Leighton and Jane were encouraged by the welcome they received and were clearly enchanted by their new home and its setting. They had already decided to name their new home Fair Hope. It seemed such a good name, an expression of their deep if modest hopes for the work they were about to begin. They apparently did not see any irony in the fact that they were naming this place on the African coast after a plantation on the Georgia coast where Gullah men and women lived and labored as chattel slaves. Leighton and Jane, after all, loved Fair Hope plantation, with its white family and seductive landscape and its happy memories of their springtime together. Such a love, such affection for a Southern home, blinded them to much that was peculiar and bitter.24
As soon as they had their goods unloaded, Leighton presented Freeman with a dash—presents from the trade goods brought out—and Freeman presented Leighton with a young bullock. Leighton thought the Grebo felt “interested in our object and claim me as their man in distinction from the colony,” and for the next few days, crowds pressed around the mission house to see the white couple who were taking up residence there with Margaret and Catherine. Jane was apparently the first white woman many of them had ever seen, and she must have appeared very odd to them, with her blue eyes and pale white skin—largely covered by her long dress—and with her blond hair carefully tucked under her bonnet.25
As the Grebo, curious and eager to learn about the newcomers, continued to crowd around the mission house, they ignored what Leighton and Jane—and no doubt Margaret and Catherine—regarded as private space. With their compact towns and villages, the Grebo saw space and how people occupied it differently from the North Americans, so Leighton found he had to have a fence erected around the mission yard. The fence, he thought, was very serviceable, as it allowed him to regulate the visits of the people. Still, he and Jane welcomed the visits and the interest the visits seemed to indicate.26
Freeman came regularly and enjoyed sitting on one of the piazzas and talking with the young white couple, and with Margaret and Catherine as well. He ate frequently with the newcomers, and he was quick to learn that if he wanted to eat inside, and not on the piazza, he had to wear more than a cloth around his waist reaching down to his knees. Jane explained to him that in her home he must clothe himself more fully, a requirement he apparently accepted without complaint as one of the peculiarities of the newcomers. With him came his translator, Simleh Ballah, and Freeman’s brother William Davis, who was eager to have his daughter enrolled in the proposed school. Baphro, king of Grand Cavally, also came on occasion. He wanted to know when a school would be established in his town.27
In this way, the Grebo began to observe the mission and to form some ideas about its purposes, about the character of those who had arrived on the Edgar, and about the customs and ways of the newcomers—how they held themselves and related to one another; how and what they ate; how their house was built and how the different rooms were used; how they thought of time, how they prayed, and how they had so many marvelous things brought from some distant place. Jane wrote relatives in Philadelphia that the Grebo had begun to call Leighton “true man” because “he never changes his word.” And an officer from a visiting American ship wrote home that the Reverend Mr. Wilson together with his lady appeared “to be admirably well adapted by their conciliating manners to win the affections of the natives.”28
Leighton and Jane called the king and his brother by their English names rather than their Grebo names. The colonists did the same. But in Big Town, the King was Pah Nemah, not Freeman, and his brother was Mworeh Mah, not William Davis. To the newcomers the brothers were men adapting to the new world that had come ashore and established itself at Cape Palmas. To the Grebo the brothers were Grebo, leaders among their own people. Both brothers, each in his own way, struggled in the coming years to live in both worlds and sought to help the Grebo find their way as they were attracted by the power of this new world. Freeman would be the wise political leader, negotiating with the colonial authorities, recognizing the economic benefits the colony brought to Big Town and the military power supporting the colony, but always remembering that as Pah Nemah he was a Grebo and had to do his best to protect the interests of the Grebo. William Davis would be a leader in engaging the culture and religion of the newcomers. A man whose brilliance startled whites, Davis understood that beneath the power and wealth of the newcomers was a new way of seeing and being in the world, a way that seemed to offer not only more cargo, but also some freedom from many of the fears that marked life in Big Town. Davis was to probe and wonder about—and finally to enter deeply into—that new world, but he would do so as Mworeh Mah, a Grebo man.29
