Passing Strange (13 page)

Even without knowing precisely where Ada spent her earliest years, we can imagine them marked by physical hardship and uncertainty. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, declaring free all slaves held in the rebellious states of the Confederacy, mattered little in western Georgia, where local papers recorded the continuing trade in slaves throughout the war.
²⁸
And the Civil War lasted longer here than elsewhere. Word of the April 9, 1865, surrender at Appomattox traveled slowly to this part of the state, where severed telegraph lines made communication with the outside world slow and difficult. On Easter Sunday, April 16, a full week after the official end of hostilities, Union troops led by Colonel Oscar LaGrange attacked Fort Tyler, the small earthwork fort constructed to defend West Point. They wrecked the two bridges across the Chattahoochee that linked West Point’s commercial center on the west bank with the farms and markets to the east, destroyed the rail tracks, and ruined 340 railcars. From inside the fort, General Robert Taylor fought back with a small ragtag group of Confederate defenders, mostly young boys and the elderly and infirm left behind when the able-bodied men went off to war. At day’s end, seven Union and nineteen Confederate soldiers lay dead, as Fort Tyler became the last Confederate fort to fall.
²⁹
Soon thereafter, the news arrived: The war was over here in Georgia. The slaves were free.

Around West Point, slave owners and freedpeople alike struggled to come to terms with the new order. The newspapers in Columbus and in La Grange, about sixteen miles from West Point, reported rumors of incipient insurrection among the freedpeople of Harris County. The evidence came from a cache of hidden firearms and from a general disinclination among the freedpeople to sign long-term work contracts.
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Such independence on the part of former slaves stirred anxiety among the former planter class. As much as local white farmers feared life
with
the former slaves, they feared life
without
them. The
La Grange Reporter
noted with anxiety the reports that disgruntled freedpeople might leave their former owners to seek work elsewhere. “It would be a
burning disgrace
for any Southern man to take the advantage of a negro in a pecuniary transaction...the
truest
and
finest
friends of the freedmen are their former masters.”
³¹
The former slaveholders’ avowed affection for their former workers, however, would be sorely tested as black men and women claimed the right to negotiate contracts on their own terms.

West Point is “a village of cheap frame houses,” wrote the New York journalist Whitelaw Reid, who passed through town shortly after the war. Reid, later to become a close friend of King’s, observed the “gangs of negroes” outside of town, clearing land for cotton with primitive tools, and acknowledged that their crude cultivation methods seemed to produce fair crops.
³²
But another northern reporter, who passed through the area in 1867, saw only poor, overworked land and a people stuck in a deep rural poverty. In a dispatch filed with the
New York Times
he wrote that “when you look at the ragged and slovenly agriculture, the washed hillsides seamed by gullies in every direction, the plains covered with pools of stagnant water, the un-drained bogs, the tumble-down stables and barns, the rude and unpainted houses, the endless snake fences in every stage of decay and hideousness, and learn that the lands are becoming less and less productive . . . the wonder is, not that they do not produce more, but that they produce so much; not that the people are not more comfortable, but that they are not less so.”
³³

For the ex-slaves of west Georgia, the early years of freedom brought not just crushing poverty but brutal and unpredictable violence. In May 1867, in Troup County, John Copeland, a member of the extended clan of white Copelands, assaulted a freedman named Andrew Boozier with a gun.
³⁴
In September 1867, according to the official records of the Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau, whites killed two black men in Harris County in unprovoked attacks and shot and severely whipped another. The civil authorities took no action. Nor did they act in Troup County, where that same month a white assailant killed a black man for being a “radical” and an unknown attacker stabbed another black man.
³⁵
C. S. Cherry, a white schoolteacher and a Republican who lived in Chambers County, Alabama, just across the state line from West Point, Georgia, testified in June 1871 before the congressional committee set up to investigate Klan violence in the South that violence escalated yet further just before the election of 1870. Passions ran high, he explained, as Klan members sought to intimidate Republican voters, reinforce white supremacy, and disrupt the Reconstruction programs designed to move blacks into the public sphere. “I know quite a number of prominent colored men who did not sleep in their houses there for more than a month after the election; I do not know that they all sleep in their houses yet,” Cherry testified. Some, he thought, still lived in the woods. Angry threats slipped easily into violent acts. A week or two before the election, about twelve miles from West Point, eight white men broke into the home of a well-respected, elderly black preacher named America Trammell, who provided room and board to a Mrs. Randall, the white schoolteacher from West Point who ran a local school for the freedmen, after no white family would house her. The youthful terrorists murdered Trammell in his bed and shot and wounded his son; the teacher escaped into the woods in her nightclothes. The attackers operated without masks or disguise; they escaped without ever being brought to justice.
³⁶

