By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  But his time among the country Gullah also helped to shape his understanding of who he was as an African American man, and it helped to prepare him for a surprising West African home that would be both familiar and strange. When he arrived on General’s Island, he entered a largely secret world that whites saw only in glimpses and from a great distance. The music and the dancing, the stories and the proverbs, the charms and root doctors populated a sacred cosmos, an interior landscape of the mind and imagination. On General’s Island, the details of this landscape became more familiar to Paul. And because he internalized parts of this Gullah world, his deepest assumptions, his dispositions, and his inclinations were all unavoidably informed—in part at least—by what he had experienced during his years in McIntosh County. Stories and proverbs once learned by a young Paul would not easily fade into forgetfulness but must have rumbled far down in his heart and mind. Nighttime scenes of dances and funeral rituals surely lingered in his memory, ready to emerge when called forth by some new scene at some new place. And roaming spirits and chest-riding witches—they, too, must have loitered about in his imagination, waiting for their chance to appear in a troubled dream.

  Yet, in a few years, Paul would vigorously reject this internal world of the mind and imagination and seek to disassociate himself from it. He was, he would insist, a “civilized American” from Savannah who stood in great contrast to the “savage” Africans around him. And yet his rejection would be the rejection of an insider, of one who had lived within the world of the Gullah, who knew not only star rise and moon rise on General’s Island and the sound of talking drums flowing across the Altamaha, but also the fear of roaming spirits and threatening witches. And so, like many others around the world struggling to be “civilized,” to be modern and escape the traditions of ancestors, his rejection would carry an intensity and passion that could easily lead to violence.

  NICHOLAS BAYARD LEARNED the hard way that it was no easy thing to operate a rice plantation from a banker’s office in Savannah—nor was his experiment as profitable as he had hoped. And so after a few years of buying supplies and sending clothes and food to the island and gaining little in return, he abandoned his plans, rented the land to a neighboring planter, and brought the Bayard slaves back to Savannah. Most likely they were all glad to leave the plantation and its fetid rice fields to return to Hutchinson Island, even if going back to the old life had its own burdens.38

  On Hutchinson Island they at least did not have to plunge into miry rice fields. The Bayards had entered an agreement with the city in 1818 to practice only “dry culture” on Hutchinson. It was thought that miasmas, the noxious and deadly vapors of summer swamps and rice fields, were somehow the cause of what was called “the bilious remitting fever,” or “country fever,” or “marsh fever”—or sometimes simply “malaria.” The miasmas were also associated with the devastating epidemics of yellow fever that periodically swept the city. These miasmas had apparently claimed the lives of the Bayard parents in the early 1820s. Both Jane and Margaret Bayard had most likely had the fever as well—it was not so devastating for children. Their immunity to the scourge would stand them well in the future.39

  With his full labor force of slaves back in the city, Nicholas now handed out work assignments to each. As a banker, he wanted to utilize them in the most rational and profitable manner possible. Most of those who were newly returned from General’s Island he put to work raising cotton and oats on Hutchinson Island. Two old men he hired out in the city as house servants, while a few others he hired out as common laborers. Charles, Paul’s father, had never left Savannah, and Nicholas had him continue his work as a porter, pushing large carts loaded with cotton, rice, and other goods along Bay Street and Factor’s Row. Nicholas gave Mary, Paul’s mother, and a few other older women space on the island to tend a large garden for the Savannah market. He rented a stall at the market on Ellis Square where the women sold potatoes and okra, beans and benne seeds, tomatoes, field peas, and arrowroot cakes. He had them bring him regularly the proceeds of their labors—although there was obviously room for the women to fudge when the time came to settle accounts.40

