Ruled by Race: Black/White Relations in Arkansas From Slavery to the Present

1. Voices of Slavery

C H A P T E R 1 Voices of Slavery The forty-six years of slavery in Arkansas (1819–1865) have to be understood in human terms to appreciate their power and influence over the telling of the state’s history for so many generations. Until we begin to appreciate the profound grip slavery had on the state of Arkansas and its institutions , we will not be able to understand the ineffable bitterness that came when it ended. Let us begin with the voices of former slaves who were living in Arkansas toward the very end of the slave era or, in some cases, with their memories of what their parents told them about the institution. A “New Deal” creation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression, the Federal Writers Project hired unemployed writers to write about each state. As part of one of the projects , writers were hired to interview former slaves about their experiences. Fortunately, almost all of these interviews with individuals who had been slaves in Arkansas have now been collected into a single book by George Lankford.1 Scholars of slavery have been reluctant to rely on these slave narratives as stand-alone information about slavery because of the advanced ages of the interviewees and the impossibility of verifying their accounts of often brutal treatment . Of the 186 interviews collected by Lankford, approximately one-third relate an episode of violence against an Arkansas slave. What safeguards are in place to guard against exaggeration or outright falsehood from a bitter survivor of the slave era? In fact, one might begin by consulting the 3 1STOCKLEY_pages_i-250.qxd 10/7/08 12:06 AM Page 3 written accounts of Freedmen’s Bureau personnel in Arkansas after slavery ended during the period known as Reconstruction (set out in detail in Chapter 4) to understand that whipping of blacks was still a regular event on and off the plantation. The head of the Freedmen’s Bureau for Arkansas, General John Sprague, reported in September 1866 that although there were a few planters who did not abuse freedmen most were of the opinion that “the only way to manage niggers is to whip them and make them know their places.”2 The brutality was mind boggling. Randy Finley has documented that “pregnant women at Hamburg and Camden received such severe beatings that they miscarried their unborn children.”3 “Discipline” The following except is from Sallie Crane, estimated to be over ninety years old. Crane said she was born in Hempstead County and had never been out of the state in her entire life. I have worn a buck and gag in my mouth for three days for trying to run away. I couldn’t eat nor drink— couldn’t even catch the slobber that fell from my mouth and run down my chest till the flies settled on it and blowed it. ‘Scuse me but jus’ look at these places (She pulled open her waist and showed scars where the maggots had eaten in. . . . ) They kept a bowl filled with vinegar and salt and pepper settin’ nearby, and when they had whipped me till the blood come, they would take the mop and sponge the cuts with this stuff so it would hurt more. They would whip me with the cowhide part of the time and with birch sprouts the other part. There were splinters long as my finger left in my back. . . . They jus’ whipped me ‘cause they could —‘cause they had the privilege. It wasn’t nothing’ I done; they just whipped me. My married young master , Joe and his wife, Jennie, they was the ones that did the whipping. But I belonged to Miss Evelyn.4 4 VOICES OF SLAVERY 1STOCKLEY_pages_i-250.qxd 10/7/08 12:06 AM Page 4 In matter-of-fact terms, the former slave T. W. Cotton, age eighty, remembered being a small boy in Phillips County “when the Civil War broke out.” His mother was a cook for the master, Ed Cotton. “We lived in part of their house. Walter (white) and me slept together.” Without warning, the narrative reads, Aunt Ruthie was a field hand. Aunt Adeline must have been a field hand, too. She hung herself on a black jack tree on the other side of the pool. . . . She hung herself to keep from getting a whooping. Mother raised (reared) her boy. She told...