By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  In the end, Leighton sent his father certificates of freedom for John and Jesse. “If John and Jesse,” he said, “would go to one of the free States, I would be greatly pleased. But if they prefer to remain on the plantation and work as heretofore, then let them do so, with the understanding that they may leave whenever they choose to do so.” Leighton thought that if the whole matter were not “noised abroad,” then only family would know that he had freed them, and no one in the neighborhood would feel disposed to disturb them. If, however, word got out that they had been freed, then they could be sent out of the state. “I feel assured,” he wrote his father, “that you will do the best for them that you can.” And he added: “I commend them to the care of the Lord.”21

  So at Leighton’s instructions, both men continued to live at Boggy Gully, only now as free men. They received a small income from their work plus their board and clothing. They had their taxes paid by Leighton’s father. John became what Leighton’s brother Sam called “something of a carpenter” and made extra money for himself by building kitchen furniture, flour boxes, and other household items, which he readily sold. Young Jessie did what brother Sam called “light labour” for a few years and lived in the cabin with his mother. Later he took up the hard labor of a farmhand, married, and lived with his wife close to the waters of Boggy Gully.22

  PART III

  Life Among the Mpongwe

  Chapter Fourteen

  Toko and the Waterwitch

  When Leighton had left Cape Palmas in the spring of 1842, he did not know what lay ahead of him or what the future of the mission might be. He only knew that he and Benjamin Griswold had to find an alternative to Fair Hope, and that Captain Lawlin had told them that Gabon was a good possibility. From the start of the trip south, however, Leighton had been restless, worried about what lay ahead, and he had missed Jane terribly. Except for Leighton’s short trips into the interior, they had been together constantly since their marriage eight years earlier.

  As Lawlin had sailed the Atalanta further and further south, Leighton had poured out his heart in letters to Jane, who was then waiting at Cape Palmas for Lawlin to return and take her to the United States. “My dear wife,” Leighton wrote, “I was little aware how severe a duty I was imposing both upon you and myself when I proposed a separation of nine months or a year.” He said his time with her had been the eight happiest years of his life, happier than all the rest of his life put together. He wrote that while their early years together had been all “fervor and glow, the longer and more matured part of our life has been the season of a steadily growing affection.” He felt overwhelmed when he remembered how as a young bride she had cared for him during his long and deranged bout with malaria. She had been a lonely woman on the coast of Africa watching over what she thought was a dying husband. He told her that her name and image were constantly in his mind, and that, thinking of her, he was encouraged, even though he was sailing toward an unknown destination. Standing on the Atalanta’s deck and watching mile after mile of African coastline passing slowly before him, Leighton had felt his world shifting and its foundations shaking, and only his sense of a guiding providence, of a higher purpose for their lives, had kept him from becoming seriously depressed.1

  To help keep his melancholy in check, Leighton turned his attention to the passing African coastline. He took careful note of its rivers and lagoons, and noted the changing contours of the land—from the high tableland of the Ivory Coast to the hills of the Gold Coast to the mountains of Cameroon. When Captain Lawlin went ashore, Leighton and his traveling companions accompanied him. They spent a few days at Elmina and a week at Cape Coast, and Leighton had time to visit once again the sites where years earlier so many slaves had been kept in wretched dungeons before being shipped to Jamaica or Cuba or Charleston or some other place of waiting slave markets. With him on these visits was not only Griswold but also a Dr. McDowell. The doctor was an artist of sorts, who kept busy throughout the whole trip drawing scenes of a passing mainland and of West African life. On his return to Cape Palmas, McDowell would give Jane a collection of his sketches.2

  WHEN THEY HAD finally reached Gabon, Lawlin had taken the Atalanta slowly into the wide estuary—about fourteen miles across where it met the Atlantic. They sailed along the north shore past Point Clara and Qua Ben’s Town before the Atalanta came to anchor off King Glass’s Town. Glass—his Mpongwe name was R’Ogouarouwé—was the “Big Man” of the Agekaza clan of the Mpongwe people, and his town was the most important trading center in the region (although it, along with the other Mpongwe towns, was small in comparison to Big Town). Glass had immediately come out to greet them in a neat sailing boat. With him was Lawlin’s trading partner and old friend Toko. They had been wanting an English school to be established for their children, and they said they would build a school if Leighton and Griswold established their mission at Glass’s Town. Toko invited all of the Cape Palmas newcomers to stay in his home—a large and comfortable house with a number of rooms and European furniture. Dr. McDowell drew a handsome sketch of Toko and of Yanaway, most likely a daughter of Glass, and Leighton and Griswold quickly concluded that they had found the place for the new mission.3

