Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  For years Jupiter had been the driver on the Jones plantation, and as he stood by the fire warming his old bones, he knew he was the boss, the master’s right-hand man. When John Jones had been away in the 1790s tending to business in the state legislature, his letters to his first wife, Elizabeth, had been full of instructions to his driver: “Jupiter, my dear wife, will be obliged to give the Negroes some corn before Saturday.” “Tell Jupiter I expect to see great matters done, as I have left everything to himself.” Elizabeth had replied: “Jupiter told me he had finished thrashing that stack of rice, but could not tell me how much it would turn out.” And John had written: “Do, my dear, speed Old Jupiter on, and tell him if he wishes to drive for me he must task away and let me see a heap of work done when I return, or I never will trust him again.”4

  Over the following years Jupiter had kept the trust of his master and also of the men and women he lived among in the settlement. His position as driver had required a kind of tightrope performance—he had to convince his master that the work of the plantation was proceeding smoothly and efficiently, and he had to demonstrate to the other slaves on the plantation that he was a buffer between them and the master. He used many strategies to walk this narrow line. No strategy, however, was more important than his cultivation within Jones of a sense of dependence. For Jones knew that without a skilled driver, Liberty Hall would be both unprofitable and also difficult to manage.5

  No one knew the settlement better than Jupiter. Born around 1740, he had come to the old Jones place, nearby Rice Hope plantation, as a young man, and there he had learned not only the skills of survival in the Georgia low country but also the ways of organizing and managing the work of a rice and Sea Island cotton plantation. With him by the fireside was his wife, Silvey, blind and feeble, who had made her way out of their cabin. They had been together many years and had with them in the settlement their sons Jupiter and Hamlet, their daughter Hannah, and their grandsons Little Jupiter, Augustus, and Prince. A few years earlier, before Silvey was blind, John Jones had rented her to his cousin to work in a neighboring plantation kitchen. Jupiter had used all his skills to get her back to Liberty Hall, and finally Jones had consented. “Make Old Jupiter go to Mr. Dowses and bring old Silvey home and set her to work,” Jones had written Elizabeth Jones. Later Jones had sent a message to Jupiter: “Tell him that as he has now got his wife I shall expect he will do his best for me.”6

  As Jupiter looked at the others gathered around the fires, he saw many faces that he had known all his life. Old Monday and Sunbury were here, as were March, April, and May, July and September, November and December. They had all been slaves of the first John Jones and of his widow, Mary, and their names reflected practices from an African homeland. Lizzy, who had hurried off to the kitchen, had come to Liberty Hall in 1801 with her mistress Susannah. With her brother Cassius and sister Willoughby, Lizzy had belonged to Susannah only a year when their mistress married John Jones and they had all moved to Liberty Hall. Susannah’s brother, John Girardeau, had willed them to his sister on his deathbed in 1800—with Dick, Paul, Sina, Sary, and little Rosetta, together with land and seven cows and calves.7

  Jupiter could see even more recent arrivals as he looked at others warming themselves before the fires, eating sweet potatoes cooked in fireplace ashes, or some hominy prepared the night before, or johnnycakes cooked on a long clean board before the morning fires. Abram, Ben, and Jim had come three seasons earlier when Jones had bought them from Captain Forester. Flora, Ishmael, and David had come the next season from Mrs. West’s place. But Lucy, July, and Sanco, bought the same year, had already been sold off the plantation and had been little more than temporary laborers for a season and pawns to be moved around in the business of buying and selling slaves.8

  Of all those in the settlement, however, none were more distinctive than Fanny and her son Marcus and her handsome young daughter Elvira. Only a few seasons earlier, they had been living in Africa. Captured and brought to the coast of their native continent, they had endured the terrors of the passage to Savannah and its slave market. Carried to Liberty Hall by Jones, they were beginning the long process of learning the ways of a slave community that had for generations been creating out of bitter toils a distinct African-American culture known as Gullah. Already Marcus and Elvira were learning the Gullah dialect of the low country and its Sea Islands. In the evenings around the fires they could talk of African ways and memories, and, like so many before them, add their part to the folkways and culture of the low country. Fanny, however, was difficult to understand. She spoke one of the languages of Africa, lacked the linguistic agility of the young, and was learning only slowly a kind of Pidgin English. She did not know it yet, but for the next half-century she would bear as one of the burdens of slavery a kind of isolation as she struggled to listen to and speak a foreign language.9

  Jupiter began to assign tasks. Late March was the time to begin planting provision crops of corn and peas and, as time allowed, for tilling gardens of potatoes and arrowroot, turnips and onions. Later would come the onerous work of rice and cotton fields, but for now each full hand, whether man or woman, received the familiar task of working a quarter of an acre of provisions, while half-hands and quarter-hands were given proportionally less. As Jupiter assigned these tasks, naming the fields and the sections to be worked, he was performing a central task of a driver that had been slowly evolving in the rice-growing region of South Carolina and Georgia. Already by 1805 several generations of slave drivers had played a key role in the struggle between low-country masters and slaves to name the negotiated boundaries of a task. Masters had used the weapons of the powerful—an organized military, the threats of whip, auction block, and gallows, the claims of superiority, and the styles of speech and dress that intimidate. All these they had used to push out the boundaries of a task, to demand as much work from slaves as could be squeezed out of them. Jupiter and other drivers and field hands had used the weapons of the weak—foot-dragging and playing dumb, gossip that threatened the reputations of owners, and secret scorn for the pretensions of masters; and when the work was heavy and needed to get done, some had run away. All these weapons they had used to limit the boundaries of a task and to reduce the work required of a slave.10