Simleh Ballah and Baphro also had English names—Bill Williams (Ballah) and Joe Holland, (Baphro)—but the settlers and the missionaries seldom used them. Both men spoke the Pidgin English of the West African coast. Ballah would soon visit Baltimore, where he could communicate with Latrobe and other leaders of the Maryland Colonization Society without difficulty. Baphro already had a son studying in the United States, and in 1837 he sent a young wife to the mission school at Fair Hope. But both Ballah and Baphro lived more fully in one world, the world of the Grebo, even as they saw another world approaching. To be sure, both, like Freeman, sought to negotiate with that other world, but neither had Freeman’s insight about what the Grebo were facing. And both were thought to be open to the changes arriving at their shores, but neither followed Davis by entering deeply into the assumptions and commitments of that new world. Leighton and Jane seemed to know this intuitively, calling them Simleh Ballah and Baphro even as they also called them friends.30
The settlers also began to visit Fair Hope. Dr. Hall came and welcomed the young missionaries to “Maryland in Liberia” and talked with Leighton about developments in the colony. He had named their little town Harper after the Revolutionary War hero General Robert Goodloe Harper, a former fiery congressman from South Carolina who had moved to Maryland. Harper had been one of the founders of the American Colonization Society and a mentor of Latrobe’s. In a letter widely circulated in Maryland, Harper had argued that free blacks were largely paupers who lived at the expense of the community, that they had the potential of stirring up slaves against their masters, and that colonization would remove “a population for the most part idle and useless, and too often vicious and mischievous.” Hall had also named the nearby salt lake “Lake Sheppard” after Moses Sheppard, a Quaker and wealthy flour merchant in Baltimore. Sheppard, a leading member of the Maryland Colonization Society, largely shared Harper’s views on the need for colonizing free blacks. So the settler town and its nearby lake, like Fair Hope, bore odd names deeply rooted in the landscape of American slavery and racism.31
DECEMBER BROUGHT THE end of the rainy season at Cape Palmas, but before it expired, great thunderstorms rolled over the Cape. The thunder and lightning were more violent than anything the newcomers had yet experienced, and they were awed by the power of the storms that sailors called “tornados.” They were not the funnel clouds called “tornadoes” in the United States, but sharp, tumultuous line squalls that could sink a ship or bring terror to a village. Once the rainy season had ended, however, and the storms had passed, a regular weather pattern settled over the land. Leighton found the climate pleasant—perhaps as agreeable, he thought, as in any part of the United States. In the morning, from eight until eleven o’clock, the air was rather still and sultry. Then a sea breeze began to build, and from eleven until twelve at night the air was cool and damp. It was most likely at night after the sea breezes had subsided that the bearers of malaria arrived at Fair Hope.32
Among the many species of mosquitoes that filled the air at Cape Palmas was Anopheles. From deep in time it had brought much suffering and death to the coast of West Africa, and its body appeared to be designed for the task. From its compact head emerged thick spikes of hair, two antennae, and powerful mandibles. Its six legs were bristled and jointed, its wings light and strong, and its back arched for att
ack. Most formidable was the female. Hunting at night, from dusk to dawn, she punctured the skin of victims with her long proboscis and sucked blood until her body turned red and was full. When she bit a person infected with the protozoan Plasmodium, the Anopheles became infected herself with a malaria parasite. When she bit another person, that person became infected. The parasite entered the person’s liver, grew, spread into the blood, and invaded the red blood cells.33
Of course, in 1835 no one knew the role of a little mosquito in spreading malaria. The whites and the African Americans thought that the miasmas, the noxious vapors of swamps and decaying matter, were somehow the cause of the fevers, which were sometimes “intermittent” and sometimes “remittent.” When they were “intermittent,” the sufferer had periods of normal temperature followed by a high fever. When they were “remittent,” there were fluctuations of higher and lower temperatures, but no intervals of normal temperature. The two patterns, however, often seemed to overlap, and there was often uncertainty about the nature of the fever and how best to treat it.34
