The New Man: Twenty-nine years a slave, twenty-nine years a free man

by Henry Clay Bruce

CHAPTER XI.

On March 31, 1864, I landed at Leavenworth, Kansas, with my intended wife, without a change of clothing and with only five dollars in cash, two of which I gave Rev. John Turner, Pastor of the A. M. E. Church, who united us in marriage in his parlor that day. I knew a friend in that city, who came from Brunswick, Paul Jones, and upon inquiry soon found and secured room and board with him. The next day I was out hunting for work, which I obtained with a brick contractor, at two dollars and seventy-five cents per day, to carry a mud-hod, which I had done before; so that the work was not entirely new, nor the contractor a stranger to me. His name was Amos Fenn; he had worked for a contractor named Hawkins, who built a row of brick buildings at Brunswick, Mo., in the Fall of 1854, where I worked a few weeks, and when we met I remembered him and he gave me a job.

For the first few weeks I was well pleased with the pay I received, and thought I would soon have plenty of money, but now I had a new problem to solve, which was to support and clothe myself and a wife and pay doctors’ bills, which was something new to me. I had never been trained in the school of economy, where I could learn the art of self-support, as my master had always attended to that little matter from my earliest recollections. Now I had expenses to meet of every kind. The necessaries of life were all very high, including house rent, and by the time I paid up my bills on Saturday night, I found my week’s earnings well nigh gone; this was the case right along. I also found that I had to make my own bargains for whatever necessaries we needed, and to provide for a rainy day, all of which experiences were new to me, yes, very new, and were a source of annoyance for a long time, because it taxed my mind each day to provide the necessaries for the next week and from week to week. I had lived to be twenty-eight years old, and had never been placed in a position where I had occasion to give this matter a single thought, for the reason that my master had it to attend to, as before stated.

I found myself almost as helpless as a child, so far as managing and providing for personal welfare and the future was concerned, and although I had been trained to work from a child and had acquired almost a perfect knowledge of it, together with a will and ability to perform hard manual labor, yet I had not learned the art of spending my earnings to the best advantage. I had a very limited knowledge of the value of any article, and often paid the price demanded without question, and ofttimes bought articles which were useless to me. My wife and I had good health and worked steadily every day, and by so doing managed to save up money enough in a short time to rent and fit up a small two-room house.

Continuing to enjoy good health and obtaining steady work, we had saved enough money within two years to buy the house and lot, paying nearly two-thirds cash therefor. I felt proud, being then for the first time in my life a land-owner, but it was of short duration. I had relied upon the word of a white man, and had paid him the amount agreed upon, and had received what I had supposed to be a clear title to the land, but it turned out soon afterwards, that the man owned only the house, and the land upon which it stood was the property of another, who notified me to pay rent for the land or move my house away.

I found the white men of Kansas quite different from those of Missouri, in their dealings with Colored people or ex-slaves. They would talk and act nicely and politely, and in such a way as to win my confidence; always referring to my former condition and abusing pro-slavery men, pretending great friendship for me, and by so doing they ingratiated themselves into my confidence to such an extent, that I would follow their advice in the purchase of what they had to sell. Of course I believed what they told me and was often cheated out of my hard earnings.

I had been reared where it was a crime for me to dispute a white man’s word, and that idea was so well and thoroughly grounded in me that it took time and great effort to eradicate it. It took me a long time to learn that a white man would lie as quickly as a black one, and there are thousands of illiterate ex-slaves now living who have not entirely dismissed that idea, that a white man can not lie, drilled into them from early childhood, for I have found this true in dealing with them.

Let any ex-slave, uneducated, wanting information come to an educated colored man for it, and obtain it, he will not be really satisfied until he lays the matter before some white man, and if approved, then it is all right, but if condemned then the white man’s opinion is accepted and the other rejected; this holds good to-day, and in my opinion is one of the results of slavery, which I can only explain by stating that slave-holders considered it very low to lie to a slave, and would not do it under any circumstances, and had great contempt for another one who would purposely do so. I have known them to refuse to answer questions rather than tell a lie, when they could not afford to tell the truth. Many times the slave has wished that his master would lie, when he has told him that at a certain hour or upon a certain day he would punish him; for he knew he would get the promised flogging almost as surely as the day came. Sometimes he would be told, “I am doing this only to keep my word.” My own personal experience is, that in dealing with slaves the master was perfectly honorable and truthful, and would not cheat or practice deception in any way with them, and the slave knew that the master would not lie and therefore believed what he said.

I found by sad experience that the white men in a free state, especially in business transactions, were not as truthful as the slave-holders of Missouri, in dealing with colored people, a fact to which many colored men in Leavenworth and Atchison, Kansas, can testify, men like myself who have been deceived into buying a lot, and who, in installments had paid the entire price agreed upon. After having built a house thereon, in a few years they found that the land was owned by someone else.