Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Early on the morning of 4 April, Jupiter gathered a few possessions he had packed, and with old Silvey by his side, went out of his cabin on his way to the boro. With them went their sons Jupiter and Hamlet; their daughter Hannah with her son Little Jupiter; Hamlet’s wife, Phillis, and her children Augustus and Prince. They were all part of the first group from the settlement to be sold in front of the courthouse. The sale was not scheduled until the next day, but they had to be there early in order to be inspected by prospective buyers. When they arrived in the boro, they were taken to the gaol, where they were to be kept for the night. Planters from throughout the county who were interested in purchasing “more Negroes to raise more cotton and rice” arrived as well. Some knew the Jones slaves already. Others inspected them carefully. Old Jupiter had to watch their inspection and listen to their questions. Were there signs on their backs or buttocks of whippings, indications that they were troublesome to owners? Were they healthy and strong? “Show me your teeth,” they were told. “Let’s see your feet and hands.” “What about your arms and legs?” “Do you have a hernia?” “Any bulge in your belly?” “Woman, are your children wormy?” “How old are you, boy?” “You know how to hoe in a rice field?” “You good at threshing?” “You know how to guide a plow?” “How old are you, Old Daddy?”19 Some such slave market questions, now swirling around the gray head of Jupiter, were part of the deep and bitter humiliation of slavery. What could he do to protect his family and those who had for so long been under his care? Jupiter who had spent his life seeing that the Jones plantations flourished, who had announced the beginning of each new day with his conch-shell horn, assigning tasks and seeing that they were done, who had been a buffer between master and slave, using his wit to ease the tasks and the burden of the work, was now powerless to protect even his own children and grandchildren from the degradations and terrors of this sandy place before the courthouse. But the bitter experience into which he was now plunging deeply was the common sorrow of the Gullah people, from whose collective voice was to arise the low-country lament:

  I got to weep at Zion’s Court House

  I got to weep there fo’ myself

  My dear mother can’t weep there fo’ me

  I got to weep there fo’ myself.20

  The bidding began the next day at ten in the morning. They were to be sold in lots. The first up were Toney, Betty, August, Jack, and Abby. Joseph Bacon, a neighboring planter, made the highest bid of $1,176 for the five of them. Next came Hannah—not the daughter of Jupiter and Silvey but another young Han-nah—and her children Molly and Dick. This Hannah also came from one of the oldest of the Joneses’ slave families. She had been born at Rice Hope, her children at Liberty Hall. Captain P. H. Wilkins, with an offer of $380, was the highest bidder and left with mother and children for his plantation near Sunbury.21

  Next came the largest lot, seventeen in all, and among them stood Old Jupiter and Old Silvey, their grandsons Augustus and Prince, the children’s mother, Phil-lis, but not the children’s father, Hamlet, or their Uncle Jupiter or Aunt Hannah. Colonel Joseph Law was a surprising early bidder and ended with the highest bid. His plantation was east of Riceboro, downriver from the village, and was not far from Liberty Hall. Next and last came a lot of eight that included the brothers Jupiter and Hamlet, their sister Hannah, her son Little Jupiter, and Sary, who had belonged to the first John Jones. Once again, Colonel Law was the high bidder. While he was a respectable member of the community of Liberty County planters, and a leader of the Midway congregation, no one had expected Colonel Law to be expanding his workforce with a purchase of twenty-five slaves. What Law knew, however, was that the real purchaser, hiding his identity, perhaps to keep the price from going up, was none other than Joseph Jones himself.22

  During the following days, as others were brought from the settlement to be sold, Joseph bought openly, no longer using his friend as a front. Included among those purchased was Fanny from Africa and many who had long been owned by the Jones family. But at the end of the purchasing, he had an additional surprise: the twenty-five bought by Colonel Law were to be a gift for Susannah Jones and for the children of his deceased brother. A bill of sale was made over to his sister-in-law and the children. As the patriarch of the family, Joseph Jones was their protector, and these purchases of slaves seemed a wise and prudent way to secure their future and to maintain the family status in the community. A new start could now be made at Liberty Hall, freed from the debts of John Jones and under the careful direction and vigorous management of the hardworking Joseph.23

  In this way, Old Jupiter and his family were returned with the others in their lots to the settlement at Liberty Hall. Lizzy greeted them, for she—together with all those owned personally by Susannah Jones—had not been subject to the debts of John Jones. Fanny’s children Marcus and the handsome young Elvira were there as well, for in 1804 John Jones had given them as a gift to his year-old daughter, Susan. But the settlement was almost half-empty. The cabins of those who had been sold away were reminders that a slave community had been divided and that those who remained were but a remnant of those who had lived there. This remnant—the men, women, and children who were reunited in the settlement in April 1808—did not know it at the time, but they were to form the core of a Gullah-speaking African-American community whose lives would be interwoven with the lives of John Jones’s children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren until a mighty army shook the land.24

