By the Rivers of Water
Page 24
Shortly before Wasa brought Maria to Leighton, Margaret Strobel and her daughter, Catherine, returned to Fair Hope. The little school that Margaret had been running in Harper had been taken over by an African American Methodist minister—most of the settler children were Methodist—and Leighton had not objected. So Leighton had a small cottage built for the mother and daughter at Fair Hope, and Catherine joined Jane as a teacher in the boarding school. Margaret once again took up the vocation she had practiced in Savannah, becoming a seamstress. In this way, the mission was able to provide, along with food, clothing for all the Grebo students.19
The Wilsons did not intend to teach adult Grebo. The young couple thought the habits, temperaments, and ways of thinking among adults had been so deeply embedded since childhood that Jane’s limited resources and energy could best be focused on teaching children. Adults, they hoped, could be reached through Leighton’s preaching, once he learned enough of the Grebo language to undertake such a daunting task. But when Simleh Ballah and William Davis came to Leighton and asked to be taught to read and write in English, he and Jane thought they could not turn them down. Both men had spent time as Leighton’s teacher, translator, and interpreter and had explained to him much about Grebo ways. So Leighton, in a spirit of mutuality, took on the responsibility of being their teacher, even as he remained their student—and they became his students, even as they remained his teachers.20
Both men impressed Leighton with their quick minds, but he was amazed by William Davis. On the day Davis began his lessons, he came into Leighton’s study with his daughter, Mary Clealand. Sitting on her father’s lap, she began to teach him the English alphabet. “In half an hour from the time the book was first opened to him,” Leighton reported, “and having no other teacher than his own child, he thoroughly learned every character in the Alphabet. And in less than six months he could not only read, but wrote an intelligible note.” Leighton, thinking no doubt of the trouble he was having learning Grebo, wrote Rufus Anderson, saying that Davis’s “progress in learning so far is unequalled by anything I have ever known either in America or Africa.” In a letter to the Johns Island Presbyterian Church, where Sunday by Sunday a small group of wealthy South Carolina slave owners gathered with their slaves to worship, Leighton wrote about Jane’s students. “The progress of the children,” he insisted, “in learning I would not say is good but extraordinary. A large proportion of the boys and girls can read the English testament with as much ease and facility as the children of similar ages and advantages in any school in the world. I am aware that many persons regard the inhabitants of Africa as a stupid, dull race of men, but I feel confident no one would who would look into the progress of these children.” He then told the white Carolinians about Davis and his accomplishments and intellectual gifts. In this way Leighton found that the students at Fair Hope, whatever their ages, served to challenge deeply entrenched stereotypes and to refute claims that mission work among Africans was well-meaning but naive—an effort to reach those who were incapable of understanding or internalizing the Christian gospel. Leighton and Jane hoped and prayed that their work and their reports would stir the hearts and imaginations of those at home and kindle within some the courage to follow an ocean highway to Cape Palmas.21
SO THE WORK at Fair Hope was going forward, not only in the schools, but in other areas as well—even with the mission’s restricted resources. Perhaps most remarkable was the work of the newly established press and of the African American printer B. V. R. James. Before James arrived in late 1836, Leighton and Jane had already discovered that the English alphabet contained some letters whose sounds were not used in Grebo—c, j, q, v, x, and z. They had also found that they needed some simple and suitable characters to denote Grebo sounds that were not contained in the English alphabet. But because there was no single way of ascribing a letter of the alphabet to an individual sound in the Grebo language, difficult decisions had to be made. Using the orthography developed by John Pickering for American Indian languages, Leighton had transcribed individual sounds in the Grebo language into Latin characters with a distinct Grebo alphabet, then ordered the necessary fonts for the press from Boston.22
With the proper materials in hand, James began to print an amazing number of books and pamphlets. In March 1839, the mission at Fair Hope reported what had been printed during the previous year. In 1838, James had printed 1,500 copies of a twenty-page Grebo “First Reading Book”; 1,370 copies of a Grebo vocabulary and dictionary; 382 copies of a Grebo grammar; and 600 copies each of pamphlets on “The Story of Joseph” and the Gospel of John. In addition to several thousand copies of other pamphlets, the Gospel of Matthew had been translated into Grebo, and 1,720 copies had been printed. Altogether, James had printed 181,532 pages in one year. He had also started printing materials for the Episcopal mission at Cape Palmas and the Baptist mission at Basa Cove on the Liberian coast. The missionaries clearly hoped that literacy would flow rapidly from mission schools and that reading and writing would help to spread new information and perspectives. But literacy would also challenge older ways of remembering and the authority of old traditions.23
Leighton, in conversation with Jane and James, had to make decisions about what to print and in what order. Most critical was the decision to translate parts of the Bible from the Greek and publish them in Grebo. First came the Gospel of Matthew, and shortly thereafter the Acts of the Apostles. To undertake such translations and publications was a daunting task, and it involved critical judgments. The three missionaries at Fair Hope were committed to raising up a Grebo church as quickly as possible, and they envisioned it having Grebo leaders and a Grebo Bible. In this they were reflecting the broad commitments of the Protestant mission movement as well as the particular commitments of the American Board. But what books of the Bible to translate first? Should they start with Genesis or maybe Psalms, or what about Paul’s Letter to the Romans? What was the best starting point for the Grebo journey into the strange world of the Bible? The missionaries apparently decided on Matthew and Acts because they believed that these two books conveyed the story of early Christianity and the essential message of the gospel in the most accessible possible way for the Grebo.24
Matthew begins with a genealogy and is marked by vivid stories and parables—the birth of Jesus and the visit of the Wise Men; the devil tempting Jesus in the wilderness; the Sermon on the Mount; the Lord’s Prayer; the sick and the blind being healed and demons being cast out of afflicted people; the feeding of the 5,000; a parable about seeds and a sower; and the story of the Last Supper, of Jesus being betrayed and crucified, and of his resurrection from the dead. Acts provides the earliest history of the church and its missionary efforts, but it, too, contains memorable stories: the lame being healed, Stephen being stoned to death, the conversion of an African and other gentiles, Paul’s conversion, exorcisms of demons, Peter breaking out of prison with the help of an angel, and Paul being shipwrecked.