  Nicholas was pleased with Paul’s progress in carpentry. He rented him out for various jobs around the city, and the wages Paul earned for the Bayard estate grew steadily as he became increasingly skilled. He had learned his numbers—how to add and subtract, how to multiply and divide—as a necessary part of his carpentry. He needed to be able to measure the length of a board and determine how much of it to cut off to make it fit; how many feet of lumber he needed for a job; how to figure a quarter of an inch or three-eighths of an inch; and how to cut a board at just the right angle. And as a part of his training, Paul also learned to read and write, even though it was illegal for a slave to do so. Nicholas apparently turned his head and ignored this illegality, knowing that a slave carpenter’s ability to read and write made him more profitable. Now Paul could receive written instructions about how a window was to be framed or a roof laid, or send written questions about where a door was to go, or where he was to secure lumber or nails. But literacy was not only a valuable skill—it was also an opening for Paul to a wider world. He could now read newspapers and pamphlets, the Bible and city signs. To be sure, he had to read and write with great caution and circumspection in order not to alarm whites. But literacy provided a new freedom within the constricted world of a slave. And that freedom also offered, perhaps ironically, a path that led not only away from white control, but also away from the world of the Gullah. Literacy was a pathway for Paul to a modern world, to his identifying himself as a “civilized” American from Savannah. At any rate, Nicholas bought more tools for his bright carpenter, and Paul began to receive special treatment when clothes and shoes were distributed to the Bayard slaves.41

  So Paul prospered—as such things are measured for a slave—and he entered ever more deeply into the life of the black community of Savannah. As he moved around the city, he met a young woman who was a “domestic servant” of an affluent white family. Perhaps he met her in the market on Ellis Square, where his mother sold produce. Or perhaps they met at First African Baptist—the church was one of the few places where blacks, slave and free, could gather in large numbers. Wherever they met, they fell in love and were able to convince Nicholas and her owner to give them permission to marry. The service would have been simple—even though the bride was a domestic and the groom a skilled carpenter—but not so simple as a country wedding, in which slaves sometimes simply jumped across a broomstick together to become married. Because their marriage was widely recognized by whites, a minister most likely conducted it—perhaps Paul and his bride were one of the thousands of black couples married by Andrew Marshall of First African. But slave marriages were not announced in the newspaper or recorded in court documents, and so the details of their wedding—even the bride’s name—entered a silence as deep as a slave’s grave.42

  After the marriage, Paul had a “wife house”—his wife’s room where she lived in slave quarters behind a Savannah house. Paul could visit her on weekends, so they could have a little time together before he had to return to his own home on Hutchinson Island. Whites often allowed such divided housing arrangements for slave couples with different owners—and with such arrangements, Paul and his wife struggled to create a family and life together.43

  SO PAUL WAS a married man, a slave husband on his way to becoming a slave father, when he learned the deeply troubling news in 1832 that the Bayard sisters had become engaged. Now the danger of a separation from his wife loomed as an alarming possibility. How would the slave property—the men, women, and children in the Hutchinson Island settlement—be divided between the sisters, and where might they be scattered? When Paul and his wife fell in love and decided to marry, they knew that a slave marriage ran the risk of separation. Such knowledge had not deterred them from taking such a risk and claiming some freedom in the midst of their bondage. In the years ahead, however, this risk, and i
ts fragile freedom, would extract a bitter cost, demanding of Paul a decision that could not staunch a terrible pain.

  Chapter Two

  Many Mansions

  While Paul was becoming a skilled carpenter and immersing himself in the life of Savannah and General’s Island, his two young owners, Jane and Margaret Bayard, were growing up and being shaped by very different circumstances. They were, after all, white children of great privilege. Their father, Dr. Nicholas Serle Bayard, had made a name for himself as a respected and well-connected Savannah physician. Much to the gratitude of city authorities, he had stayed at his post during deadly outbreaks of malaria and yellow fever during the first two decades of the century. Rather than flee to the countryside, as did many physicians, he had visited the sick and dying and had done what he could to ease their suffering. And as one of the incorporators of the Georgia Medical Society, he had worked hard to make the practice of medicine the work of scientific men—of professionals, not roaming quacks promising wonderful remedies for all the ailments of man and beast.