Even as vigilante violence exploded, however, the freedmen’s schools managed to survive. And somehow, in the harsh and violent world of post-emancipation Georgia, Ada Copeland learned to read and write. The first evidence of her literacy comes from the period after her marriage, and it remains possible that she learned to read and write from a sympathetic friend or employer in New York. But it seems more likely she learned as a girl in the Reconstruction or post-Reconstruction South.

During the antebellum period, black literacy posed an incipient threat to slavery and the South’s repressive social order. Georgia’s original slave code of 1755 prohibited teaching slaves to read and write, and a law of 1829 extended the restriction to free people of color. “If a man had a slave and taught him to read,” a former slave from Columbus, Georgia, recalled, “he was sent to the penitentiary, and consequently the door of literature was barred against us.”
³⁷

When Ada was born circa 1860, fewer than 5 percent of black adults in the state could read and write.
³⁸
An African American minister writing a history of “Negro education in Georgia” in the late nineteenth century reported that outside of Savannah, Augusta, and Columbus during the antebellum days there were “not a dozen colored people able to read and write, and in the country places, perhaps not one.”
³⁹
Ada’s parents, then, were unlikely to be her teachers. Like so many other freedpeople, they were probably illiterate and vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous employers in their new post-emancipation world. “Well the older ones are ignorant,” admitted a black clergyman in 1883, “and you can impose on them.... But you can’t do that with one of these live men that have had the advantages of education.”
⁴⁰
A black schoolteacher in Opelika, Alabama, about fifteen miles from West Point, told a government agent in 1883 that he had “three married ladies” in his school, the eldest of whom was around forty-eight. “What is their object in learning to read at their age?” asked the agent. The teacher replied, “Well, their object is just to learn to read and write, so that they can act for themselves.”
⁴¹
Blacks of all ages understood that literacy could provide a path to the economic as well as political independence that could give real meaning to their new legal freedom. Still, as late as 1890, almost two-thirds of the black men and just over 70 percent of the black women in Georgia remained illiterate; the older you were, the slimmer the chance you could read and write.
⁴²

If Ada learned to read and write in Georgia, she might have acquired her skills at one of the freedmen’s schools set up by private missionary societies and later supported, in part, by the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency established in 1865 to help oversee Reconstruction programs in the Deep South. Only 5 percent of Georgia’s school-aged black population attended elementary school in any one year during Reconstruction, 1865-70 (a figure that would grow to more than a third by 1877 and 43 percent in 1880), and few of them could attend on a regular basis.
⁴³

School attendance in the rural districts around places like West Point mirrored the seasonal rhythms of cotton farming. Few families could spare their children’s labor when harvesttime came around. And indeed, as a new system of public schools emerged to replace the Freedmen’s Bureau schools as Reconstruction waned after 1870, many of the country schools for African American children operated only during the summer months, using teachers on vacation from their regular jobs in the town schools. One African American trained in the Freedmen’s Bureau or so-called Yankee schools, became a teacher himself in 1872, and worked in the Harris County schools. “I find that the people in the country care but little for public school,” he observed, and send their children only about thirty days out of three months. “Along about July, when they lay by the crops, then they have a little spare time and they send their children to school, but when it is fodder pulling time they take them out of school again. Then, before school closes, the cotton time opens and then the children are off for good.”
⁴⁴

And yet, in one of the schools scattered around West Point, in Troup or Harris County—in a simple frame structure, probably borrowed from a church—Ada seemingly learned to read and write.

