Massa Gone to Hell

As we look forward to the bicentennial of the Great Emancipator's birth this week, it's fitting to remind ourselves of just what a great thing he did. The University of North Carolina has a wonderful online collection, Documenting the American South, which I recommend to all my Truckbuddies who like to read history.

Among other things, the collection includes hundreds of online books with first-person accounts of slavery. It's amazing to read these things - the real stories, not the Hollywood version - and realize the enormous potentials of both cruelty and courage that reside in the human heart. Both then, and now.

Just one excerpt, a sad story but with a wry twist, by former slave Jacob Stroyer who, after he was freed, got an education and became an A. M. E. minister:

A short time before master's death, he stood security for a northern man who was cashier of one of the largest banks in the city of Charleston, he ran away with a large sum of money and left the Colonel embarrassed, which made him very fretful and peevish, he was none too good before to his slaves and that made him worse, as you know the slave holders would revenge themselves on the slaves whenever they became angry. I have seen master whip his slaves a great many times, but never so severely as he did that spring before he died.

One day before he went to his country seat, he called a man to him, stripped him and whipped him so that the blood ran down from his body like water thrown upon him in cupfuls, and when the man stepped from the place where he was tied, the blood ran out of his shoes. He said to the man, "you will remember me now, sir, as long as you live." The man answered, "yes master, I will."

Master went away that spring for the last time, he never returned alive. When they brought his remains home all of the slaves were allowed to stop at home that day, to see the last of him and to lament with mistress. After all the slaves who cared to do so had seen his face, they gathered in groups around mistress to comfort her, they shed false tears saying, "never mind misses, massa gone home to heaven," while some were saying this, others said, "thank God, massa gone home to hell, massa gone home to hell."