tiny_dr_freud

When most people think of slavery, they think of picking cotton. Working on the huge plantation with hundreds of slaves all turning out cotton bales.

Nowadays if anyone mentions it, that's all I hear of it. I think that this is just some way to look back at that practice and take out the idea that your family, your past, had anything at all to do with slavery. "It was a shameful time, but my folks didn't keep slaves, they weren't into cotton or tobacco." Just eighty odd years ago, and people don't recall much of how it was.

The truth is, if you had some industry in the south, and even in the north too, for the most part… If you had a job that involved hard callous raising work of any kind, and you had a little money, then you had a slave or two to do it for you. If you had an industrious operation, then maybe you had ten or twenty. Slavery wasn't the hundred of folks in shacks on the plantations, it was in pretty much every corner of life. Even folks that had no men, would sometimes inherit a slave from a relative, like you'd get an old bed or let's face it, some kind of livestock.

In any case, Old Master Gutman certainly didn't know cotton or tobacco, he was in the business of hogs. My Momma washed dishes and cleaned floors and whatever else that was required of her, which meant that so did I, from the time that I could pick up a cloth or push a broom. But my Uncle and my brother JB and all the other men I knew, maybe fifteen or so all told, raised hogs for Master Gutman.

They grew corn and made slops, they weaned piglets and watched that sows and boars didn't get sick or infected hooves or rotten teeth, they cleaned sties to keep the worms out of the meat if they could, and every six months or so, they scattered corn on the ground, and they'd gather kindling and cauldrons for a long night's work, and they'd get together and sing.

They'd put that corn on the ground from the sties, along the dry river bed with it's red clay, down to the sluices by the tall oaks on the little ridge. They'd lead the fattest hogs down then, and drive them into the sluices, and one by one, hoist them on the pullies on the old oaks and open their throats and let them drain.

Quick as a cat Uncle and JB and the other men could gut and take apart a hog down to it's sides. They'd stack those sides and take them out to the smokehouse over the ridge, down by the little dry river, and start them salting and smoking and honey curing, if they could get hold of honey.

I often heard Master Gutman's overseer Bill complain that we sent cotton up north for pennies, and paid the hard dollar for the same cotton in the form of bolts of denim that would come back down the Mississip. I was the same for oil from Nantucket or paper from Philadelphia or anything else for that matter, that came by drover or barge from the north. Like hogs from Chicago. Master Gutman raised hogs more local, and could sell them cheaper than the Chicago hogs, and to make up for it, he was an industrious man, and he had a certain ruthless efficiency about getting every penny out of each pig to recoup his loss on the market price.

A hog is a natural resource, if you know how to refine it, and you have lots of time for hard work. Master Gutman's operation (meaning my family mostly,) supplied the work, and took the raw material, and they made a lot of the things that everyone around those parts needed, hot of what they could get from hogs.

So fat no good for lard was rendered for oil and turned to tallow. Skins were tanned and made into all manner of hinges from pig leather. Innards were cleaned and made into chitterlings and casings, blood was collected and along with the cast off scrap and brain, they'd make sausages. Hoof and bone, hair and bristle, were boiled down to paste.

Uncle always said that a hog ain't nothing but fat, appetite and stink, and after Master Gutman was through with it, only the stink was left, and that was just cause he hadn't found anyone who would buy it yet.

That all changed when the war came. My brother JB went off to join the army, lured by silly promises that would never be kept. He needn't have bothered because before too long Major Allison came with his regiment, presumably to protect us from northern aggression, but mostly to provision off of us and whoever else he could talk into it.

At first Master Gutman gave pork to the grey coats out of a sort of sense of duty. Maybe he thought that by giving a little, what he could afford to give away, that he would keep them from taking all that he had, and that worked for a little while. Major Allison even made a speech in town about defense of the states and how we all have to do our duty like Master Gutman. He seemed a fine fellow then, in his butternut brown jacket with shiny silver buttons.

But when the dying began for real, Major Allison and his regiment went off to the front, and when his regiment came back around, six months later, he was missing a hand and half his face was burned. His butternut jacket was gone, replaced with a plain white cotton one with no dye at all, and it was grey and faded by smoke and dirt until Uncle said it was like a ghost at noon. Most people don't know this now about the grey coats, that their coats weren't grey at all. They started white and got grey over time, like so many things that start out all high and mighty.

There were no speeches that second time around. Major Allison wasn't happy with what Master Gutman could spare. He hadn't seen a supply train in a long while, and his men in their ghost grey coats were thin and angry and didn't want to fight the blue coats anymore. So Major Allison asked for just about every hog Master Gutman had, and when that didn't go over so well, Major Allison let out his breath and said he needed to go out to the outhouse, and he got up and walked out. A moment later, his Second Lieutenant came in with some infantry and they put a mini ball into Master Gutman's skull. I'm sure they shot Bill the overseer as well, since I never saw him after that, but my Momma had some sense and took me out the back and we watched from the woods as the soldiers burned the house to the ground. Then they had Uncle and the others run all the hogs up to the hill to die. I think I remember that it took all night and much of the next day to butcher them all out, and they left the innards and the rest on the ground to spoil.