These stories were well received by the Grebo, who were themselves great storytellers. They believed in the power of words and were concerned about healing and malevolent forces in their world. And the Grebo learned in Acts that the Greeks and Romans did not have to become Jews to be Christians, that they did not have to renounce most of their old culture to be followers of Jesus. They heard Paul announce to the Athenians that he had noticed that they had an altar “to an unknown god,” and that he had come to tell them of the One whom they had been seeking.25
With these two books and their vivid stories, the Grebo encountered a Christian message that addressed important aspects of their everyday life. And they encountered a religious faith that seemed to allow them to add new beliefs and practices onto many of their traditional ways, which did not have to be discarded in order for them to become Christian. In this way, Matthew and Acts provided pivotal and foundational stories for an emerging Grebo Christianity; in time, as Christianity expanded rapidly across the continent, they became favorite books of the Bible a
cross Africa.26
Leighton, of course, did not translate these books or write a Grebo grammar and dictionary on his own. First, Simleh Ballah was his Grebo translator and teacher, and then, for a short while, Wasa Baker, but it was Mworeh Mah—William Davis—who worked with him most intensely and for the longest time. Davis thus played a key role in what poured from James’s press. Translation was a complicated process of reciprocity between missionary and Grebo teacher. What Grebo word was to be used for “God”? Could a Grebo deity’s name be used? What about the word for “soul” or “righteousness,” “sin” or “love”? What Grebo language was to be used to describe Jesus rising from the dead? Great care had to be taken, and Davis was no passive participant in the process. He spent long hours and several years with Leighton teaching him about the nuances of Grebo language and culture. In this way, the gospel stories began to be more than foreign imports by missionaries, or the reflection of some cultural imperialism—they began to be indigenized by Davis and other translators, and through them the gospel stories were carried by Grebo words and grammar deep into Grebo culture.27
Leighton did not fully realize it at the time, but by translating the biblical stories, he was setting the stories free from his control—the Bible was on its way to becoming a Grebo Bible. As the Grebo began their move from being an oral culture to a literate culture, first Matthew and Acts and then other biblical books carried great symbolic power and authority as written texts. Leighton himself found that the word “book” was a symbol of intelligence among Africans, and he once recounted an African fable that attributed the power of whites to their possession of the arts of reading and writing. Consequently, when literate Grebo began reading aloud from the Grebo Bible in Grebo towns and villages, it seemed an almost miraculous phenomenon that demonstrated a marvelous new power. A new divine word was coming to them in their own language, making the Grebo tongue, the vernacular language of the people, the bearer of the divine. Yet, because this new divine word was coming to them in their own language, the word was not simply new, but also old. A pre-Christian past with its religious life was being embedded in a Grebo Christianity through the conventions of speech. And the Grebo, like other peoples before and after them, began to identify with the people and stories of the Bible and to claim the Bible’s message for themselves.28
Even the operation of the printing press itself was beginning to pass into Grebo hands. Shortly after James arrived, two young Grebo men from the school at Fair Hope—both recently converted to Christianity—became his apprentices. One, Francis Allison, was soon sent to New York to learn bookbinding as a part of the mission strategy of the American Board. The board, wrote Rufus Anderson, wanted indigenous people around the world who were trained in the art of printing wherever the mission had presses. The hope was that gradually the books written by missionaries and the scriptures translated by missionaries would be replaced by those which were written, translated, and printed by indigenous peoples. The goal was to encourage Grebo and other indigenous authors and to incite their literary labors through the activity of their own presses.29
WITH THE APPRENTICES helping with his printing responsibilities, James was able to give some of his time to teaching at Fair Hope. He quickly established himself as a gifted teacher and won the affection and admiration of his students. Leighton and Jane greatly admired him and were secretly pleased when James began showing some romantic interest in Catherine Strobel. Catherine had been a young girl when she and her mother had lived in Savannah, and she had only fading memories of life in Georgia. She had quickly become bilingual after they had arrived at Cape Palmas. By early 1839, she was a bright and attractive nineteen-year-old. Both Leighton and Jane admired her and enjoyed her company. James, who was twenty-five at the time, was apparently as inept in courting her, however, as Leighton had been with Margaret Adger in Charleston, and he was soon to find himself in an awkward situation.
