In coming years, African Christians, in all of their diversity, would see this introduced figure that Leighton saw—Satan—in light of those familiar and terrifying figures that came out of the shadows to dance and threaten on moonlit nights. But in this new devil, this Satan, they would see personified not only a terrifying figure on stilts, not only a part of their old religion, but the personification of all evil that threatens to hurt or destroy human life. And against this devil, this Satan, whatever his disguise, they would engage in “spiritual warfare,” trusting the gospel of a powerful new African Christianity to protect believers and to cast out all fear.31
TOKO FINALLY FINISHED his negotiations, and the Waterwitch returned to Glass’s Town. Shortly thereafter, Toko sold his handsome boat for a handsome price to a Spanish slave trader at King William’s Town. It was the same trader who a few months earlier had blown apart the two slaves who had escaped his barracoon. The Spaniard wanted to use the Waterwitch to ferry slaves out to waiting ships.32
And Leighton wrote up his adventure with Toko on the Waterwitch and sent the story to Rufus Anderson, who published it in the Missionary Herald. Then, in parlors in Boston, Philadelphia, and Savannah, on the piazza at Pine Grove, and all across the country, white men and women—Bayards, Henrys, and Hodges; Clays and Wilsons; and a host of others—read of Toko and the Waterwitch, of Passall and Kobangai, of Fang moving toward the coast, and of a “devil raising” in a tropical village in far-off Africa. And in the reading and in the telling of such a missionary narrative, many no doubt had their images of Africa both reinforced and challenged.33
But such narratives were not confined to whites. On some plantations in the Lowcountry, pious plantation owners on Sunday afternoons read to Gullah slaves stories from a white missionary who had grown up by the Black River not far from Boggy Gully. Whatever the purposes of whites in reading such stories to slaves, the hearing of such stories provided a reminder to Gullah people—a reminder that the way life was ordered in the Lowcountry was not the way life was ordered everywhere, that whites were not always owners and blacks were not always slaves. In unintentional ways, stories about Toko and African kings, about the handsome Waterwitch and even a “devil raising,” may have helped to undercut on some plantations white attempts to control the imaginations of slaves. It is, of course, impossible to know, but perhaps when some Gullah heard of Toko, they imagined new and subversive alternatives to white power and white rule.34
Chapter Fifteen
A Sophisticated, Hospitable, and Heathen People
In late winter 1843, Leighton went to Cape Palmas to wait anxiously for Jane’s return from her visit to the United States. Although she had written a number of letters, none of them had reached him in Gabon, so he was uncertain that she had even arrived safely in New York. To his immense relief, when he reached Cape Palmas he found that a letter from Margaret Eckard had arrived—Jane was well, had been busy visiting family, and expected to sail in the spring with Captain Lawlin. Leighton consequently turned his attention to the final details of closing what remained of the Fair Hope mission and to the publication of several small tracts in Mpongwe. He had with him a Mpongwe interpreter who was helping him prepare the tracts and who was working with him on the details of the language. Leighton had spent less than a year in Gabon and he was already preparing a simple publication in the local language. He had already found Mpongwe a much easier language to master than Grebo.1
