed to develop skills, even when they were slaves, that helped them to make better lives for themselves after Emancipation. The interviews and other sources demonstrate that escape from the constraints of plantation bondage was a principal goal for many slaves. Some Virginia bondpeople found a partial escape in urban life (or by working at an iron forge), which, especially for hired slaves in tobacco factories, allowed them to lead somewhat more autonomous lives than on the plantation. Urban slaves could associate with the hundreds of free blacks in small cities like Richmond, Petersburg, and Norfolk/Portsmouth. A handful of slaves, like Sally Hemings and her children, managed a partial escape from regimentation through their membership in Virginia’s small third caste. A much larger number found temporary escape from physical abuse by flight to the local woods—the most significant outlet for the slaves’ profound discontent with their lot. A small, yet appreciable number escaped permanently to the North or Canada. Religion offered a spiritual escape from oppression. The slaves’ Afro-Christianity was shaped mainly by their experiences in 208 retrospect North America—by their appropriation of many elements of white people ’s evangelical Christianity and by their encounter with slavery, which dictated which aspects of Christianity resonated with their own experiences . In Virginia the legacy of African religions, by 1860, was much attenuated though still perceptible (e.g., in funeral observances). AfroChristianity was a splendid morale booster, encouraging bondpeople to see their masters as subject to a higher law, and fostering hope that one day justice would prevail. The slaves’ Christianity normally promoted nonviolent forms of dissidence that, it may be argued, served the slaves’ interests better than violence would have done. The disruption of families by sale (especially the sale of children away from their mothers, or the sale of siblings away from each other) was the focus of the most painful recollections of the elderly interviewees. Their pain bespoke the strength of their family connections. In addition to the attachments between children and their mothers, there were often also strongattachmentsbetweenchildrenandtheirfathers.Yetitisunmistakeable that the central family unit was a mother and her children, to which the father was sometimes firmly—but often only weakly—attached. The large number of abroad marriages, where the father only visited his wife and children once a week, took a toll on the development of nuclear-family traditions, as did the presumption of slavemasters and slave traders that the normal unit of sale (if a family were sold together) was a mother and her young children, sold separately from the children’s father, and also often separately from the mother’s eldest children. Members of an extended family (especially the children’s grandmother or aunts and uncles) might help a mother raise her children, but the expectations and customs of family life were substantially different from what they would have been if Virginia’s lawmakers had sought to strengthen nuclear-family institutions among the slaves. Asubstantialnumberofslavespursuedpathsofself-developmentasfar as they could. Some learned to read, or even to write; many became cooks, and some learned to be midwives, seamstresses, or household managers; some became drivers or preachers; some were trained as artisans, hostelers , or butlers. Usually, access to these skills came with the assistance of well-disposed white people (as when white children or a white mistress taught a slave to read, or when a white master arranged the training of a male slave as a cobbler or a butler). The term “self-determination” perhaps Oppression and Self-Determination 209 suggests these slaves’ goal more accurately than “autonomy,” because their road to self-development often obliged them to depend on the assistance of some member of the ruling race, and they could not therefore be autonomous . This kind of dependence could fracture the slave community, but it did not inevitably do so. Usually, it took incredible grit for a...