Each cabin had, or might have had, its little yard and garden, and each family had its chicken-house and yard.
On the larger plantations, where the Negroes numbered two hundred or more, nearly everything was made by them, so that such an estate was a little world in itself, substantially self-supporting. On our place, while the spinning and weaving and the carpentry-work were done on the place, most of the cloth for clothing and the shoes were bought in town in the spring and autumn, and the tailor and cobbler kept them in order. In purchasing the shoes, each person brought his measure, a stick the exact length of his foot. This stick had certain marks or notches on it, and the Negro kept a duplicate, by which to identify his shoes when they arrived.
III
No servants or retainers of any race ever identified themselves more fully with their masters. The relation was rather that of retainers than of slaves. It began in the infancy of both master and servant, grew with their growth, and continued through life. Such a relation does not now, so far as I know, exist, except in the isolated instances of old families who have survived all the chances and changes with the old family servants still hanging on. Certainly, I think, it did not exist anywhere else, unless, perhaps, on the country estates of the gentry in England and, possibly, in parts of France and Germany.
This relation in the South was not exceptional. It was the general, if not the universal rule. The servants were “my servants” or “my people”; the masters were to the servants, “my master and my mistis,” or “my white folks.” Both pride and affection spoke in that claim.
In fact, the ties of pride were such that it was often remarked that the affection of the slaves was stronger toward the whites than toward their own offspring. This fact, which cannot be successfully disputed, has been referred by Professor Shaler to a survival of a tribal instinct which preponderated over the family instinct. Others may possibly refer it to the fact that the family instinct was, owing to the very nature of the institution of slavery, not allowed to take deep root. Whatever the cause, it does not appear even now to have taken much root, at least, according to the standard of the Anglo-Saxon, a race whose history is founded upon the family instinct.
The family ties among the Negroes often appear to be scarcely as strong now as they were under the institution of slavery. Marital fidelity is, if we are to believe those who have had good opportunities of observation, not as common now as it was then. The instances of desertion of husbands, of wives, of parents, or children would possibly offset any division that took place under that institution.
A number of old Negroes whom I have known have been abandoned by nearly all of their children. Often, when they grow up, they leave them with scarcely less unconcern than do any order of the lower animals.
The oldest son of our dining-room servant went off at the time of one of Sheridan’s raids and was never heard of again until some twenty years after the war, when it was learned that he was a fisherman on the lower James, and although he lived, and may be living yet, within a hundred miles of his old home, where his father and mother lived, he never took the trouble even to communicate with them once. The next son went off to the South after the war, and the only time that he ever wrote home, so far as I know, was when he wrote to ascertain his age, in order that he might qualify to vote. The same may be said of many others.