Chapter 4: Teacher

Ab’s second Christmas with the army was marked more specially than the first had been, but it seemed dreary. The war was over, and the army was dwindling away.

When orders came, they were to return the ammunition they had. The wagon trip was much shorter; they crossed the bridge into Montgomery. they took several trips a day, however, until the battery had no shells or shot. They kept a little powder and cannister. Then Ab and Jair were paid off, and the battery left for Mississippi with the rest of the artillery.

They discovered that most of the colored infantry had been mustered out near Montgomery. They got to the Freedmen’s Bureau, only to find that they were in the back of a long line. The bureau handed them some rations, though.

Weeks later, when their turn came up at the bureau, the man behind the desk was harried. They handed over the letters that they had been given saying that they had served as teamsters.

“That doesn’t count as enlistment,” the white man said. “What was your master’s last name, his full name if you have it?”

“Massa Richard Tyler,” Jair said. the man got up and went to a line of boxes on a table.

“And your full name?”

“Jeremiah, sir.”

“And yours?”

“Absalom.”

The white man made some marks on the paper. “Now,” he said, “the government will give you forty acres, some land. But the government will only give it to you once. So, you will have to decide where you want your land, the place you will farm and live for the rest of your life. Do you want it around here, or down by your old plantation, or somewhere else?”

“I want to go back to the old plantation,” Jair said at once, “If I can still be free.”

“You’re free, boy,” the white man said. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you different. Your old master and his family don’t even own the land, anymore.”

“Why do you want to go back there?” Ab asked him. He had sort of pictured them staying together.

“Near everybody I know lives there. Near everybody you know, too. Horses, too.”

“Well, some of them don’t live. That place would remind me that I won’t ever see Tammie again. I never want to see that plantation again.”

“You want to have some land near here?” the white man asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, come back to the office Wednesday morning, just after dawn.”

The white man told Jair how to find the town where the other Freedmen’s-Bureau office would give him his land. He also issued him three day’s rations. He told Ab to bring all his possessions with him to the office on Wednesday.

Out on the street, Jair told him that he wasn’t going back to the tent they had been living in. Ab could have the tent and anything Jair had left there. “If your mama shows up,” Jair said, “I’ll tell her where you’ve gone.” Neither of them thought that this was likely. They exchanged the one hug that had ever passed between them, and Jair strode off.

Ab chose what he would take from the tent Tuesday night. He left the tent flap open that night and woke with the first light of dawn. He was at the bureau office with the tent and his other belongings before the office opened. Then, he had to wait for the others to gather and for the white man who was going to show them their land to finally arrive. The bureau handed out rations, though. Some of the men were from plantations east of Montgomery; some had been soldiers. One had been a house-slave in Montgomery, itself.

When the bureau official arrived, he was driving a wagon and was followed by a young buck driving another wagon. He called the names from a list, and the men put their belongings on the wagon beside piles of rations and then climbed aboard. The drive was a long, bumpy one. When they finally stopped, everybody got down and stretched. The white man stayed in the cart and stood up and spoke in a loud voice.

“I’m going to show you what is your land. I’m going to start with three of you, but don’t worry. I’ll get to the rest soon enough. Now, we are stopped on Zeb’s land, and this is for him, but the rest of you should listen in case the road runs over your land. We say that the land is yours, but when a road runs through it, the road has to remain open for anyone who wants to use it. You can’t plow the road; you can’t build your cabin on the road; you can’t dig the pit for your outhouse on the road. You might want your cabin close to the road so people can reach you easy; you might want your cabin far from the road, so nobody knows where you are. That is your choice. But don’t build it on the road. Most of the roads we took coming here were crossing some freedman’s allotment – the land belonging to some other freedman.

‘‘Now, this young man,” he pointed to the buck who had driven the other wagon, “will bring rations to you every Saturday morning. When you want seed, tell him on a Saturday. He’ll bring it the next trip.”

