Down By the Riverside + The Yearling

What the U.S. Civil War meant for those nearly four million most directly affected was absolutely clear to that four million from before the first shots were fired.  They knew it was planned for years of listening to shouting red-in-the-face white power elites while they served at dinner, drinks on the veranda, drove the carriages, held the horses while the cards hit the table, just for starters.

I've been going through the highly respected Down By the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community by Charles Joyner (1984 - 25th anniversary edition).  It's a problematical book about antebellum Sea Islands' culture, particularly in the South Carolina parishes of All Saints and Waccamaw.  The problematical consists of several parts.

This matters because the book is so admired, and it often is the only book most people consult when looking for information of what it was like to be a slave on the plantation. This is a book much cited by those who argue that "slavery wasn't bad, and slaves lived better than most people."  This is not the fault of the author, and in should in no way negatively impact the deserved esteem in which he is held.

First, the research was conducted prior to 1984.  Research focii and techniques that tell us origin points of populations have changed our knowledge in these matters considerably since then. Today, no one would include either Yoruba or Fon (from where comes Vodou) cultural folkways and religion in this region these days because we know better. Nor would the large numbers of Islamized peoples be ignored -- or just not seen. Yoruba never came to North America in any numbers that could impact the African folkways of the majority peoples from Senegambia  (both fresh out of Africa -- so many of them Muslim -- during that period of great importation between the Constitutional ratification and the end of the Atlantic trade in 1808 and the older populations culturally assimilated with English folkways out of Virginia), Ghana and always, Angolan (Gullah).

Second, Joyner describes a culture and folkways at a mature, rooted stage of development. Almost all of his references are from 1859, and those who were still living into the later 19th century.  So the descriptions he gives the conditions of living on the 'street" (the row of slave cabins) are charming even -- a kind of golden age English feudalism --  with more than ample food, possessions, stable, long-established families, and lots of time off, in which they make their own money.  It was a very different situation in the 17th and 18th centuries, digging all those trees out of the swamp, digging the canals and all the rest -- and in very many places, even in the 1840's, as Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839. Ms Kemble's account of the slaves on her husband's plantation is one of horror.  She divorced Butler as consequence. If what Ms Kemble saw on Butler Island had been what Joyner describes on the Weston's plantation, Hagley, in All Saints -- the Westons accounted even by their own people, the 'bes massa'  --  it's unlikely Kemble would have been so horrified that she needed to leave the marriage (there were other reasons to leave Butler as well, but they were all rooted in his being a member of the rice plantations' unimaginably wealthy ruling slave power elite). As Joyner doesn't see the Islamic elements in the culture, he glosses over the constant threat of sale and violence. Yet, by now, South Carolina had long been a principal slave exporting state, as much as were Virginia and Maryland.

Third, this region is exceptional in the availability of wild food, for personal consumption and to sell -- with easy water access to markets such as Georgetown and even Savannah and Charleston. Rice is persnickity as to where it will grow -- it needs vast amounts of water, both salt and fressh.  Consequently, unlike in the Cotton Kingdom (or in the tobacco years of Virginia) where every possible square foot is given over to growing the cash crop, destroying the habitats of food animals and even fish, the rice plantations were surrounded by woods filled with food animals.  As well there were fresh water fish, and salt water fish, oysters and shrimps in bounteous measure, easy to get. The soil of the slaves' own provision plots was fertile and produced a wide range of food. Again, these are long-established plantations, held in the hands of the same families. In contrast, the cotton plantations were young, and there was a great churn of people and ownership going on. (Among this churn were the importation of slaves from this very region, which is how the black cat bone and the harmonica get to Mississippi.) The sugar plantations? They were death camps. 

Fourth, it's again rice.  Many skills from measuring water, to careful carpentry, even the threshing of it, are demanded.  Indeed, this is why the majority were Senegambians in origin, deliberately taken from homelands where the growing of rice had been community tradition for generations.  The plantation owners didn't have this knowledge. Unlike cotton or tobacco or sugar, rice couldn't be successfully brought to market via gang work.  Task work was how the labor was assigned on the rice plantations.  The worker, accomplishing his or her task, had the rest of the day free. Relatively better treatment of such skilled labor was demanded. You couldn't just show up in Natchez and find a replacement for a man who could build the sluice trunks that shut off or brought in the demanded salt water when needed or drained out the fresh water when needed -- and who knew the timing of the tides of the water, and timing of the season for salt, for fresh, for no water at all. The plantation owner wanted his people's children to survive, so their parents could impart their skills to the next generation.  Joyner seems not to take these imperatives into account when frequently including the relatively good treatment of these South Carolina slaves.

But there are excellent parts, that reveal Joyner does, of course, 'get' the most important thing -- people don't want to be slaves.  As one of Joyner's sources reports as the Civil War gets started, while on a visit to Hagley, even the Weston people knew what this war was about and looked forward to no longer being Westons' people:

In All Saints Parish blacks outnumbered whites nine to one. "Suppose," said Scipoio, "dat one quarter ob dese niggas rise -- de rest keep still -- whar den would de white folks be?"  The norther visitor observed that "most of you have kind masters and fare well." Scipo replied, "Dat's true, massa, but dat ain't freedom, and de black lub freedom as much as de ewhite.  De same blessed Lord made dem both, and He made dem 'like, 'cep de skin.  De black hab strong hands, and when de day come you'll see dy hab heads too!" All Saints slaves recognized slavery as an evil institution quite independently of whether the master, overseer, or driver, was "good" or "bad," was brutal or permissive.  A slave named Pompey told an English visitor:

"'pears to me Englad must be a good country to lib in." "Why so?" "All free dar, sa!" "Why you'd have to work harder than you do here, and have nobody to take care of you.  The climate wouldn't suit you, either, there's not enough sunshine.  You couldn't have a kinder or better master than Colonel -- I'm sure." "No, sa!" with a good deal of earnestness; "he fust-rate man, sa, data a fac; and Mass Philip and de young ladies, dey berry good to us. But --" and the slave hesitated. "What is it, Pompey? Speak out!" "Well, den, some day de Cunnel he die, and den trouble come, suah!  De old plantation be sold, and de hands sold too, or we be divide 'tween Mass Phil, Miss Jule, and  Miss Emmy.  Dey get married, ob course. Some go one way, some toder, we wid dem -- neber lib together no more. Dat's what I keep t'inking ob, Sa!"

Not so charming living without freedom after all; those who were property knew all too well the price they paid of living without freedom.

Worth reading in this context: the story by Rebecca Sharpless that begins:  "Dora Charles and Idella Parker, two black Southern cooks, were born nearly a half century apart . . . "  Paula Deen is just one in a long line of white women taking credit for what their black cooks do and create – while providing rotten working conditions and a lot of disrespect.  .  Yes, one of them is the author of The Yearling (1938), Book of the Month selection and best seller, edited by Maxwell Perkins.

The comments are unusually perceptive as well.  Things change clothes but stay quite a lot the same inside those clothes, it seems, particularly in the former slave states.