Master Gutman may have been my Daddy, but I was not unhappy to see him go. My Momma hated the sight of him, but I was never anything more than another hog to him. I am sure things would have changed had I been just a little bit older before he died, and had I caught his attentions in the way that my Momma did. In any case, that night the Lieutenant sent Master Gutman on over to the other side, I was glad that the house was afire and I didn't have to scrub his brains off the floor for him after what he made my Momma go through. I said as much to my Momma, and she looked at me with her eyes all up in tears, and she asked me that night if I saw how God can sometimes answer prayer. I thought it was a funny way to do it, but I didn't say anything else but "yes, Momma," because that's what I always said. At times like that, I can almost see that it makes sense. It's good to believe in hell because then you can imagine people like Master Gutman burning there with a hole in his head, and it makes you feel good to be alive.

A lot of people will tell you that life is one thing or another. I can tell you right now, that life is one thing after another. More and more till you can't hardly stand it. It's like the whole point of it is to pile on so much that you give in and start hoping for what's next. At least, that's what it's been for me and mine.

A lot of people will also tell you that the civil war ended on the day that Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. I didn't know about that for a long time. I knew the war was over when two white boys eating dead horsemeat made fun of me for eating mud. Everything everywhere was all used up and nobody thought about anything other than how to fill up the hole in their gut. Anything of value or worth or use had been burned, drowned, eaten, or stolen by blue coats and grey, didn't matter much when you were hungry. They came in and took what they could find and burned the rest, no matter what clothes they wore, and no matter what reason they gave for what they did. Thieving, rape, murder, and always ending with fire, until you never hoped to have nothing to your name but a cinder.

A lot of people will tell you that the slaves were free and black folks were equal on that day that Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation. I can tell you right now that I didn't know about that for a long time afterwards. Nobody in Alabama would tell me and I couldn't read it. Even after I did hear it, and take it in for what it meant, I didn't believe it, and still don't to a large degree.

You see, freedom isn't something that other people can get for you or give to you by signing a paper. Freedom on someone else's terms just don't fit the description of the word. Freedom is something you need to reach out and get a hold of for yourself.

The story I want to tell you is the story of my own reaching out to be free, and it has a lot of answers to that first question of yours, but in order for it to make sense, the whole thing has to come out. I knew someday that someone would come along to ask, and for that I've been waiting a long time.

My name is Girlie. That isn't my real name, but that's the name my Momma called me by, so that's the one I prefer. If you need a last name, it's Gutman, we were all Gutmans that worked on Master Gutman's farm. I have more claim to the name than most, though. Momma said she couldn't tell me who my Daddy was, but if you were playing the numbers the safe bet would be on Master Gutman. Master Gutman took what he wanted when he wanted it, and Momma said he didn't have much use for property that didn't lie quiet and do what it was told. So Momma did just that, how ever many times it was till he lost interest, and she always told me later that she prayed that she could do enough good for others in her life to gain forgiveness from the Lord for that sin, and the other times that she lay with men, out of pleasure, or to get something she needed.

Even as a little girl in pigtails, I heard my Momma tell me that about Master Gutman, and the Lord, and I thought to myself that GOD, and praying to GOD, had to be about the most foolish thing I ever heard of. If prayer didn't protect you from the sin cast upon you by others, and you still had to hope for forgiveness in the by-and-by then I'd heard about enough of that nonsense. So I didn't put much stock in god or jesus or the disciples or church going on Sunday. I did it while my Momma was alive but never learned a thing that changed my mind. It's a rigged game where you never even get to know what the prize even was. You just wish for the best thing you can imagine because you'd never get it in this life anyhow.

So by now, I bet you are thinking that I grew up as some sour, dour, angry, evil little girl with a mean spirit and uncivil mouth, but you'd be shocked to know that I didn't grow up much different from the way girls do now. I played games and listened to songs and stories, and enjoyed the company of friends and family. My Momma taught me to respect and honor my family, no matter what else happened, and for that I bless her to this day. She kept me from losing my way, long after she'd been dead and gone.

A short intro, perhaps an apology.

There is a lot of this story that would go a little better with the benefit of some careful research.

Since this month is supposed to be purely about volume, I've let these issues slide, because if I know myself, I could easily become swept away in such matters to the degree that the story would be put on the back burner while research into herbalism, cultural anthropology, language and dialects and post civil war history ate up all my free time for a year or so.

So if something seems a bit strange, and strains your suspension of disbelief, just let me know, and I will add that to any future revisions that evolve out of the tale.
Since the story is going to be serialized on this journal, I figure this will be a unique way to write, allowing a lot of input from the reader.

Having said that, let's get started.

FOREWARD.
( Dr Calhoun's White Paper. )