He called three names and led those men away. Ab went over to make friends with the mules. They were still in harness. The white man was gone so long that Ab would have loosed them. When the white man came back, he led another four men off. He was gone as long, maybe a little longer. Then they got back in the wagons and went on. When they stopped this time, Ab was one of the people he called.

They walked to a pole which showed a corner of Ab’s land and a corner of another man called ‘Cellus. Then they walked a fair distance to the next pole. That marked another corner. ‘Cellus headed south and Ab headed north to explore their new farms. The first thing Ab looked for was a high spot to keep his tent dry. He set up the tent so the morning sun would wake him each day and stored the rations inside. Then he found the other two boundary poles. He walked over enough of his new ground that he would know it.

Come morning, he headed for the road and then down it toward the store the white man had told them was there. He had the rising sun at his back, and the walk wasn’t long. The door to the store was open and he went in. A white man looked up.

“Massa,” Ab said.

“Ain’t your master. Jesus is in heaven, and mister Hamlin is in Washington. Anybody closer is just like you. I’m Sam Warren.” He held out his hand. Ab looked at it for a moment, but he’d seen white men do this. He took the hand and Warren moved it up and down once and let go.

“You ever bought anything before?” Warren asked.

“No sir.” You called southern white men, ‘Massa,’ and Yankee white men, ‘Sir.’

“Just got your land?”

“Yes sir.”

“These are hoes; those are Yankee hoes. They are lighter and easier to use, and they are cheaper. But you break one, and you have to buy another. Massa ain’t going to whip you ever again, but he’s not going to give you any tools, either. Which one you want?”

Ab pointed to the Yankee hoe. He’d done well with Yankees so far.

“You got a woman, you bring her along next time. Got all sorts of stuff that women need, sewing and all that.”

Ab shook his head. Mama used to fix his clothes, but what he wanted a woman for wasn’t sewing.

“You patch your own clothes? I carry needles and thread and cloth.”

“No, sir. These are new.”

“New doesn’t last long. Army buys clothes cheap. Need shoes, I have an assortment, and I could probably fit you.”

“I left my boots at my tent.”

“Want anything else? Bureau will give you seed. Get corn as well as cotton. What’s the sense of owning land if you don’t grow your own food? I might sell seed next year; depends.”

“I could use a spade, sir.” The army had taught him to shit and piss in a trench. Even living alone, he thought he might keep that up.

Warren handed him a spade. “Anything else?” After a long pause, “Got money?”

Ab had put the paper from his last pay in a separate pocket. He took it out to see if this would really buy anything. He showed them to the white man.

“Careful with those,” he said. He plucked two of them from Ab’s hand. See this thing in the corner. It means five. One of these is worth five of these. This has a one in the corner.” Ab noticed, though, that he’d kept his hand on the one that he said was more valuable. Well, the hoe and the spade were real. He picked them up and headed for the door.

“Hold it a minute,” the white man said. “You come to buy things, you almost never have exactly what it costs. You have to pay more, but the storekeeper gives you back some money. That’s your change. Wait a second.” He groped in a drawer and handed Ab several pieces of paper and what Ab thought of as real money, a few coins.

“Now, I can take the tools?” he asked.

“Now, they belong to you. You paid me for them.”

“Thank you.” He almost said ‘Massa,’ but remembered not to.

Back at the tent, Ab looked for the place to put the latrine trench and sank the spade deeply into the ground there. He left it; he had to start clearing the ground.

He found the stake which the Bureau man had told him was the southwest corner of his land. He could never clear all this land this year, so he stepped east two paces and started clearing a strip north. The hoe was lighter than what he was used to, but the white man at the store had been right. Used right, you could do as much with it with less effort. When he got about even with his tent, he started clearing ground going east. He worked between his first row and his tent until the sun was definitely past noon. He broke for dinner but went back to hoeing later. When it was too dark to see whether he was getting all the weeds, he went back to the tent to cook supper.