He stayed with B. V. R. James and Margaret and Catherine at Fair Hope. Margaret had recently given birth to a little girl, and the James family was staying at the old mission station until the child safely passed through the seasoning fever. So Leighton worked on completing the Mpongwe tracts, and James printed them. First came a sixteen-page “Colloquial Sentences in English and Gaboon,” followed by “Scripture Questions,” “Scripture Precepts,” and then “Hymns in Gaboon”—five hundred copies of each. After the printing was completed, Leighton and James carefully boxed the press. They made preliminary arrangements for the cottage to be sold to George McGill and for the little cemetery to be kept neat and cleared of grass and underbrush. Final arrangements had to be made as well for former students. Most had already been placed in the Episcopal mission at Half Cavally, but there were some who were eager to join the new mission in Gabon. Among these were Wasa and Maria. They had had good success with their little mission at Sarekeh and they wanted to go and establish a school among the Mpongwe.2
Leighton also talked with William Davis about his daughter, Mary Clealand. Davis had brought her to Jane when the school had first opened at Fair Hope, and she had quickly become one of Jane’s star students. Now, in 1843, Davis agreed to her request that she go with Jane and Leighton to join the mission among the Mpongwe. Neither Davis nor Jane nor Leighton could have imagined the important role this beautiful young Grebo woman would have in the early history of the church in Gabon.3
WHEN JANE FINALLY arrived at Cape Palmas, she and Leighton had a wonderful, happy reunion, and both vowed there would never again be such a voluntary separation. Jane brought with her Jane Cooper, a free woman of color from Savannah, who had agreed to come out and help Jane and be a teacher at the new school at Baraka. She was not officially under the American Board—the Wilsons paid all her expenses themselves and provided her salary—but for the next seven years she would be an important part of the mission. Also on the ship was the Grebo printer Francis Allison. He had spent six months in New York studying bookbinding and was to become the printer in Gabon.4
After a short stay at the Cape, Captain Lawlin pulled anchor and sailed the Atalanta once again for Gabon. With him were twelve who had come on board from Fair Hope—Grebo, African American, and European American men and women. Their destination was Baraka.5
WHEN THE ATALANTA disappeared on the southern horizon, Russwurm wrote Latrobe that the abandoned land at Fair Hope should not be given to any other mission. It was, he said, too valuable and too contiguous to Harper to be deeded to any other society. Shortly thereafter, Russwurm’s father-in-law, George McGill, who had already bought and dismantled most of the Fair Hope buildings, took possession of the former mission land. There, where in the evenings the fires of Big Town could be seen glowing in the distance and night winds stirred tall palms, McGill set about building warehouses for the little settler community at Harper. And Russwurm wrote Latrobe to let “the name of Fair Hope die.”6
TEN DAYS AFTER leaving Cape Palmas, Captain Lawlin ran the Atalanta toward a long, low cape on the south side of the Gabon estuary, then tacked sharply and headed for the north shore. The travelers saw stretching out before them a magnificent body of blue water that mirrored the tropical sky. To the north and to the south, shorelines of dense forests appeared to hold the waters of the estuary in place like giant pincers. Lawlin sailed the Atalanta along the high and rolling north shore toward King Glass’s town. Watchful eyes spied the brig and the captain’s familiar insignia. William Walker and some Mpongwe quickly launched a little sailboat and came alongside. After a brief reunion on deck, the travelers climbed down the ship’s ladder and were soon headed for the beach.7
When the sailboat hit sand some twenty or thirty yards from the beach, Mpongwe men came splashing through the water to carry Jane and the other women ashore. As Jane was lifted by strong black arms, perhaps she remembered her first arrival at Cape Palmas. Then, singing Grebo canoe men had taken her through the crashing Atlantic surf to the beach, where King Freeman and a multitude of shouting, largely naked Grebo had greeted her and her young husband.