  Griswold wrote the mission board to give the reasons for their decision. There was, he said, no other mission in the estuary, so there would be no duplication of mission work. The Mpongwe were eager to have schools and they were, Griswold thought, among the most civilized people they had encountered on the West African coast—he was most impressed by their sailboats, which were far more sophisticated than the dugout canoes he had seen used by others. Yet, in spite of their sophistication, they were a people, he said, deeply in need of the Christian gospel—they were unmistakably pagan, with their greegree houses at the entrances to their towns and with charms that covered their bodies to “preserve themselves from sickness, defend themselves from danger, and deliver themselves from the evil spirit.” Griswold wrote that the location of Glass’s Town by the shores of the estuary was also a reason he and Leighton had selected it as the place for the new mission—the rivers that emptied into the estuary provided easy transportation into the interior and promised access to people far removed from the coast. And finally, Gabon seemed—for Africa—a healthy place, although Griswold was quick to say that “no one must come to Africa who will shrink from suffering or who is afraid of death.”4

  Leighton wrote Jane that “The Gaboon,” as he called the Gabon region, “is a new chapter in my African experience. Things are greatly different from anything we have ever before seen in Africa. The river itself (I think it should rather be denominated a bay) is a noble one, and opposite the place where we are to live is greatly enlivened by beautiful sailboats flying in every direction.” The place they were to live was just outside of King Glass’s Town, about half a mile from the shore on a hill called Baraka. In earlier years there had been a Portuguese slave barracoon there, and one of the first tasks before the missionaries was clearing away the bones of slaves whose bodies had simply been dragged away and left in the bush—an ominous sign of things to come.5

  While Lawlin was still in the estuary trading and negotiating with Toko, Leighton and Griswold hurried to learn as much as they could about the area. One day they secured a boat and sailed across the estuary—almost twenty miles—to the south shore to visit the town of King William, who was also called King Denis by the French and Antchouwe Kowe Rapontchombo by the Mpongwe. Both Leighton and Griswold were immediately impressed. Leighton described the king as a man of medium stature, with a compact and well-formed frame and great muscular power. He was about sixty years old and had a very black complexion that contrasted wonderfully with his large, snow-white beard. Leighton thought he had mild and expressive eyes and a gentle and persuasive voice that was friendly and dignified. He was, Leighton thought, the most king-like man he had ever met in Africa. Griswold also found him to possess a remarkably pleasant face. Seldom, Griswold remarked, had he “seen a man more agreeable
in his manners. His intercourse with his people seemed marked with kindness, mildness, dignity and authority.” The king showed them his Legion of Honor medal, which he had received from the French for his aid to French sailors, and a gold medal from Queen Victoria for rescuing four British sailors. He spoke French and Pidgin English and most likely some Portuguese and Spanish. He was clearly an impressive person, but the missionaries would later learn that he was also a much more complicated person than they at first perceived.6

  William received them warmly and invited them to dinner. Unlike the Grebo, who would have had Leighton and Griswold sit on the ground with them to eat, William ushered them to chairs at a table set with silver knives, forks, and spoons. The king had a fine meal served to his guests—including wine and champagne, which the missionaries politely refused. Afterward, he took them to see some of his town. They saw manacled slaves, many of whom belonged to the king, and learned to their mortification that most of the slavers used ships built in New England for the slave trade. They were told the ships had been sailed to Cuba, where slavers had purchased them at a handsome price.7

  The missionaries, in spite of their positive impressions of the king, were clearly disturbed by what they perceived to be his engagement with the slave trade. They had every right to be. William took them a short distance from town and showed them a barracoon kept by a diseased and short-tempered Spaniard. Leighton wrote Jane telling her what they found. “Think of four hundred and thirty naked savages of both sexes, of all ages, sizes and conditions, brought together in one enclosure chained together as gangs of twenty, thirty and forty and all compelled to sleep on the same platform, eat out of the same tub, and in almost every respect live like so many swine. More than this, on the middle passage they must have still more circumscribed quarters and live on much scanter fare. But God reigns and this vile trade in human beings must come to an end.”8

  But more horrors were to come. A few days after their visit, the missionaries were informed that two men had escaped and had been recaptured. Brought back, they were tied up in the center of the barracoon, while all the people were made to stand around them and watch the terror that was to follow. The enraged Spaniard went into the midst of the people with his gun. While the two men watched, he charged it with powder and balls, and then walked within a few feet of the first man and fired directly into him. In his fury he recharged his gun and fired again and again, blowing the man apart as his terrified companion watched. He then turned to the second man, who, wrote Griswold, “stood by waiting a similar fate, which he received so soon as the Spaniard had glutted his vengeance upon his companion.”9

  Neither Leighton nor Griswold had been so close before to such degradation or witnessed such sickening violence as that done by the Spaniard. Even the terrors of the sassy wood ordeal did not compare to such brutality. Leighton wrote Jane that he hoped never again to “visit a similar scene of human degradation.” Griswold had his abolitionist’s commitments strengthened. He wrote up what had happened and sent it back to Boston for publication and for the stirring of public outrage.10

  NOT LONG AFTER Griswold departed with Lawlin and Dr. McDowell to return to Cape Palmas and his confrontation with King Freeman over stolen goods, Leighton began traveling regularly around the estuary. He was eager to visit various towns and talk with kings or the local Big Men about the establishment of schools. Toko was his primary guide. As the leading trader on the north shore, he had extensive contacts and an intimate knowledge of the region. Leighton estimated that he did $12,000 or $15,000 of business each year. The missionary was amazed that Toko could manage a business of this extent “in the smallest fractions and driblets, without the aid of any written accounts.” Yet it was done, Leighton wrote in his journal, with the utmost accuracy, without any other aid than that of Toko’s memory. The result was that Toko lived, it seemed to Leighton, in a respectable style and associated with foreigners on terms of a general equality.11