Then he found the spade and began to dig his trench. That made different muscles ache. Digging a trench was harder than he had thought it would be, and he decided to be satisfied with a pit.

By the time he was back waiting for more rations, he had cleared enough land to have the beginnings of a decent cotton patch. It being time to begin planting, he would ask the teamster to bring him both cotton seeds and corn next week. Several of the other freedmen had their families with them. The boys and the girls were running around in different groups, and one woman had a baby at her breast.

Cellus, who had the grant south of his and had paced off their common boundary with him, had a family. His wife was Tina, and they had a small boy, Tie.

The men who had been there longer told him that they were learning to read. He could go to school, too. They were going that night and again on Saturday. The teacher was a white lady. He decided that that night was too soon, but he could be ready on Saturday. He had a razor from a soldier who had died, but shaving without soap was a pain. He had a scraggly beard.

When the teamster came, he asked about seeds the next week. The teamster asked him specifically whether he wanted garden seeds as well as cotton and corn. He remembered that his Mama had grown a garden, and he said yes.

He’d lost a good deal of time, and he worked hard clearing more cotton patch that day. The next day, though, he went back to the store and bought soap, a lantern, and oil. Saturday, he broke work when the bottom of the sun touched the ground. He went to the branch where it ran through his land and bathed with the soap. Then he shaved by touch. He ate supper by his tent and went to meet the people going to school where they’d said that they would meet. Soon a group came by carrying lit lanterns. It seemed to Ab that they had a lot of light. Ab joined them, and they walked for a while. Other groups merged with theirs. They came to the big house of a plantation.

“We go in the front door,” ‘Cellus told Ab. That seemed more revolutionary than firing on Montgomery had been, and Ab had never fired a cannon himself. Still, everybody else, including women, were going in that door. He followed the others to a door where a white lady was standing.

“Hurry,” she said instead of scolding them for using the wrong door. “you are late.” The voice sounded like the colonel’s had sounded. It wasn’t soft at all. Still, something in her tone reminded Ab of how Mama had spoken.

Marjorie always took time during each class to ask if anyone was new to the school. Then she asked each new student his or her name. Adults she asked about children.

Tonight, the third record she scrawled on her paper read,

Absalom ______ Ab Light-Handsome! 0

He looked distinctly negroid, although she had seen many swarthier men in Massachusetts. He also was the best-formed man with the handsomest face she had ever seen.

Percy MacGregor had sweated during the last summer, and not only because of the hellish heat. Congress could say that a million freedman families were each entitled to a farm of forty acres. Somebody had to decide which forty acres and take them to it. As the chief of the Freedmen’s bureau for Alabama, MacGregor didn’t have to deal with all million, but he and too-few assistants had to deal with nearly 150,000 of them and another 50,000 veterans. That was more than 15,000 square-mile sections, and one person was pushing himself to take one group of freedmen to a section in the morning and another group to another section in the afternoon, which left no time for the office work of verifying claims and deciding which farms went to which freedmen.

The army had helped by keeping colored troops under arms longer than the white regiments and discharging them gradually, but that wasn’t enough help. When a regiment was discharged, that meant maybe 400 veterans – up to 800 if it was one of Butler’s regiments which had been filled up by newer troops – wanting their land all at once added to the freedmen. Four hundred veterans was fifty sections.

The federal government owned two sorts of land in Alabama. Alabama had been a territory not too long ago, and the Federal government owned every acre which they had not sold. Then, too, planters had kept slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation and after the law fining them for not obeying the Proclamation. When they couldn’t pay the fine, the government auctioned off their plantation, and – when nobody bid enough to cover the fine -- it kept the property. First, the bureau gave out the second type of land. It was located where the freedmen were. In their hurry, the bureau had begun with entire townships to which the government had title. Then they had dealt with entire sections to which the government held title. They didn’t have the resources to take freedmen out to a single -- quarter mile by quarter mile – farm by himself.

