Elder Care

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Elder Care

The lives of slaves who were fortunate enough to survive to an elderly age were made worse by the fact that once they could no longer perform the arduous demands of physical labor, they were often left to take care of themselves after years of service to their masters. Frederick Douglass's (1817–1895) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass provides some descriptive details of the trauma inflicted on those such as his grandmother, who reached an age where her masters did not know what to do with her. He writes about the plight of his grandmother:

If any one thing in my experience, more than another, served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with unutterable loathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to my poor old grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves: she had become a great grandmother in his service … she was nevertheless a slave—a slave for life … and to cap the climax of their base ingratitude and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother who was now very old, having outlived my old master and all his children, having seen the beginning and end of all of them, and her present owners finding she was of but little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die! ([1845] 1968, p. 944)

The description that Douglass paints of his grandmother illustrates the lack of regard accorded to elderly slaves. In her article Aging and Slavery: A Gerontological Perspective Leslie Pollard writes, "In Africa, the elderly performed special roles and functions that continued in slavery. They were the storytellers, the advisors, the links between the past and the present, and the historians of a non-literate people" (1981, p. 228).

While many plantation masters may have shown no feeling or care toward elderly slaves, slaves who were older were held in high esteem by the slave community. According to Pollard, "the mammy was often an old woman who had been on the plantation for several generations, and others, called 'aunties' and 'uncles' by their masters when 'boys' and 'girls' proved ridiculous, were also usually elderly slaves" (Pollard 1981, p. 229). But mammy sometimes referred to a slave's own mother and the term was also used to convey that. Pollard further notes that respected elderly slaves sometimes had the word Old juxtaposed before their given names such as Old Tom or Old Isom thus indicating the same deference for elders that their ancestors in Africa held for older family members (Pollard 1981, p. 229). Many slaves referred to their elder slaves as aunt or uncle often because they were, as Pollard related, but when the masters and mistresses of the plantation used these terms, they took on another meaning altogether. It was not uncommon for them to use aunt or uncle to refer to an older slave when they could no longer call them girl or boy. In the Unwritten History of Slavery, a project undertaken by the Social Science Institute at Fisk University, a former slave recalls, "I didn't do nothing but play and pick up chips for old Aunt Fanny. She fed us. They had these wooden bowls, and Aunt Fanny would take that and pour the licker in it, and put bread in it for the chillen to eat" (Unwritten History of Slavery 1945, p. 114). Aunt Fanny may well have been her biological aunt; however, the meaning differs when used by the mistress as evidenced by the following quote: "Mistress would say Go pick up some chips for old Aunt Fan to put on the lid" (Unwritten History of Slavery 1945, p. 114). Aunt or uncle were not terms of endearment and their elderly status did not keep older slaves from being whipped. The same woman remembers when her sister received a whipping for not keeping her dress clean and how her mother, whom she called mammy, protected her sister and how Aunt Fan herself endured beatings from the mistress:

Mammy got out of bed and went in there and throwed Aunt Fan out of the kitchen door, and they had to stop whipping Big Sis and come and see about Aunt Fan. You see, she would tell things on the others, trying to keep from getting whipped herself. I seed mistress crack her many a time over the head with a broom. (Unwritten History of Slavery 1945, p. 117)

Another woman recalled her mistress mistreating an elderly woman slave:

Honey, that sho' was a mean ole woman there. I remember when I went to bed that night the ole woman slave, the cook you know, was piddling 'round in the kitchen, and that ole woman was just actually driving her. I know that po' thing never went to sleep that night. Well, that ole woman had a parrot, one of these ole talking kind, and he was smart and talkative like me. The next morning the po' ole slave come out and say breakfast was ready; it was before six o'clock then…. I say shut yo' mouth, drat you … well, you know, course ole missy didn't git after me or nothin', but she tole me after a while Lucy, don't you say nothin' to that woman; you will make her whip that poor old slave; she is terrible mean. (Unwritten History of Slavery 1945, p. 19)