James and Catherine were both living at the mission, teaching at the mission, and having their meals at the mission with Leighton and Jane. But so was Catherine’s mother. Leighton, who was largely oblivious to such matters, was apparently warned by Jane that Margaret, who was thirty-five, was taking an interest in James. So daughter and mother soon began to compete for James’s attention. Leighton tried to warn James about “being entrapped by the mother while he was seeking the hand of the daughter.” Although Leighton worked well with Margaret, he and Jane thought her a much less attractive person than her daughter—they did not think they could always rely on her and found her fickle and preoccupied with herself. Moreover, wrote Leighton, “she renders herself personally offensive by the free use of tobacco”—she liked her pipe and snuff and simply ignored the Wilsons’ objections.30
When Leighton talked to James about Margaret, James seemed surprised and assured Leighton that she would be the last person in the world that he would think of marrying. But perhaps the suggestion caused James to take note of the mother, for shortly thereafter, James announced that they were engaged. The Wilsons were obviously disappointed in his choice. Leighton wrote Anderson: “Mr. James has been exemplary in a very remarkable degree for piety, industry, and devotion to the missionary work, and there is scarcely an individual of his acquaintance who has not loved and esteemed him.” When Leighton and Jane had learned of the engagement, Leighton wrote, matters had gone so far that they did not feel that they could express any reservation. “We had no right and we felt no inclination to interfere,” Leighton said, and so they tried to be supportive in the face of the announced engagement. “We therefore showed them,” he told Anderson, “all the attention on the occasion of the marriage which the circumstances of the case and Christian propriety would allow.”31
Leighton had a house built for them at Fair Hope of approximately the same size and design as his and Jane’s, and he recommended that his own annual salary be reduced from $500 to $400 so that James, as a married man, might receive the same amount as Leighton. As for Catherine, she was left feeling very little respect for James, and Leighton feared she would become a thorn in James’s side. She apparently lived with the Wilsons for a while before moving in with her mother and new stepfather, reconciling herself to the marriage. They became a family of three, and in four years, when Margaret had a child, Catherine became a loving aunt. She never married, and the Wilsons’ fears never materialized. The James/Strobel family settled down to a long, happy, and influential life together as missionaries on the coast of West Africa. And James and Paul Sansay became friends, and during the coming years, the printer from New York and the carpenter from Savannah worked together to build up what they increasingly regarded as their African homeland.32
Chapter Eleven
The Conversion of William Davis (Mworeh Mah)
Tensions, perhaps inevitably, continued to build between the mission at Fair Hope and the colony at Harper, between the white Wilsons from Georgia and South Carolina and the African American settlers seeking to escape American racism and the bitter legacies of slavery. In the midst of these tensions stood not only Big Town and the surrounding Grebo people but also the African Americans—especially B. V. R. James—who were a part of the mission and deeply committed to its life and purposes.
For his part, Leighton thought that his early fears were being realized—that the proximity of the mission to the colony had turned out to be an impediment to the work at Fair Hope. The disdain the colonists had for the Grebo, their imperialistic intentions toward Grebo land, and their readiness to go to war with the Grebo were not just distractions; they were a genuine threat to the work at Fair Hope and the other recently established schools in neighboring towns. Leighton consequently began to look around and to wonder: Did they need to give up all the work they had done at Fair Hope and all their study of the Grebo language and culture, to abandon the Grebo of Cape Palmas, and establish a new mission far from the influence of the African American colonists and their white sponsors in Baltimore? It increasingly seemed to Leighton a b
itter and infuriating necessity.
Yet from the outset, Fair Hope had been considered a launching spot for missions to the interior and to the large populations known to exist in many other parts of West Africa. Leighton’s explorations in 1835 and 1836 had been early attempts to get some idea of the countryside and the people who lived beyond the immediate vicinity of the Cape. In the spring of 1837, however, he made his most extensive exploration of the interior in the hope of finding in the fabled Kong Mountains some suitable location far beyond the influence of the colonial settlement.1
With William Davis as his guide and interpreter and several other Grebo men as companions and porters, Leighton set out for the Pah country far up the Cavally River. The Pah, reported to be a numerous people, were said to live in the Kong Mountains—those distant peaks that Leighton and Simleh Ballah had seen on their excursion to Bolobo. Leighton now hoped to find on their high slopes a promising land far from settlers that might have a healthier landscape than the coastal regions with their mangrove swamps and miasmas.2