  The quarter-acre task that Jupiter assigned to full hands on this March morning in 1805 was the outcome of this struggle between low-country masters and slaves. John Jones still liked to think that he possessed some discretionary power, that if he wished he could walk down through the morning mists into the settlement and demand a third of an acre for a task. But for Jupiter and those who stood with him, the quarter-acre task had become a right to be guarded and claimed. Indeed, low-country slaves had extended the task beyond the original rice fields to the cultivation of Sea Island cotton and provisions and to other activities. For full hands, when pounding rice, the daily task was seven mortars. When laying fencing, it was one hundred 12-foot poles. And for a pair of sawyers, the weekly task had finally been settled at 600 feet of pine or 780 feet of cypress.11

  The landscape of Liberty Hall, like that of other low-country plantations, had encouraged this task system that Jupiter managed. On large areas of the plantation the dark waters of swamps quietly and slowly swirled through forests of giant cypress and black gum and thickets of sweet bay and palmetto. These dark waters provided in cleared areas the means for rice production through an elaborate system of dams, gates, and canals. On higher ground, where the hardwoods and pine had been cut and burned, and where Jupiter and his crews had grubbed out the stumps, Sea Island cotton grew. The task system (unlike the spreading gang system of up-country cotton plantations, with its largely sunup-to-sundown hours) meant that once a task was completed, a slave had the remaining hours of the day for working a garden or raising a pig, for fishing in the river or hunting in the swamp.

  Already by 1805 the slaves of Liberty County and the surrounding low country had taken advantage of “after task” time to develop a r
emarkable if limited informal economy of buying and selling. The pigs and chickens, the marsh ponies and horses, the wagons and cows that low-country slaves owned—they were all the result of this task system. The Gullah culture of Jupiter and Lizzy, of Ishmael and David, of Marcus and Elvira, and of all the other descendants from the nations and tribes of Africa who gathered around low-country fires, was built upon this hard-won system and its informal economy.12

  While Jupiter was assigning tasks for the day, his son Hamlet was at the stable saddling a handsome English horse. John Jones fancied himself a kind of low-country Cavalier, a gentleman after the English fashion. He was, his grandson later wrote, “Very fond of everything English, importing his horses, hounds, gun, watch, dueling pistols, wines, etc.” His English hunting horse was a roan, an animal of large size and spirit that cost as much as a healthy young slave. Jones thought just such a horse was needed for a man of his ancestry and status.13

  His father, Major John Jones of Liberty County, had been a young South Carolina aristocrat when he came to Georgia to make his fortune. He had an indigo plantation on one of the Sea Islands, and with an expanding slave force he had seen nearby Rice Hope become a prosperous plantation. This first John Jones had been in business with his uncle, Miles Brewton of Charleston, one of the wealthiest men in all the British North American colonies. With a Brewton cousin, the first John Jones had owned warehouses and a wharf in Sunbury, the little port for the growing colony south of Savannah. And there had been other Carolina blueblood relatives: Pinckneys and Hugers, Legares and Swintons, Colcocks and Hutsons. To add to his distinction, Major Jones had become a hero of the Revolution. In the battle for Savannah in 1779, when Patriot forces were trying to retake the city from the British, he had led a charge against the Spring Hill battery, and there, wrote a historian of the state, “in the fiercest and most desperate part of the contest, he was struck by a cannon-ball in the breast, and instantly killed.”14

  Hamlet brought the roan to the plantation house. Jones mounted, took his silver-mounted gun, and rode down the plantation avenue that led to the gate and the sandy road that cut through Liberty County on its way from Savannah down the coast to Darien. At the gate he met his two hunting companions, Colonel Daniel Stewart and James Smith. Stewart, famous for his exploits during the Revolution and the Indian wars that had raged of late in central and south Georgia, was the brother of Jones’s first wife, Elizabeth. Smith was a wealthy neighbor whose plantation had been raided only a few years earlier by the Creeks whom Stewart and his cavalry had chased south to the marshes of the Altamaha River. The three men were friends and had often hunted together in the surrounding woods and swamps.15

  If Jones thought himself a kind of Cavalier figure, with his love for English ways and English goods, his two friends were part of a Puritan tradition that had found its way to the Georgia coast and established itself deep in Liberty County soil. Their ancestors had left Dorchester, England, in 1630 for Massachusetts, settling there for five years before moving on to Connecticut, where they had remained for sixty years. In 1695 a colony had left for South Carolina. There beneath great oaks and beside the black waters of the Ashley River, they had laid out their village and built their meetinghouse. As with most good Puritans, they had prospered—in spite of a sickly climate—so that within two generations there had been a need for new land. Commissioners had been sent to Georgia and, after some negotiations, a grant of more than thirty-one thousand acres had been secured. In this way a colony of 350 whites accompanied by their 1,500 slaves had begun in 1752 a southward trek to what would become Liberty County.16