Whether intermittent or remittent, the fevers were devastating. The person struck felt first a sledgehammer attack of fever. Soon afterward, the whites of the eyes became tinged with yellow, and the tongue became covered with what nineteenth-century physicians called a “brownish fur.” The sufferer became sick to the stomach and would now and then vomit bile as the fever began to climb. And so the disease progressed, day by day, with rising and cooling, until it came to a crisis. Then the lips became purple and swollen, the tongue dark brown or black, clammy and offensive to the smell. The eyes became either dry or red and watery, and the urine was either much reduced in quantity or nonexistent; what urine remained was of a dark brown color and had a bad smell. The evacuations of the bowels were either black, bloody, and in quantity, or reddish and watery. The stomach became soft, as if filled with air. And sometimes, just before the sufferer died, blood was discharged from the bowels, nose, or mouth.35
Over long generations of suffering, West Africans had developed certain immunities to various kinds of malaria, and while they—and especially their children—continued to suffer its assaults, they did not have the extreme vulnerability to the disease that Europeans and European Americans had, who died like flies when they ventured onto the West African coast. Indeed, malaria had long acted as a kind of African shield against an invasion of whites and as a vengeful fury that pursued any slaver who dared to linger too long on the African coast.36
Sometime in early January 1835, Anopheles mosquitoes began entering Fair Hope, seeking a human blood meal. Leighton was struck first—then Margaret and Catherine, and finally Jane. Leighton wrote his family that they were all recovering, “yet we all expect occasional relapses. The fever is severe, and we all suffered much for a week or ten days, especially myself.” The headaches were excruciating, but Margaret and Catherine had relatively mild cases and quickly recovered. Jane, however, had a violent relapse: “My dear wife has been the greatest sufferer,” wrote her distraught husband. She was confined to her bed almost steadily for four weeks, and during this time she had a miscarriage. They did not know it then, but Leighton and Jane were to be childless—apparently the result of the repeated assaults of the fevers—a fate of most of the early missionaries to West Africa. Leighton later wrote Anderson about the dangers malaria posed for pregnant women: “A woman hazards her life by coming here in a state of advanced pregnancy. Very few indeed, thus situated, survive the ravages of the fever.” Jane’s miscarriage and their inability to have children was a deep sorrow for the young couple, especially for Jane, who took great delight in children. As the months and years passed and she began to realize she was not going to have children, she began to turn with even greater intensity and more tender care to the children who came to the mission schools.37
Leighton thought that he had passed through the worst of the fever, but in the middle of March he was suddenly struck with great violence. For weeks he appeared near death. Jane, weak and still recovering, struggled to nurse him back to health. She bathed and cleaned his fevered body, changed his bedding, prayed and prayed again and again, and watched Leighton fighting for his life. A growing apprehension and sense of isolation came over her, this young white woman from Savannah, as she struggled to ease Leighton’s suffering. The vastness of a great continent seemed to be engulfing her as she listened to the pounding surf and looked out across a lush, and to her unknown, African landscape and prayed beside the bed of her fevered husband. Dr. Hall, who was himself fighting the fever, sent instructions about what to do, so Jane gave Leighton powerful purges, including calomel, and then regular doses of opium intended to quiet him. But Leighton sank deeper into his suffering and became severely anemic, pale as death, and deranged.38
Freeman and other Grebo leaders were alarmed, for if Leighton died, so, too, did the promised schools. Because they believed the fever came not from some noxious miasmas or pestiferous vapors but from a malignant spirit lurking under the mission house, the Grebo gathered at Fair Hope to fight with their own medicine. First one and then another and then altogether they began to howl and shout as they hurled threatening and deprecatory language at the lurking spirit in a ritual intended to frighten it and chase it away. But their threats did not intimidate the spirit; the fever remained, and Leighton drew near to the grave. Hall struggled out of his own sickbed, came out to Fair Hope, and now began giving Leighton some quinine. Hall stayed beside Leighton for days and nights, not sure how much quinine to give, when to give it, or what else to give with it, but Leighton began to improve, although the recovery was slow.39
On June 15, Jane wrote Rufus Anderson that Leighton had been suffering from “brain fever.” “You would scarcely recognize,” she wrote, “the robust and cheerful young man in the now feeble and fevered frame of Mr. Wilson. Should he continue in this state of health would it not be duty dear Sir to return to our fathers’ land?” But she was not ready to give up. “The cause of God in Africa will ever be dear to our hearts and we both hope to spend and be spent for the good of her sons and daughters.”40