  Moreover, when he was so inclined, Dr. Bayard was ready to remind his proud Savannah neighbors of his Huguenot ancestry and to point to a family tree loaded with colonial leaders. By the time Jane and Margaret were old enough to understand family connections, one of Dr. Bayard’s brothers was clerk of the US Supreme Court, another was a wealthy Philadelphia banker, one sister was married to the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court, and a cousin was a US senator from Delaware.1

  The immediate patriarch of this Bayard clan—the paternal grandfather of the two young sisters—was Colonel Bubenheim Bayard. He had been an honored patriot during the Revolution and had spent the difficult winter of 1777–1778 at Valley Forge with Jane and Margaret’s maternal grandfather, Lachlan McIntosh. So the sisters grew up knowing that they were descendants of distinguished Revolutionary War officers and hearing stories of their grandfathers’ bravery and patriotism.

  Dr. Bayard had married his cousin Ann Livingston Bayard of Philadelphia in 1798. Nicholas, their only child, had been born in New York in 1799 and was three when his mother died in Savannah in 1802. Three years later, Dr. Bayard had married Esther McIntosh in Savannah, Jane and Margaret’s mother. Jane had been born in 1807 on her grandfather McIntosh’s Cumberland Island plantation some forty miles south of Darien and General’s Island. There, amid the luxurious growth of the island and with the sound of the surf flowing across the land, she had had her earliest sensory impressions. Margaret had been born in 1810 in Savannah, where carriages and wagons rattled on cobblestones and black men and women walked down sandy streets hawking shrimp and crabs.2

  The sisters and their half-brother, Nicholas, grew up in Savannah in a handsome house in Franklin Ward—a house filled with black servants and frequent guests. From their earliest days, the white sisters heard whites telling blacks to come here and to go there and to do this and to do that. When they went with their parents to visit friends, or to go to church, or to take an outing for their health, they inescapably saw—although they may not have consciously noticed—blacks building, cleaning, and feeding Savannah. For privileged white children growing up in the city, such arrangements must have seemed natural, like the rising of the sun in the east and the setting of the sun in the west and the movement of the moon and stars at night. Whites had their place and blacks had theirs, and each moved in their own place, in their own orbit, as a part of daily life. These distinctive social arrangements were quiet guides for the sisters as they were learning what it meant to be white girls and young Bayards in Savannah.

  With their distinguished ancestry, and Dr. Bayard’s lucrative medical practice, the Bayard family moved easily in the city’s highest social circles. They were members of Savannah’s Independent Presbyterian Church, where Dr. Bayard rented a pew and brought his family to listen to the long, logical but passionate sermons of their greatly loved pastor, Henry Kollock. The sermons and the arrangements of the congregation reinforced the sisters’ understanding of the world’s ordinary ways—blacks had their place in the balcony, whites had their place in rented pews. When the congregation’s new sanctuary was completed in 1819, the local papers declared it one of the most beautiful church buildings in the country. Its steeple soared high above any other structure in the city, announcing its prominence, and its great domed ceiling declared the blessings of heaven on what was below. When the new sanctuary was dedicated, the young Bayards watched President James Monroe and his entire cabinet arrive and take their seats in the front of the church to join the celebration, while blacks looked on from above.3

  Dr. Bayard died in 1821 when Jane was fourteen and Margaret eleven. He was, declared the Savannah Republican, a man who did “ample justice to his talents, the excellence of his character, and the urbanity of his manners.” The paper described him as public spirited and hospitable—a man endowed with an independent mind who had honor and honesty as his only guides. He was said to be “religious, moral and candid.” He lived life, said the paper, “without fear and so ended his days without reproach.”4