In keeping with Douglass's recollections of how his own grandmother was treated, another slave recounts:

Old Aunt Calline Fletcher was sold after she come out of the trade yard to old Dick Grinstead. He bought her, and after she had done all she could and yet she didn't suit old Dick's wife, they said she would have to go back to the trade yard. When his wife would get mad she would beat her as long as she wanted to, and she used to lead her around by the ears, and would put hot tongs on her ears and tell her that these were her earrings. (Unwritten History of Slavery 1945, p. 194)

Another horrifying picture of slavery and how the elderly were treated occurs in the beginning of Unwritten History of Slavery where an ex-slave retells how an old woman was beaten to death by her mistress:

She had one old woman and a boy and a girl; they come to her by her mother, and that was all the slaves he left her when he went off. She used to whip that old woman 'till she would run away, and they put a big iron bell on her and fixed it so she couldn't get to the clapper and put it on her neck with an iron collar … just before the war they sent her to the greenhouse to make the fire … well, she stayed so long in the greenhouse that the old lady got the cowhide and went out to see what the trouble was, and there was the old lady bending down just like she was making the fire and the old lady cut her lick with the cowhide, and lo and behold she was dead. (Unwritten History of Slavery 1945, p. 6)

There is evidence that still other plantation masters were not as cruel in how they treated elderly slaves. In their book, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, authors Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman note "planters solved the problem of old age by varying tasks to capacities of slaves" (1974, p. 74). As Pollard suggests, the "agricultural nature of slavery" made it likely that elderly slaves could work in some capacity whether it was in the home sewing, cooking, taking care of the master's children or whatever other domestic skills were necessary to keep the plantation operating to full capacity (Pollard 1981, p. 231).

Whether elderly slaves were allowed to live out their years on the plantation or discarded and left on their own depended largely on their masters. In keeping with their roots, elderly slaves received the best treatment and care from the slave community itself. Pollard notes "in the slave community, that important network of social relationships away from the Big House, that the elderly gained status" (Pollard 1981, p. 232). Here, the elderly were afforded a buffer that helped them to survive the stresses and strains of aging and an escape from the precariousness of a nonproductive existence in a productionbased system (Pollard 1981).

In his book Medicine and Slavery, Todd Savitt says "according to the Virginia mortality census of 1850, and the death registers of four Virginia counties and towns between 1853 and 1860, more slaves than whites died of old age (1978, p. 201). The dilemma of what to do with slaves as they aged was a problem posed for masters and while some elderly fared better and were able to live out their days on the plantation in some capacity, many others as indicated by personal accounts did not. The fate of an elderly slave often depended on the wealth of the plantation owner. Those who could afford to take care of slaves as they aged sometimes did so, but those who could not would either avoid medical care or, in the case of a Mrs. Martha Southward, whose elderly slaves came down with smallpox and received treatment at the city hospital, petition the city council for release from payment of the hospital bill (Savitt 1978, p. 202). As indicated by Douglass, some owners simply left elderly slaves to take care of themselves in the rural areas by placing them in the woods with a rudimentary hut or in cities, by releasing them to wander on their own. There were several ways in which plantation owners handled the aging dilemma: (1) allowing slaves to perform other duties; (2) ignoring the fact that their slaves were aging and expecting the same level of work in excess of capabilities; (3) hiring them out for light work; and (4) allowing them to remain as part of the slave community and simply handing over the duties to younger slaves (Savitt 1978, p. 204). The available evidence indicates that most old people remained at home to be assisted by their children and the general slave community, thus indicating the tight bonds and esteemed held for their elderly and going back to traditional African roots where the elderly were revered (Savitt 1978). If slaves were fortunate enough to survive to an age where they were too old to do the work, then their fate lay in the hands of the plantation owners; however, within the slave community they were treated with much respect and admiration.