BY THE MIDDLE of July, Leighton was much better, and he and Jane, at Dr. Hall’s recommendation, took a short trip for their health on one of the trading ships going up and down the coast. They found being at sea refreshing, loved the feel of the wind and sun, and returned much restored in health and strength. But they were distressed by the slave ships they passed off the Liberian coast. “They hover along this coast,” wrote Leighton, “like so many birds of prey, and seize their victims under the eyes of Americans, but nobody is found for their relief.” They did not realize it at the time, but many of the slave ships they saw were American built and sold in Cuba or on the African coast for a handsome profit—especially the fast clippers built in Baltimore, the home of the Maryland Colonization Society. Leighton hoped that the introduction of Christianity among the coastal peoples would lead them to stop selling slaves to the Portuguese and Spanish for the Cuban and Brazilian markets, but he apparently did not have much hope for the Portuguese and Spanish who sailed the ships.41
In early August, the Wilsons finally plunged into their work. Leighton focused on learning Grebo—Simleh Ballah was his teacher, and they met every day of the week in the study at Fair Hope. Leighton quickly learned that the language presented more difficulties than he had anticipated. He would learn one pronunciation of a word or the structure of a sentence from Ballah, and then hear another pronunciation of the same word, or a different sentence construction, from someone else. He concluded that the language was more fluid than English because it was unwritten, which, he thought, must be the case, more or less, with every unwritten language. If there were a written standard, he wrote Anderson, “there would be of course fewer innovations and variations.” He thought “euphony in words and sentences seems to be the governing principle,” a principle that appeared to rule out any “uniformity whatever that I have been able to discover.” What was most strange to Leighton,
however, was the way the Grebo frequently separated the syllables of a verb and inserted between them the noun which was governed by the verb. He gave Anderson an example: “The verb occausea signifies to build and the noun ki is a house. Then the natural construction to us would seem to be occausea ki ‘to build a house.’ But they speak it occau-ki-sea.” So Leighton and Ballah met daily as Ballah sought to respond to Leighton’s questions and to teach him something about the language, and Leighton went into Big Town and tried out what he was learning. The Grebo laughed at his awkward use of the language—and he laughed with them—but Ballah encouraged him, saying that one day, he would speak it better than any of them. Leighton kept careful notes and began a vocabulary list, which in time he would have printed as the first Grebo dictionary. He also continued to struggle with the language’s grammar, seeking to systematize that which was so fluid, and from his notes he composed the first Grebo grammar, which he also had printed. He knew it was incomplete and most likely contained serious errors, but it was a beginning.42
This demanding language study by Leighton ultimately would have a profound impact on Grebo culture and society, imposing Western ideas of order and system onto the language. As he worked on his Grebo dictionary and grammar, Leighton was creating a standard Grebo dialect, used first in the mission schools and later in government schools. And he was also preparing the way for a shift in Grebo authority from oral storytellers to those who could read and write.43
But more immediately, working with the language opened for Leighton a window into Grebo life. As he met daily with Ballah and as he tried to talk with the residents of Big Town, he was visiting another world of thought and encountering a web of cultural practices that were a part of that world. Not incidentally, the Grebo—and especially Ballah and later William Davis—were his guides into that world. They were not passive as Leighton made his inquiries and drew his conclusions; rather, they actively made decisions about what to tell him and what not to tell him, interpreting for him the meaning of words and the significance of what Leighton was observing as he visited among the Grebo of Big Town and the neighboring villages. In this way, Leighton himself was being changed by the Grebo as they by him. The world he had brought with him to Cape Palmas—the world of Pine Grove and Union College and Charleston and Columbia—that world continued to rumble deep in his mind and imagination and to dominate his feelings, thoughts, and basic assumptions. But the world he brought with him was being enlarged by what Ballah was teaching him and by what he was learning as he walked through Big Town or sat on the piazza with Freeman.44
By the Rivers of Water Page 14