  A few months later, Esther McIntosh Bayard was dead, apparently a victim of yellow fever. She possessed, the Georgian noted, “all the qualities that ought to render a lady dear to her relatives, and estimable in the view of the public. She was friendly, hospitable, affectionate, and in all respects filled her station in society, as an honorable, useful and good member of it. She was the eldest surviving daughter of Major General Lachlan McIntosh, a patriot of the revolution, and inherited his patriotic feelings, and firmness of character.”5

  Much of the character of the parents had already been inherited by Jane and Margaret—a spirit of generous hospitality and hearts that were affectionate, independent, and surprisingly fearless. But the home in Franklin Ward had now become a painful reminder to them of happier times. They began to withdraw to themselves and turned to one another for comfort in their grief. Nicholas, a twenty-two-year-old bachelor, did his best to look after his young half-sisters, but he quickly realized they needed more than he could provide. They needed a full and happy home life, and they needed to continue what they had already begun in Savannah—an education to prepare them for their place in society as Bayard women.

  EARLY ON THE morning of July 4, 1822, Nicholas and his sisters arrived at a wharf across from the Hutchinson Island settlement. Black porters loaded their extensive luggage on the packet ship Garonne. A number of other prominent whites in the city joined them on board. Then, when the wind and tide were right, sailors hauled anchor, and the captain steered the ship out into the river to follow its flow.6

  Two weeks later, Nicholas and the sisters were in New York visiting Bayard relatives. After a short stay, they boarded a coach loaded high with their luggage and set off across the countryside for Philadelphia. They stopped in Princeton to visit their Hodge cousins—their grandmother Bayard had been a Hodge. During his early teens, Nicholas had spent several years living with the Hodge household and going to school in Princeton, and he was eager to revisit the little village and the family that had welcomed him so warmly. Nicholas had become particularly close to his cousin Charles Hodge—they were the same age—and when the travelers arrived at the Hodge home they discovered that Charles had been elected, only a few weeks earlier, professor of biblical and Oriental literature at Princeton Theological Seminary. Young Charles was on his way to becoming one of the country’s most influential theologians, and in the years ahead he would have a close and affectionate relationship with his cousin Jane and her distinguished husband.7

  When the travelers arrived in Philadelphia, they went straight to the home of their uncle Andrew Bayard, their father’s oldest brother. A wealthy merchant and president of the Commercial Bank of Philadelphia, he lived in one of the city’s most elegant homes, where white servants did the polishing of silver, the cleaning of dishes, the washing of clothes, and the cooking of meals. Nicholas brought his young sisters and their luggage to the Bayard house on Washington Square,
and there Andrew and his wife, Sarah, welcomed them as their own daughters and brought them into their large, affectionate, and pious family. For the next five years, Jane and Margaret called their uncle’s home their home, and they began to think of their Bayard cousins as their brothers and sisters.8

  Jane and Margaret quickly became especially close to their cousins Theodosia and James. For the rest of their lives, even during long and sometimes terrible separations, they would all regard one another with genuine affection. Theodosia Bayard later visited Jane and Margaret in Savannah and traveled with them in New England, and James Bayard—who was close to Jane in age—made his home in years to come a second home for them and a refuge in times of illness or distress.9

  After their arrival in Philadelphia, Nicholas met quietly with his uncle Andrew and negotiated the financial support his sisters would require. He left funds for their immediate needs and made arrangements to send his uncle regular payments to cover the girls’ expenses. Drawn from the proceeds of their father’s estate, the payments came largely from the profits that flowed from the labors of Paul and the other Bayard slaves. So even in Philadelphia, Jane and Margaret were attached by the webs of slavery to those who lived in the settlement on Hutchinson Island and by the rice fields of General’s Island. Uncle Andrew, careful banker that he was, used the funds prudently for the girls’ education, for their clothing, and for visits to various family members in New Jersey, New York, and Delaware. They frequently went with Theodosia to visit her sister Elizabeth Bayard Henry in Germantown, and in this way the young Savannah girls became a part of the Henry family as well.10