  These Puritans were the ancestors not only of Jones’s hunting companions Stewart and Smith but also of most of the white planting families of the county. They had found the Georgia coast a good place to settle and at last to put down deep roots. With adequate slave labor the rich soils had offered ample opportunity for the cultivation of rice and Sea Island cotton. Yet as God-fearing Calvinists, they had been aware of the seductions of such a wilderness, and they had immediately set about establishing an organized community. They had declared that they had a “greater regard to a compact Settlement and Religious Society than future temporal advantages.” “We are sensible,” they had written in their Articles of Incorporation, “to the advantages of good order and social agreement, among any people, both for their Civil and Religious Benefit.” At the time of the Revolution the patriotism of these Georgia Puritans had been so ardent that after the war their county had been renamed Liberty.17

  At the center of this Puritan community stood the church. Almost as soon as they had arrived in Georgia, the settlers had built a meetinghouse in the most central location—halfway between Savannah and Darien. They named it Midway Congregational Church, although it was Presbyterian in everything but name. (All but two of their ministers were to be Presbyterians, and commissioners were sent to Presbyterian courts.) In 1792 a permanent church building had been erected. A handsome meetinghouse with cypress siding, it reflected in its elegant simplicity an ethic that would produce in this rural community a remarkable record of governors and senators, of clergymen and professors, doctors and scientists, judges and soldiers.18

  The three friends began their hunt. Trails were followed that had brought results on earlier occasions. Abuck had been killed between Smith’s plantation and Rice Hope. Jones and Stewart had killed two large bucks down toward the North Newport River on the William Peacock place. With several other companions they had jumped and killed a doe and two small bucks nearby. Jones had noted in his daybook that with “two Darkies” to beat the brush and flush the deer, a small buck and doe had been killed as they hunted the deep woods on Colonel Stewart’s Cedar Hill plantation. They had no hesitation to kill a doe and thought no more about shooting a fawn than they did about having a lamb slaughtered for a stew. On one occasion, two years earlier, Jones, while hunting alone, had killed one fawn and had captured another and brought it back to Liberty Hall as a pet. He had written it all down in his daybook: the dates of the hunts, his hunting companions, and the places they had found and killed their quarry.19

  Hunting on horseback in these southern woods and swamps gave them several advantages. They could see over low brush, and the deer were not frightened by the sound of the horses moving through the woods. And when a deer was jumped, the hunters could give chase, which was part of the thrill of the sport. At some point on this March morning, they jumped a deer, and Jones on his roan raced after the fleeting animal. The horse hit a hole or perhaps an obstruction it could not leap, and Jones was thrown violently from his saddle. Carried back to Liberty Hall by his companions, he lay in critical condition with internal injuries. A doctor who was summoned immediately bled him to reduce his racing pulse. Later, as Jones grew worse, mustard plaster was applied to his chest to raise a blister and to revive his vital signs. These familiar medical practices were of no help, and on 28 March, John Jones died.20

  Joseph Jones, John’s younger brother, who had been by his dying bedside, summoned Jacob and Sandy, the slave carpenters at Liberty Hall, and instructed them to build a casket. Using cypress cut from the nearby swamp, they completed the long, narrow box. Friends padded it with cotton and lined it with cloth, while grieving family members dressed the battered body and prepared it for its silent home.21

  After a night’s wake, the coffin was placed in a Jersey wagon for its slow ride to the church. Family and friends rode in carriages, and Jupiter and Lizzy and all those from the settlement walked behind. The road they all traveled was sandy and straight as it headed north. William Bartram, the naturalist, had traveled this stretch of road earlier and had described it as “straight, spacious, and kept in excellent repair by the industrious inhabitants.” Large “fruitful rice plantations” could be seen on each side of the road, and light groves had been left, said Bartram, “by the virtuous inhabitants, to shade the road, and perfume the sultry air.”22

  As the meetinghouse was approached, its white steeple cou
ld be seen in the distance and its tolling bell heard. A congregation had gathered, and waiting on the front steps for the cortege were the pastor, the Reverend Cyrus Gilder-sleeve, as well as Dr. William McWhir, a family friend, renowned teacher, and Irish Presbyterian preacher. The funeral service was long. Scripture was read, a few hymns sung, and an extended funeral discourse given. While not particularly pious, John Jones had had some religious experience during his life that had convinced him and the congregation that he could be numbered among the saints of Midway as a full communing member. A few years earlier, after receiving communion, he had written a prayer he had tucked away in his daybook:

  O Lord, I humbly thank thee for giving me another opportunity of commemorating my Dear Saviour’s dying Love, this 23rd of April. O my Heavenly Father pardon for Christ’s sake, what thou saw amiss in me at thy Heavenly Table. O my blessed God evermore feed me with this bread of life, and receive me into that blessed place where there will be no more sorrow and all tears cease, and everlasting Joy forever more.23