Learning could be difficult in these ill-equipped schools, especially in the climate of violence that gripped postbellum Georgia. In 1866 there were seventy-nine schools with 7,792 pupils, 3,000 of whom had learned to read in just the past six months.
⁴⁵
But in 1865-66 “white incendiaries” torched seven black school buildings. In 1866 in La Grange, the Reverend J. H. Caldwell and his wife opened day, night, and Sunday schools affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church that enrolled more than six hundred black children. “The whites manifest great indignation,” Caldwell wrote, “and make severe threats. A large mob surrounded my church one night recently for the purpose of intimidating me and my pupils, and gave us much annoyance by firing pistols and guns in the air.” Other teachers had their lives threatened, their homes burned.
⁴⁶
And no one had enough money. At the smaller Baptist school in La Grange, fewer than half of the sixty-five students could pay the dollar-a-month tuition.
⁴⁷
Daniel McGee, a teacher at McGee’s Chapel School in Troup County, wrote letter after letter pleading for money and in September 1868 filed his final report: “McGee’s Chapel and school house was burned to the ground Saturday night, 19th Sept.”
⁴⁸
In West Point itself, a teacher at a school connected to the Methodist Episcopal Church reported in December 1869 that public sentiment toward the “colored schools” was “bitter.”
⁴⁹
But there were at least two freedmen’s schools in West Point that winter that Ada turned eight, and together they enrolled some 120 students.
⁵⁰
By 1871, 3,563 black children attended classes in the small schools spread out across rural Troup County.
⁵¹
The conditions were basic, surely no better than those James Weldon Johnson encountered when he taught in a rural Georgia school for African American children in the early 1890s—no desk, no blackboard, nothing but hard, backless benches for the children.
⁵²
One minister recalled he had attended school in an abandoned boxcar near Atlanta. Others, he said, attended school in old fodder houses or simply sat outdoors under the trees.
⁵³

Such was the world Ada Copeland would leave behind. Even during the postwar years, the West Point area offered little to a young black woman of ambition and imagination, particularly one who understood, as one unschooled freedman put it, “that a man that is educated is going to get ahead of a man that aint.”
⁵⁴
The new textile mills that opened up along the Chattahoochee during Ada’s girlhood offered employment to poor whites displaced from the land but confined blacks to menial jobs. “All mill operatives having to do with the process of cotton manufacturing involving quick perception and manipulation are white,” testified a Columbus cotton mill owner in 1883. But “where it is only a question of muscle, and where intelligence is not a necessity” a “coloured laborer” would do.
⁵⁵
The African American principal of a “public colored school” in west Georgia explained to a Senate committee investigating local labor conditions in 1883 that his ambitious students might aspire to careers as teachers or preachers. But he added, “It is no use to educate ourselves for anything else; there is no other work for us to do. We cannot get employment in the higher branches of art or mechanics; we cannot be civil engineers or anything of that sort, we cannot even be operatives in factories.” A senator interjected, “You are as badly off as the women.” The principal replied, “Well, very nearly.”
⁵⁶

As Klan violence supplanted the terrors of the slave codes and share-cropping replaced slavery, many ex-slaves in the rural cotton country of west Georgia found their lives as economically uncertain as ever. By 1880 more than two-thirds of the farmers in Troup County were tenant farmers.
⁵⁷
For most blacks, land ownership remained an unrealizable dream. The southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips, born in the Troup County seat of La Grange in 1877, when Ada was a teenager, recalled his boyhood there in rosy terms. “In happy childhood,” he recalled, “I played hide-and-seek among the cotton bales with sable companions.”
⁵⁸
But such romantic memories of racial harmony most often took root among those southerners, like Phillips, whose white skin left them immune to the everyday indignities imposed upon black people in the post-Reconstruction South. A young African American girl like Ada most likely understood her own rural childhood in a very different way: perhaps recalling the tense relations between landowners and tenant farmers, the capricious violence directed at poor blacks, or the natural disasters like droughts or tornadoes—or even illness—that could turn months of hard, backbreaking work to naught.
⁵⁹
Whether pushed from west Georgia by violence or poverty, or lured by ambition and opportunity, Ada buried deep the memories of her early life, never passing down to her family stories of her childhood.
⁶⁰
When she left the familiar landscape of her girlhood, trading the piney hills and cotton fields of west Georgia for the bustling urban streets of Manhattan, she demonstrated a desire for the new more powerful than any sentimental attachment to the old.