Now, as she set her feet on the shore at Glass’s Town, Jane found a crowd of Mpongwe, handsomely dressed, many in European fashion, waiting to shake the hand of each traveler in a gentle manner and to say to each: “Mbolo”—“May you live to be old.” Leighton knew many of the Mpongwe already, and their greetings to him were warm and enthusiastic. The travelers made their way up from the shore through the crowd and into the town—a single street ran before them and up
a hill toward the mission at Baraka. As they entered the town, they saw bamboo houses set close together on both sides of the street—they were larger than any Jane had seen at Big Town or elsewhere along the coast.8
At the upper end of the town, at the highest point, they came to the king’s house. King Glass, as was his custom, was waiting for the newcomers. Seated in a chair in front of his house, he wore a coat and stovepipe hat and held in his hand a staff. He, too, gave a warm welcome to Leighton, for they had spent much time together during Leighton’s first stay. The king extended his welcome to Jane and the others from the Atalanta. For his own reasons, Glass was pleased that the Americans had established their mission at the edge of his town.9
Jane could see that the king was a rheumy-eyed old man, probably in his early nineties when they met, but still a shrewd trader and political leader. His once dark and shiny skin was deeply wrinkled and had taken on an increasingly crusty, ash-colored look. He still claimed he was “the greatest rum drinker in the River,” and William Walker agreed, thinking “there is no one who will dispute his claim to this distinction.” He had many wives and even more slaves—Leighton had earlier estimated that he owned at least two hundred.10
The headman of his village since 1839, Glass—R’Ogouarouwé was his Mpongwe name—traced his ancestry back through four or five generations to Re-Ndoukoue, the man who had first led the Agekaza clan of the Mpongwe down the right bank of the Como River to the estuary, where they had settled at Glass’s Town and other villages along the north shore. Here they had prospered. Glass’s Town had become the most important trading center on the estuary, rivaled in the 1840s only by King William’s Town on the south side.11
The slave trade and slaves had been a part of Mpongwe society from deep in their history. By the seventeenth century, the Mpongwe were buying slaves and iron from the Dutch—they needed, a Dutch trader wrote, “men for their wars and iron for weapons.” In the early years of the eighteenth century, while some slave trading continued, the Mpongwe had wanted primarily European iron, clothes, furniture, guns, French brandy, and then New England rum. During the closing decades of the eighteenth century, however, the slave trade had become increasingly important. Now the Mpongwe were not buying slaves from Europeans, but selling slaves to them. Primarily middlemen, the Mpongwe bought slaves from different parts of the interior and sold them to Portuguese and Spanish, Dutch, English, French, and American slavers. But not all slaves were sold—many were kept by the Mpongwe, and by the beginning of the nineteenth century slavery had come to dominate much of Mpongwe society. Ownership of slaves had become a sign of wealth and prestige. In time, as the harsh realities of slavery among the Mpongwe and surrounding peoples became more apparent, Jane and Leighton found distressing parallels to what they had known in Georgia and South Carolina.12
After being warmly welcomed by Glass, who spoke to them in the familiar Pidgin English of Atlantic Creoles, the travelers went further up the hill, where, about half a mile from the beach, they found the mission station at Baraka. An African American carpenter and his apprentice (they had been hired to come down with the first group from Cape Palmas) had built a large and attractive white frame cottage reminiscent of many a Lowcountry home—it had green shutters and a wide front porch intended to provide shade and a place to sit and visit and enjoy any breeze coming off the water.13
When Jane entered the cottage, she found familiar furniture from Fair Hope all neatly arranged, with woven Mpongwe mats on the floor. Overhead there was no ceiling—only open beams and the underside of the roof. Such an arrangement made the house cooler than it would have been with ceilings and allowed the walls and exposed roof to be swept and kept clear of insects and reptiles—although not altogether successfully. One missionary later said that missionaries used mosquito netting over their beds to keep lizards and centipedes from dropping upon them when they were asleep. William Walker killed a large snake, a deadly Green Mamba, in his room in 1844 and noted that another had disappeared somewhere in the cottage.14
From the front porch of the cottage, Jane and Leighton had a fine view of the estuary and could see it dotted with the white sails of Mpongwe boats. Frequently they and other missionaries could see the sails of European or American ships, such as the Atalanta, trading in the estuary for dyewood and other forest products. But all too often they could also see Portuguese and Spanish slavers—frequently American-made ships—across the estuary, or sometimes close by, anchored off Glass’s Town to buy slaves for the highly profitable Brazilian markets.15
By the time Jane arrived at Baraka in July 1843, Mpongwe workers had already built a library house and a workshop out of bamboo for Walker, who—Yankee farm boy that he was—was always busy with some carpentry or blacksmithing project. Other buildings were soon to be added to the station—a second cottage, this one made of bamboo; a little clapboard church in meetinghouse style; a metal storage building shipped from New York; a bamboo schoolhouse and bamboo dormitories; a bamboo chickenhouse and a bamboo shed for goats and sheep and a few cows; and, immediately behind the main cottage, a bamboo kitchen. Already a handsome hedge of lime trees had been planted around the perimeter of the mission. With their long and dangerous thorns, the trees were soon to provide—it was hoped—some protection against leopards and against any coming or going except through the gate. In a few years, a fine orchard was growing—with native mangoes and palms as well as varieties imported from New York—over the area where slave bodies had once been dumped.16
So the mission station at Baraka was in the process of becoming a mixture—southern cottage next to Mpongwe bamboo buildings next to an iron building from New York all situated among imported fruit trees growing among mangoes and palms and thorny limes. Over the coming years, this growing, evolving physical landscape, with all of its incongruities, reflected the growing, evolving social landscape of Baraka, where Americans and Grebo and Cape Coast Fanti and Mpongwe were living and working together. Here, visitors—Mpongwe, American, and European traders and explorers, Kru and Grebo sailors—often found Baraka a pleasant and welcoming place, but it was not to be a place without tensions, jarring cultural contradictions, and deep sorrows.
