A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  13. Fredonia Methodist Church still stands in Panola County, Mississippi, virtually unchanged since the days when Louis Hughes and the McGehee family attended services there.

  Daylight stretched for well over thirteen hours on these spring days in northern Mississippi. After the sun set, the bone-weary slaves generally just ate their supper and relaxed a bit before turning in. All looked forward to their weekly day of rest. But for Lou it was not altogether restful.24

  On Sunday mornings Master Jack and his family went to church. It took two carriages to accommodate them all—Madam or Mary Farrington must have provided one, since Master Jack had just one of his own now. Lou and George were detailed as drivers, which meant they had to rise early, hitch up the horses, and have the carriages waiting in the yard of the Big House when the McGehees emerged in their Sunday clothes.25

  The family’s usual destination was the nearby Fredonia Methodist Church. The McGehees had been associated with this church for decades. Master Jack himself had designed the building back in 1842, and his wife was buried there in the little graveyard; there was a plot next to hers where one day his own remains would be laid.26

  The church sat on a low hill surrounded by cedars. It was a white wooden building with a portico, suggestive of the Greek Revival style but very plain. Arriving at the church, the McGehees would go up the steps and through the double doors. Inside they divided to pews on either side, for here the old tradition of separate seating for the sexes was still observed. Lou and George, after securing the carriages, could also enter the church—not through the main entrance, however, but through a side door. This gave access to a stairway that led to a gallery where the slaves were seated opposite the pulpit.27

  The gallery was not large, for few slaves in that community accompanied their masters to church. The custom was to hold services for the blacks on each plantation on Sunday afternoons. These were sometimes conducted by a local minister who rode a circuit of plantations after his morning church service, visiting each perhaps one Sunday a month. Along with the good news of salvation, this white preacher invariably delivered a message of obedience, reminding the assembled blacks that God had ordained slavery and expected servants to submit to their masters. More gratifying to the black faithful were the words of the slave preachers, or exhorters, who led the Sunday afternoon services in the absence of the white circuit rider. The fervent sermons of these unlettered men of God, so different from the preaching of the white minister, touched the black congregations profoundly. Lou attended many such black-led services on Boss’s and Master Jack’s plantations and he was always moved by the words of the exhorters, which were at once stirring and consoling. He recalled these times warmly in his memoir: “Many tears were shed, and many glad shouts of praise would burst forth during the sermon. A hymn usually followed the sermon, then all retired. Their faces seemed to shine with a happy light—their very countenance showed that their souls had been refreshed.… These meetings were the joy and comfort of the slaves, and even those who did not profess Christianity were calm and thoughtful while in attendance.”28

  These Sunday afternoon gatherings were generally held out of doors in all seasons except winter, but it was unusually cool in Panola that spring. There was a warm spell in mid-May, but otherwise it stayed cold from the time Lou came until summer arrived with June, cold enough for the slaves to wear their woolen winter clothes and keep the fires going in their cabins all night. It was dry, too—not enough rain to please the planters. The county also endured a plague of sorts that spring: gnats. The creatures were everywhere, pestering and biting people and livestock and poultry alike.29

  While Lou swatted gnats and chopped weeds, Matilda toiled in the kitchen behind the Big House. She was no doubt grateful for the cool weather, for the kitchen was always warm. She was working hard: getting up each day with Lou, carrying her baby in its cradle to the nursery, and cooking breakfast, dinner, and supper for the McGehees while periodically returning to the nursery to breast-feed her baby. But the worst part of her daily routine was having to endure the presence of Madam.30

  Madam and her sister Mary were in charge of household matters on the plantation now that their mother was dead. This meant overseeing the blacks who cooked, cleaned, washed, wove, waited table, and tended the garden and the nursery. Madam’s daughter, who was twenty-three, and Mary’s son, who was almost fifteen, were old enough to help with these responsibilities and with the care of Madam’s younger children, boys ages three and six.31

  Madam was forty-five years old at this time. She had married Boss, who was her first cousin, when she was twenty-one. Three years later, when Lou first laid eyes on her, she struck him as “a handsome, stately lady … brunette in complexion, faultless in figure and imperious in manner.” But the family tragedies of the war years had taken a toll. Her husband’s sudden death, in particular, had devastated her; and the abandonment of their Memphis and Bolivar properties had left her without a home of her own. What Lou saw now, in the spring of 1865, was a woman “sadly changed—[she] did not appear like the same person. Her troubles and sorrows had crushed her former cruel and haughty spirit.”32

  Perhaps Matilda, good Christian that she was, had by now forgiven Madam for her cruelties. Lou could not. He remembered how she had terrorized him as a boy, slapping his jaw or pinching his ear for the slightest mistake, or for no reason at all. He remembered the tantrums that belied her image of stateliness, her screaming at him or some other servant, red-faced, stamping her foot, sometimes reaching out to slap a passing servant even as she sat at the dinner table. He remembered the almost daily beatings she inflicted on the black women as she made her rounds about the Memphis estate, all the while railing about the laziness and incompetence she had to put up with. He remembered how he came to dread hearing the words that heralded an especially brutal punishment at her hands: “Ah! You put up at the wrong hotel.” But, more than anything else, he remembered how she had caused the death of his twin babies.33