By the winter, though, their work had slowed down. Sure, veterans who had left earlier were now returning, often with families. They were aware that some city freedmen would want their land before planting time. The Bureau had much work to do besides allotting land. Much of that work had been put off, and now it had to be made up. Still, Macgregor anticipated eating a leisurely breakfast before going into the office and leaving in time for supper before sundown.

Then came January. Louisiana freedmen were working on year-long contracts. If they didn’t stay until December 31st, the planter didn’t have to pay them. Mississippi slaves had mostly “gone contraband” before the law had been passed; Mississippi planters mostly still owned their old plantations, although they bitched about the scarcity of labor. Mississippi freedmen had been issued land that was previously owned by the federal government, and the land that was left wasn’t all that desirable. Louisiana freedmen got to Mississippi first, but plenty of them came through to Alabama.

Macgregor wrote a full report to his superiors in Washington. He’d been in the Bureau long enough, though, to realize how long he’d have to wait for a response.

He noticed that they were also getting a dribble of veterans from Tennessee. They hadn’t ended the war in Alabama, but there was no land to be distributed in Tennessee.

He assigned some of his too-scarce workers to set up offices in the northern parts of the state. They would assign land the federal government had always owned.

Ab had thought that he had spent his short life growing cotton, and he had. The plantation, though, split the tasks. The ridge is formed by plowing with a two-mule team, and the actual planting is done with a plow in front, a girl placing the seed, and a harrow behind.

Ab was on old cotton land, so the ridges were more-or-less already in place. He cut the hole for the seed and covered it up with a hoe. In between, he placed the seed. Every step of the process took more work than the plantation method did. At least, chopping weeds once the cotton was in the ground was no harder; it was even a little easier with the Yankee hoe.

Still, that meant the hardest part of the job was a lot harder, and the easier part of the job was a little easier.

Ab planted the garden the way he remembered his Mama doing it. On the Tyler plantation, most of the corn was grown on plantation land, but Mama had a little on her garden plot to eat fresh. Ab was happy about that because he had never worked the plantation cornfields except to hoe the weeds.

He was working as hard as he had ever worked under the overseers’ riding drops, but he would eat the corn, and he would be paid for the cotton. His experience in the store had convinced him that money would get him what he needed.

He really needed a mule and a plow, though. He wondered what a mule would cost.

This was the second year that Bishop Hawthorne was presiding over the Massachusetts Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. He was determined to put his stamp on the Conference. “John Wesley,” he told them, “wrote of his preachers, ‘Tell them to preach education. If they tell you they have no call to preach education, tell them that they have no call to preach.’ Now, you may think that the Massachusetts community feels that education is important for them without your exhortation, but New England is not all of our country. Our colored brethren have been kept in the dark for too long in the southern states. Once it was against the law to teach them to read. Now, they are in dire need of education. Who here can tell me what they have preached in furtherance of the education of these unfortunates? ... Yes, Brother.”

“Cyrus Dawson, Bishop. Mount Jackson MEC. One of our members has a daughter who teaches at a school in Alabama. Sometimes, they share a page from their daughter’s letters with me, and I read it to the congregation. She finds that old newspapers are a great help for teaching reading, and the congregation sends her some. We also have sent some New Testaments. I’m sorry to say that it is an American Missionary Association school.”

“Wesley didn’t say anything about denomination. Do you have one of those letters with you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t, Bishop,” Rev. Dawson said.

“Perhaps, if you bring one next time, we could hear what it is like to spread education where it is needed most.”

Diane Rawlings took roll when she got to a break time midmorning. In Maine, she had taken roll when class was due to start, and some of those children had as far to walk – over much rougher country, too. In Alabama, it seemed pointless to mark students as late; they all had been. To be fair, the boys didn’t have watches; even their parents didn’t have watches or clocks.

