Happy bondage? Sons are slaves to a cruel delusion

LEONARD PITTS JR.

TODAY'S column is about happy slaves.

A little background first: In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the federal government sent workers across the country, interviewing men and women who had once been held in bondage. The old people described the lives they had lived, the beatings they had endured, the trouble they had seen. Some, burdened by the infirmities of old age, the poverty of the Great Depression and the complexities of a freedom for which they had never been prepared, spoke of the slavery they missed. Indeed, they painted those years as paradise, a time of kind masters, plentiful food and carefree days.

It is, according to the Associated Press, upon this slender reed of evidence that teachers at Randolph Community College in Archdale, N.C., are attempting to balance an offensive thesis: that the overwhelming majority of blacks were happy in slavery. The course, you will not be surprised to hear, is being taught by members of the local chapter of Sons of Confederate Veterans.

But what about those old interviews? What are we to make of the fact that some slaves did profess to preferring bondage?

Answer: the same thing we make of the fact that some battered wives think they deserve their beatings. Under any system of physical and emotional brutalization - any system of control that strips away self-worth and imposes dependency - the surprise isn't that some people crumble. Rather, it's that some do not.

Blessedly, most of the slaves did not.

So the fact that these sons of the dead Confederacy cling to the myth of slave happiness says more about them, I'm afraid, than about the slaves. In the first place, it says they can't read. If they could, they'd know better.

They'd know about Nat Turner, who was so happy to be a slave that he led a rebellion that left 60 whites dead; about the woman who was so happy after a savage beating that she threw the master's baby into a pot of boiling lye; and about Margaret Garner, who was so happy that she ran away, her four children in tow.

So happy was Garner that when slave catchers appeared at the house where she was hiding, Garner turned on her children, killing one and trying unsuccessfully to kill the others. She later explained that she sought to "end their sufferings" rather than see them returned to bondage and "murdered by piecemeal."

So happy was she to be a slave.

You look at the people pushing a fraudulent, morally bankrupt version of those horrific days, and you wonder about them. Are they evil? Are they stupid? Or are they, like the slaveholders of old, merely embracing a delusion they must believe in order to continue believing in themselves?

After all, apologists for the white South, both old and new, have long clung to the notion that its actions during slavery and the Civil War were somehow ennobled, touched by high purpose. They invariably talk of amiable relations between docile slaves and kindly masters. They paint the Southern cause in terms of states' rights, evoking grand visions of Southern chivalry, valor and honor. Always, more than anything, honor.

Problem is, the South's cause was slavery, pure and simple, and there was no honor in it. So lies must be told, if only to one's own conscience. And the slaves must be co-opted into the lies, their torments downplayed, their agonies made light.

If slavery wasn't so bad, maybe the cause wasn't, either, goes the apparent reasoning. The need to believe such idiocy might be funny if it weren't so pathetic - if it didn't heap insult on historical injury.

Decent people - black, white, North, South and otherwise - ought to be outraged.

The sons of the Confederacy prostitute truth for the benefit of disgraced forebears and a discredited system. They would desecrate sacred soil, stealing from dead slaves whatever little dignity remains.

That should tell you all you need to know about their honor.