How Freedom Came to Big Pa: An Emancipation Day Memory From St. Helena Island

Prince Polite and his son making a basket on St. Helena Island. From The Southern Workman*, April 1916*

"How Freedom Came to Big Pa" appeared in the April 1916 issue of The Southern Workman. Its author, Grace House, came to the Penn School on St. Helena Island in 1905 as an educator and took over as a principal after the deaths of Laura Towne and Ellen Murray. Sometime between 1905 and 1916 she wrote down the story of Prince Polite, a basket maker who had learned his craft from his grandfather — known in the essay only as "Big Pa," who had been born in Africa and carried across the Atlantic into slavery. It is one of the most remarkable, and least known, accounts of Emancipation Day at Camp Saxton in 1863.

The walk

Big Pa was very old when freedom came — people said a hundred — with hair white as cotton, though his eyes and ears were still sharp. When the guns came — the "Gun Shoot" — the island's white enslavers fled; officials sent by "Father Abraham" arrived to oversee the cotton, and missionary teachers followed.

Then word came that Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would be read at a great celebration at Port Royal. Before sunrise, everyone who could walk set off, carrying their babies so the little ones wouldn't be left out of freedom. Prince stayed behind with his grandfather, who seemed far too frail for the six miles to the ferry — until the old man stood up and told him:

"Son, I was born free an' I'se goin' to die free! Bring me my stick, 'cause we'se goin' to get our freedom!"

Hand in hand they set out on January 1, 1863, and Big Pa seemed to grow stronger with every step.

Camp Saxton

A boat carried them around the Old Fort to Camp Saxton, where Prince saw the biggest crowd of his life: bands, flags, and Black soldiers in their uniforms, some from their own island. The Proclamation was read aloud. On the platform stood Colonel Thomas Higginson between his color-bearers Robert Sutton and Prince Rivers.

When the colonel took up a flag and waved it, Big Pa gripped his grandson's shoulder and began to sing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." One or two voices joined him — then the whole crowd, as if all at once they understood that the flag was theirs, and that for the first time they had a country of their own.

"Born free an' die free"

The singing took the last of Big Pa's strength. He collapsed and was carried to rest under a great oak, where he asked to see the colonel. Was he truly free, he asked, and did the flag belong to Black people too? Higginson told him he was as free a man as the colonel himself, and that it did. Big Pa asked to enlist that very day, so that the flag might cover his coffin. Higginson said he could not enlist him — but promised that his country's flag would cover him when he died.

"My country's flag, my country's flag … Thank the Lord, I born free an' die free!"

Then he smiled, closed his eyes, and never opened them again.

Sources

Based on "How Freedom Came to Big Pa," National Park Service, Reconstruction Era National Historical Park, which reprints the account from Grace House, "How Freedom Came to Big Pa," The Southern Workman, April 1916, pages 222–225 — itself in the public domain; a work of the United States government in the public domain.