There were nearly 600 grants in the territory the school tried to serve, the township in which the school was located and the one west of it to the Alabama river. Of course, about a third of those were veterans, and few veterans in the state had older children. Some of the other grant-holders, too were as young as 22, and those could not have teen-age children. On the other hand, the boys she had had in class often had brothers or sisters in class. Many of those who should have been here would attend evening school when they were not too tired after the day’s work. Still, she had 83 boys on her rolls and a mere 37 of them were there that day.

When a few children were absent, you could forge ahead and hope for the absentees to catch up from the others. When only a few were in attendance, what could you hope for?

They had had vague hopes that employment in the cotton mills would increase attendance as it decreased class time – at least among those who got those jobs. It had done a little of that for the girls. The girls who worked in the mill got off at noon. They were more likely to come to class than to go back home. The boys could put in a morning of farming and get to the afternoon shift that put pay in their pockets.

Cotton farmers experienced four seasons, planting, growing, picking, and winter. They closed the school – Green even closed the mills – for the picking season. In Maine, they only held school between harvest and planting, but Alabama winters were so short. Attendance had been better, though not good, in the winter.

Even so, Green was telling the teachers that he was having workers come late or not come all the time. He fired the worst. The teachers were there on a mission to the freedmen, and they could not abandon their mission because of a failing that was a relic of slavery.

A third of the students now present had not been here for the previous day’s lesson. If she built on it, those would gain nothing. She had repeated it, and two thirds received merely a review. Now, she would go on, and hope that the summary would be sufficient.

Ab had been converted, at the age of 11, by a Negro preacher who operated in secret. If the man had any denominational connection, Ab had never heard. He was, as far as Ab knew, back in the old neighborhood. During his days as a teamster for the artillery, Ab had attended the services held by chaplains. Since getting his farm, he had attended a Baptist service irregularly, but he missed the fervor – and the secrecy. There were frequent arguments between the Baptists and the Methodists among his fellow freedmen, but Ab stayed out of them.

One night walking back from school, the arguers had another target. Galen attended the services of the Congregational Missionary. “Congregational! Who ever heard of them? They ever jump for joy? Tell me one reason a black man would go to those services.”

“I’ll tell you three reasons,” Galen answered. “Teacher Purcell, Teacher Rawlings, and Teacher Nelson. Sometimes, they all there. Nearly every time I go, one of them is there. Now, massa can’t tell me shit. Why go to church like massa’s church?”

Ab was carrying a lantern. When Galen turned off, Ab followed.

“I got nothing but a spelling book, and you got your own,” Galen said. “Why you following me?”

“Teacher Purcell really go to your church?”

“‘Most every week.”

“How you get there?” Ab asked. It turned out that the church met very close to the school.

Saturday night, he bathed in the branch and then rinsed off both shirt and trousers there. He hung his clothes and the piece of sacking he used for a towel on the sides of the shelter around his tent. Sunday morning, he shaved with soap and heated water. He rinsed off again in the branch and then dressed, ate, put on his boots, and went to the school. Church was already gathering.

Soon, some men brought out several chairs. A white lady he had never seen before came out of the school. She was herding a boy and a girl and would soon have a third. She sat on a chair. Teacher Purcell came out with Teacher Nelson. They took the other chairs.

The congregation was smaller than Ab was used to since the War, but they started singing. It wasn’t a song he knew. As it was drawing to a close, a white man came out of the school. He walked to a funny-looking stand in front of the group. When the song ended, he said a prayer. Everybody said “amen” after he had, but nobody said it twice.

The sermon was not to different in content than he’d heard before. It seemed to Ab that the preacher wasn’t giving it any excitement. The rest must have thought so, too; they didn’t say “amen” once during the sermon. There was a parcel of children with the congregation, and they began running around outside the adults who were all standing bunched together.

The strange white lady tried to keep her children quiet, but they escaped soon. They were dressed in shoes and fancy clothes, but the other children accepted them. Their game sounded more interesting than the sermon, but the teachers kept their attention on the preacher. So, Ab did too.

