Freedom

He Roads Heading South to Mobile were crowded, packed with people with baskets on their heads; barefoot children in tattered shirttails, with bundles tied to their backs; women with babies on their hips; families pushing rickety and wobbly old carts, sleeping in ditches, cooking, eating, resting on the side of the road. Four million people had been freed, more than 10 percent of them in Alabama, and they were on the move. Some were gone the minute they heard the news; they gathered children and clothes, and they were gone. “Most of the niggers took what all they have on their heads and walked off,” freedman Lindly Hardley recalled.The first restriction that servitude had imposed on its victims was immobility. Their world was circumscribed to the house, the farm, or the plantation, and venturing outside of these limits was not permitted without written permission. So, to feel really free, men, women, and children had to walk away, leave the fields and the quarters, travel wherever they pleased—far away or just up the road—without asking for a pass.

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