  Her real aim had been to punish Matilda, whom she particularly hated. When the twins were born, late in 1859 at the Memphis property, Boss had tried to lighten Matilda’s burden by giving Lou time off to help her in the kitchen. But Madam would not hear of it. She made excuses to keep Lou occupied with errands and watched closely to see that Matilda did not slack off on her duties, which included washing and ironing the McGehees’ clothes as well as preparing their meals and doing the dishes. It was all Matilda could do to slip away and nurse the babies at intervals during the day. “My heart was sore and heavy,” Lou recalled, “for my wife was almost run to death with work. The children grew puny and sickly for want of proper care.” A doctor confirmed this diagnosis and recommended that Matilda be allowed some rest, but Madam was relentless. Exhausted and desperate, Matilda finally packed up the babies, fled the mansion, made her way to a Memphis slave market, and told the proprietor she wanted to be sold. When Boss was notified, he came in his carriage to fetch her home. As they drove up to the mansion, Madam came running out, shouting at Matilda, “Ah!… you put up at the wrong hotel.” She then took Matilda to the barn, tied her to a joist, and beat her. Afterward, she sent her back to work. The babies died six months later.34

  Lou had hated Madam for a long time before this episode, and he continued to do so after. But he could never bring himself to hate Boss in the same way. In his younger days he had been quite in awe of Boss and had done all he could to please him. He thought him brilliant and distinguished, a man of patience, generosity, and humanity. He loved the way Boss would take him in hand and carefully instruct him in medicine and other skills. He saw what joy Boss took in giving little gifts to his “people,” like the red-and-yellow checked gingham he brought back from a business trip for the slave women, who cried with delight and fashioned the cloth into fancy turbans. He was touched when he learned that Boss wrote occasional letters to the mother of a slave boy he had bought in Virginia, addressed to her owner, so that she might have news of the son s
he had been separated from.35

  But there were times when Boss revealed his ignoble side. He was, for one thing, appallingly hotheaded. On one occasion at the Pontotoc place, Lou had watched in horror as Boss armed himself with a double-barreled shotgun and prepared to kill one of his neighbors over a silly property dispute. And, for all Boss’s paternalism and kindness, he often unleashed his fury on his slaves. “[A]lways there was slashing and whipping” going on at Boss’s place, Lou remembered. Generally the overseer dealt out the prescribed punishments, but if Boss lost his temper or felt especially aggrieved, he wielded the whip himself. Lou saw him do so many times. One of his victims was Matilda. He assisted in Madam’s thrashing of her in the barn; and on another occasion, after Madam complained about her, he became so enraged that he grabbed Matilda and choked her.36

  Lou was not exempt from such treatment. He learned early on how quickly Boss could turn from patient mentor to brutal disciplinarian. His memory of one occasion in the 1850s, after his second escape attempt, was still vivid four decades later:

  I was taken to the barn where stocks had been prepared, beside which were a cowhide and a pail of salt water, all prepared for me.… I was fastened in the stocks, my clothing removed, and the whipping began. Boss whipped me a while, then he sat down and read his paper, after which the whipping was resumed. This continued for two hours. Fastened as I was in the stocks, I could only stand and take lash after lash, as long as he desired, the terrible rawhide cutting into my flesh at every stroke. Then he used peach tree switches, which cracked the flesh so the blood oozed out. After this came the paddle, two and a half feet long and three inches wide. Salt and water was at once applied to wash the wounds, and the smarting was maddening.… I could hardly move after the terrible ordeal was finished, and could scarcely bear my clothes to touch me at first, so sore was my whole body.37

  Punishments such as this whetted Lou’s desire for freedom. So did the outbreak of war, the Yankee invasion, and the Emancipation Proclamation. Reports of these events circulated among the Confederacy’s slaves despite the efforts of Southern whites to keep the slaves uninformed. Lou himself picked up a lot of news by eavesdropping on the McGehee family’s conversations, and he shared it eagerly with his fellow servants. He remembered listening on one occasion while Master Jack cursed the Confederate president for bungling the war effort: “What is Jeff Davis doin’-doin’?… [He] is a grand rascal-rascal.” Among themselves, the slaves whispered about such stories, and as Confederate defeat became more certain, they made up songs to celebrate their coming freedom. Lou recalled one that Kitty sang:

  There’ll be no more talk about Monday, by and by,

  But every day will be Sunday, by and by.