  Leighton developed an almost immediate affection for Toko. The Mpongwe trader was hospitable, humorous, drank only a little rum, and was, above all, honest and dependable. About forty years old when Leighton first met him, Toko was of medium height with a dark black complexion. He possessed, Leighton wrote, “a very remarkable and intelligent countenance, strongly marked with the deep vein of natural humor which pervades his whole composition.” Although wealthy, he was careless in his dress and unpretentious in his manners, but, Leighton noted, “his shrewdness and unbounded humor, almost in spite of himself, peer out at every turn in conversation.” A great talker and storyteller, Toko on his frequent visits to Baraka could keep Leighton laughing late into the night—not an easy task with the serious missionary.12

  Leighton compared Toko’s storytelling with that of King William on the south shore. Both men, Leighton wrote, were familiar with all the traditional stories of their ancestors and had their minds amply stored with fables, allegories, and proverbial sayings. Leighton thought the king, who was more formal in his deportment, was precise and very cautious in all his statements. When telling a story to white men, Leighton wrote, “he is careful not to state anything too hard for their credence. He keeps his own fancy under restraint and is much more apt to take from than to add to the current stories of the country.” Leighton thought William’s stories more reliable than Toko’s, as the king “deals more in actual facts than fictitious representations.” So Leighton listened carefully to what William said in order to learn what he could about the history of the Mpongwe and the customs of the people.13

  But if Leighton tried to learn from William’s stories, he loved and delighted in Toko’s. Toko, he said, knew nothing of William’s restraint. “When he sets out to rehearse one of his favorite fables, all his humor is at once stirred up, and he yields himself to the spirit of his story. He is all glee himself, and the hearer cannot for his life avoid being carried along with him. The wild animals of the woods are summoned before his audience, they are endued with all the cunning and shrewdness of man, and before you are aware of it, you have before your imagination a perfect drama.” Leighton found that Toko had no misgivings about exceeding the credulity of his hearers—his humor was constantly prompting him to test just how far he could take someone into the world of his imagination, and Leighton thought that he sometimes purposely stretched his points so far as to turn the whole story into outright burlesque. Toko’s humor was clearly infectious. When he laughed, his whole body shook—he began to abandon himself to his laughter and to bend slowly to his right as his laughter overflowed from deep within him, spilling onto his hearers the surprises and inconsistencies of his story. He seemed to know instinctively that his humor and laughter came from uncovering, with a surprising twist in a story, the often hidden ambiguities and pretensions of life. Things were not always what they seemed, especially for white men. Toko told of Engena, the “largest and most powerful of the monkey tribe, and of Telinga, the smallest.” Telinga, a shrewd and funny little fellow, tricked the powerful Engena into giving him his daughter for a bride. But the powerful animals of the forest, indignant that such a little monkey as Telinga should win the hand of the belle of the forest, drove Telinga away. So he “sprang into the nearest tree, and, ascending to its highest boughs, vowed never again to live on the ground, where there is so much violence and injustice.” If Toko ever gave any hint that he thought Telinga might reflect something of his own experiences and hopes or those of someone else, Leighton never noted it.14

  In time, Leighton came to realize that such fables and Toko’s laughter and humor were deeply linked to love—to Toko’s love for the Mpongwe people and for their traditions and ways. And Leighton, almost in spite of himself, found, as his listened to Toko and laughed with him, that he was in fact learning something from Toko, not only about the Mpongwe—the character and habits of the people and the geography of the country—but also about what it means to be human, with all of the hopes and fears, ironies, and deep ambiguities of human life.15

&nb
sp; SHORTLY AFTER HIS arrival in Gabon in the summer of 1842, Leighton went with Toko to his plantation, which was a short distance from Glass’s Town. When they arrived, they found Toko’s wives working with his slaves as they prepared fields for planting plantains, cassava, yams, sweet potatoes, groundnuts, corn, pumpkins, and beans. Most of Toko’s slaves lived on the plantation in the ompindi—a slave settlement close to the fields. Largely isolated from free people during most of the year, the slaves were joined by Toko’s wives during planting and harvest time. Toko, like other rich Mpongwe men, only visited his plantations occasionally, giving most of his time to his work as a trader. When Leighton and Toko arrived, the women prepared a rich feast whose main course was fufu, made of green plantains mashed and shaped into long rolls and wrapped in plantain leaves. Leighton found it softer and more spongy than what he had usually eaten at Cape Palmas, but nevertheless tasty. A sauce, the consistency of butter, was made of parched peanuts pounded and baked with dried fish and was served with the fufu. It, too, was tasty, but Leighton found it rather rich. The man who had grown up by the waters of the Black River was being introduced to the particular flavors and textures of Mpongwe cuisine and to the particular character of Mpongwe slavery. They were distinct and different from what he had known before, but they were also familiar and pointed toward links in an Atlantic world.16