After service, he walked back with Galen.

Sam Warren had got used to reading newspapers during the war. Papers from home were how soldiers kept track of how the rest of the war was going. Sometimes, it was how they learned why they were marching where they were. When they marched east from Atlanta, it was the papers from home that told them that they were headed all the way to the sea.

While he’d read Confederate papers as a sergeant and called his officers to turn in any that they found when he was a general, the local weekly did not appeal. Mostly, it was about all the atrocities that the “Yankee occupiers” and the “uppity Negroes” were committing.

Deborah used newspapers for reading practice for her more advanced adult students. She took to sorting out the most recent – less than a month old – papers without any duplications and lending them to him. Since the people sending them to her in bundles took mostly the same papers, she might get as many as five copies of the very-same paper. These would be fine for her main – and the donors’ only – purpose, but the duplicates would do him no good. Mostly, the papers were the local one, but some Boston, and even New-York, papers made their way to her.

Sam’s reading revealed that he was living near one center of a national debate. While Alabama had shipped more cotton through Mobile in ‘65 than they had in any previous year, most of that had been before picking season had started. The actual crop harvested was less than half the pre-war results. Democrats contrasted that with the results in Louisiana where the sugar harvest had reached more than three-fourths of the way to its pre-war levels.

Alabama land had, to a large degree in reality and a much larger degree in the minds of editorial writers, been apportioned among former slaves who were farming it for themselves. Louisiana land was still in the hands of the planters, and they paid workers – often the same men who had worked the land as slaves – on an annual contract. Slavery was dead; should the successor system be a black yeomanry or a process of debt-peonage? The answer was clear, said the Democratic editorials (written by men who would never use the term, peonage) in the comparison of production.

The old abolitionists answered them. Sam suspected that friends of Deborah’s, friends who would pay to send reading material to freedmen, saw more of the abolitionist writings than the average New Englander did. When he read an editorial in the Boston Examiner which was only a week old, he decided to write his own response.

War brings destruction. Louisiana produces less sugar than it produced before the war three years after New Orleans was taken (from the river). Alabama produced an even smaller ratio of its prewar cotton in the year that Montgomery was taken (across the cotton fields). The Examiner finds evidence in the difference between these ratios of what it wants to prove.
War brings suffering. In ‘61, the planters were fiercely insistent on war; the slaves were not consulted. The Examiner insists that the resulting suffering shall fall on the slaves to shield the men who sought the war.

Sam’l Warren
Brig. Gen. (ret.)

Ab had neighbors on four sides -- eight if you counted the corners. He liked the others well enough, but Cellus, who farmed south of him, was a real friend.

Cellus’s wife, Tina, was younger than Cellus, which made her not that much older than Ab. Sometimes, though, she treated him in a motherly fashion. She sometimes invited Ab to eat with them, but they got Bureau rations just as he did.

Tie, their son, was standing taller every time he saw him. He had stumbled a bit on the rough ground when they had met; now he was constantly running.

Tie had been shy at first meeting, but he grew friendly. By high summer, he ran to greet Ab when he walked over to their house.

The teachers took a full hour for dinner and a full hour for supper. Messalina ate supper and breakfast with them, but she ate dinner earlier and dealt with the children while the teachers were eating. Dinner became their time for sharing their observations about class. It also was almost their only time for gossip.

When one of the teachers got seriously ill, the daytime class was merged with the closest age group. The teacher without a class that night, and there was now always one, took the evening class. Marjorie shuddered to think what they would do if two teachers were ill at the same time. She, alone, had handled the entire school for months, but there were more students, now. She could no longer imagine heading even the size of classes she had then.

Deborah was ill for a week, and they all struggled to cover her classes. She recovered, although her stomach was still weak, and she visited the outhouse during class. That was something they had all trained themselves to avoid.