ON THE DAY the Atalanta arrived at Glass’s Town, William Walker wrote in his diary that the arrival of the twelve travelers “makes a large addition to our family, our cares, and our labors.” It also made possible the rapid expansion of the mission to other towns on the estuary. But first the mission had to organize itself. Within a week of the arrival, Walker had drawn up a covenant and a few rules for the regulation of a church, and Leighton had been elected pastor. Leighton, with a committee of four, was to administer the government of the church, for all was to be done decently and in order, mixing Presbyterian and Congregational polities to suit the needs of a mission church.17
But organizational concerns did not take all of their time—romances had thrived while Leighton had been away. Benjamin Griswold came to him and said that he and the widow Mrs. Dr. Wilson had decided to marry. She was an attractive young woman and had been married to Dr. A. E. Wilson only a short time before his death at Fish Town—his first wife had died in South Africa. Leighton, still naive about such matters, had thought when they first came to Baraka that she and William Walker had some interest in one another—but he had added in a note to Jane, “I have no penetration in such matters and may be mistaken in my suspicions.” He was mistaken, and so he was surprised when Griswold told him the news. Walker was not surprised. “This is what I have long been expecting,” he wrote in his diary, “though they have both more than once positively denied any such intention. Probably at that time they had no such intentions, and I suppose that they were then deceiving themselves and did not know their own hearts so well as I could read them in their actions.”18
But theirs was not to be the only wedding. John Edwards, a Fanti from Cape Coast who had been a teacher at Cape Palmas, announced that he and the widow Mrs. Brent wished to be married. She was a Grebo, a gra
duate of the school at Fair Hope, and had been married for a short while to Thomas Brent, a native of Sierra Leone and a teacher at Fair Hope. On their voyage to Gabon, Thomas had drowned in a capsized canoe off Cape Lahu on the Ivory Coast.19
So the two widows took on new husbands and joined them in their work as the missionaries at Baraka organized themselves for their teaching and evangelistic efforts among the Mpongwe and surrounding peoples.
LEIGHTON WAS DEEPLY impressed by the Mpongwe during his early years at Baraka. He had seen much of the West Coast of Africa, from Sierra Leone in the north to the Gabon Estuary in the south. He had met the tall and handsome Mandingos and Vai in the north; he knew and admired the Kru, with their knowledge of sailing and their reliable character; he had gone ashore through the heavy surf at Cape Lahu on the Ivory Coast and had walked its city streets and talked with its leading merchants; he had visited the old slave fort at Elmina, and had seen its surrounding town and fishing fleet from atop its high walls; and he had spent time at Cape Coast among the Fanti. He knew about the Ashanti and Dahomey kingdoms, with their astonishing military and political power, and had talked with those who had visited their capitals; and he had seen Accra and visited the islands of Fernando Po, St. Thomas, and Corisco. And, of course, he knew the Grebo—King Freeman and Ballah and William Davis and all the others among whom he and Jane had lived and worked for seven years. Yet when he thought of all of these different places and these different peoples who lived along the coast with their different languages and different traditions and customs, he thought the Mpongwe were the most sophisticated and hospitable.20
By the Rivers of Water Page 33