  Always, however, the slaves had to take care to hide their feelings from the whites. One time Kitty was careless: Malinda McGehee overheard her singing in the kitchen and interrupted her sharply: “Don’t think you are going to be free; you darkies were made by God and ordained to wait upon us.”38

  Even as the war raised hopes and opened new opportunities for seekers of freedom, however, it posed new dangers. Lou had learned of these dangers firsthand during his two wartime escape attempts. For one thing, Confederate army patrols were about, and they had orders to keep an eye not only on the Yankees but also on the slaves. Lou had blundered into one of these as he fled Master Jack’s plantation just after Christmas of 1862, heading for a rumored Union army force at Holly Springs. The rebel soldiers held him long enough to ascertain from where he had escaped, then whipped him with dogwood switches, dragged him back to Master Jack’s, and whipped him again in the presence of Madam.39

  His next attempt, a few weeks later, had pointed up another danger: the increased vigilance of the white citizenry. On this occasion, Lou, Matilda, and three others set out from Master Jack’s with the hope of reaching Memphis. They took every precaution, traveling at night only, staying off the roads, carefully skirting farmhouses. After two nights of stumbling through fields and woods and thickets and swamps, they had made about fifteen miles and were congratulating themselves on their success when they heard bloodhounds yelping and men shouting. The five scattered, but it was no use. The party of pursuers—which consisted of two McGehee relatives, a hired tracker known as “Williams the nigger-catcher,” and his fourteen dogs—rounded up all the fugitives. When Lou descended from the persimmon tree in which he had taken refuge, the dogs ripped his flesh, Williams urging them on. The five were marched back to Panola by their captors, stopping overnight at a farmhouse where an old white woman taunted them: “You niggers going to the Yankees? You all ought to be killed.” Once they were back at Master Jack’s, Lou recalled, “All of us were whipped. All the members of the family were very angry. Old Lady Jack McG[eh]ee was so enraged that she said to my wife: ‘I thought you were a Christian. You’ll never see your God.’”40

  Panola County had never been an easy place for slaves to escape from. In the Old South, the racial fears of whites were greatest where slaves were most numerous, and in Panola County there were many slaves: they constituted six-tenths of the county’s population in 1860. As a result, whites in Panola strove to maintain the mechanisms of control that in many other Southern communities had been relaxed. Patrols rode regularly at night to watch for suspicious activity; slaves were required to have a written pass to travel beyond their home. Whites were especially watchful in the district around the village of Como, where Master Jack’s plantation was located. In this district the county’s biggest plantations were concentrated, and whites were outnumbered by blacks five to one.41

  With the war came not only increased vigilance on the part of whites in Panola, but also increased brutality. Lou knew of three slaves who were killed while trying to escape. One was a slave of Boss who was being held at Master Jack’s after Boss evacuated the Bolivar plantation. He slipped away and got a few miles from the plantation before being overtaken by Master Jack’s son William, a Confederate soldier who happened to be home at the time. Instead of bringing the man back, William shot him dead.42

  Lou got that story secondhand, but he was an eyewitness to another episode. Two slaves belonging to a neighbor of Master Jack, a man named Wallace, were caught running away and were returned to their master. Wallace decided to do the community a favor by making an example of them. He had the two hanged and notified his neighbors. Lou tells the rest of the story: “All of our servants were called up, told every detail … and then compelled to go and see them where they hung. I never shall forget the horror of the scene—it was sickening. The bodies hung at the roadside … until the blue flies literally swarmed around them, and the stench was fearful.”43

  Escape was not impossible. A number of Panola County slaves made it to freedom during the war, either by managing to elude their pursuers all the way to the Union lines or by going off with one of the Yankee raiding parties that periodically came through the county. But, as Lou had learned, evading determined pursuers for any great distance was very difficult; and, as he learned on another occasion, Yankee raids did not always offer an opportunity to escape.44

  Lou had come face to face with Union troops at Master Jack’s plantation in early 1863. One night he was awakened by a rumbling sound coming from the road, like the noise of heavy wagons. Cautiously he crept from his cabin and saw federal artillery passing and some soldiers at the creek. He remained hidden, however, fearing that if he approached the soldiers, they might get startled and open fire. After the troops moved on, Lou returned to the quarters, told Matilda and George what he had seen, and suggested that this might be a good time to flee. But George, who was older than Lou, advised him not to be hasty; they needed time to prepare.45

  Early the next morning Lou set out on an errand, mounted on one of Master Jack’s good horses. He was carrying a package and some letters that he was to mail at the Como post office. As he dismounted to open the gate, he was accosted by a Union officer on horseback leading a column of soldiers down the road. If Lou had ev
er fantasized about a warm reception and instant freedom upon meeting the Yankee invaders, that fantasy was now dashed. The officer seemed interested only in Lou’s horse. He forced Lou to exchange mounts, leaving Lou with a very sorry nag, and then confiscated the package and letters and rode away with his men behind him.46

  Lou returned to his cabin, sick with anticipation of the punishment he was sure to get for losing the horse and mail. Perhaps he might have gone off with these Yankees. But they had in no way encouraged him; and what if he had tried and they had rejected him, or had taken him along but then abandoned him, and the McGehees found out about it? And even if he got away, what about Matilda? A half hour later, another detachment of Yankees appeared and entered the grounds of the plantation. One old slave shouted, “My Lord! de year of jubilee am come.” But Lou did not even think about escape. He just went to the Big House, reported that Yankees were pillaging the dairy, and broke the bad news about the horse and mail.47