  3

  SUNBURY

  Among those who walked back from Riceboro and down the plantation avenue leading to Liberty Hall in 1808 was Rosetta, eight years old and a motherless child. She had stood with Old Jupiter as a part of the lot of seventeen and had been subjected to the humiliating examinations of buyers and the bidding for slaves in the sandy yard before the courthouse. Now she returned to the settlement that she had known all her life and to the special supervision of Lizzy. As a young child in the settlement, she had known a life relatively free of work. A slave nurse, an old woman, had taken care of the plantation children while the parents went to the fields, and when instructed to do so, she had given them small jobs around the settlement and the plantation yard—sweeping, gathering eggs, and other work familiar to rural children. But now all that was changing. Rosetta was approaching the age when she would be classified as a “half-hand” and expected to begin learning the routine and work of an adult. This eight-year-old, however, was not destined for working the long rows of cotton or for wading in treacherous rice fields—at least not immediately. Rather she was to be trained as a domestic servant, and she was to begin by being the nurse of the two-year-old Charles Colcock Jones and his five-year-old sister, Susan.1

  With the two older Jones children—fourteen-year-old Betsy and ten-year-old John—in school in Sunbury, Rosetta had the task of keeping an eye on Charles, helping to amuse him and Susan, and, when he napped, brushing the flies and mosquitoes off him. Unlike so many children of planter families, Charles and Susan did not have an Old Momma, a slave woman whose care for white children nurtured in them deep and special affection. Rosetta was much too close in age to Charles and Susan for them ever to think of her as their Old Momma, but Charles at least would always remember her as his nurse, and she no doubt played a role in shaping his early character. Years later, the child of a neighboring planter, remembering his own nurse, insisted that in “the shaping of character in child life, domestics, whether bond or free, have always exercised more influence than is imagined…. Children are largely influenced by the character of the servants to whose care they are necessarily and largely entrusted.”2

  Whatever influence Rosetta might have had on Charles and Susan, the landscape and environment of the low country had a role to play in the shaping of their sensibilities and their deep memories. Much of the children’s play at Liberty Hall was outside in the yard and in the gardens that surrounded the plantation house. Susannah Jones, in her grief over the loss of her husband, had turned to her fl
owers and to her kitchen garden with its neat rows of vegetables and herbs. Here for the next two years, during balmy low-country winters and fragrant springs, the children played and grew. Charles would remember beds on each side of the walk where he would “gather flowers and endeavor to catch the thistle birds when they went into the cabbage heads.”3

  Susannah Jones was thirty in 1808 when her brother-in-law Joseph had to save the family from the consequences of her husband’s buying and selling. Pale, with blond hair and blue eyes, she would be long remembered as possessing a “calm sorrowful face.” Between visits of family and friends, she spent sad days at Liberty Hall and “lonely desolate nights when the hoot of the large owl would come echoing up from the deep swamp below the family mansion,” and the barking of the hunters’ dogs “swept fearfully around the corners of the house,” reminding her of an earlier hunt and its dreadful end.4

  Such a setting and such a mood made a lasting impression on young Charles. He would remember his mother taking up her guitar, which she suspended from her neck by a blue ribbon. She “would promenade the east piazza in the quiet evenings and play and sometimes sing.” On occasion she would be persuaded to play “some lively air” for Charles and Susan and Rosetta, together with other “little servants to dance upon the grass in the yard.” And there were other memories: “I recollect,” wrote Charles decades later, “our discovering in the flower garden in front of the house a rabbit’s soft bed with three or four young ones, and the Negroes presenting us with young summer ducks which would unceremoniously when let go in the balcony pitch down into the yard below and scamper off.” Charles was sure, on recollection, that these activities encouraged an early interest in natural history that would follow him all his life. It also no doubt left deeply embedded in his memory an image of home where whites and blacks lived together and where blacks such as Rosetta brought things to whites, looked after them, and cared for their needs.5

  Liberty Hall, viewed from the perspective of those who lived in the plantation house and walked on its piazza and in its gardens, was lovely in winter and spring, as all the senses were invited to revel in the charms of the low country. But Liberty Hall was hot and dreadfully muggy in the summer and early autumn, when the heat could be seen rising from the tepid waters of rice fields and flooded swamps, and mosquitoes and gnats swarmed in clouds. Planters had learned early that such seasons were deadly for whites, that miasmas, the noxious emanations from the surrounding waters, filled the air with poison and pollution. Africans and their African-American children seemed for some unknown reason to be able to live in the midst of such miasmas without being as vulnerable to the fevers and agues that struck the whites with violent and deadly results.

  Hard experience had taught the planters and their families that their best defense was moving away from such a poisoned atmosphere, and so they went in summer and autumn to the sand hills, where tall pines grew and water drained quickly away and did not stand in fetid pools, or they went to the coast, where sea breezes and salt water kept the miasmas and their fevers largely away.6 For the African Americans such an absence of white supervision allowed space and time for the nurture of their African traditions, and for the development of their distinctive Gullah culture and of strategies for resistance against white control and white culture.

  In late May 1808, Susannah Jones and her two youngest children left Liberty Hall, as was the family custom, and went to their summer home on the coast in the little town of Sunbury. With them went Lizzy and Rosetta. Left behind were Old Jupiter and the remnant of those who had once lived in the settlement. They would be largely on their own under Jupiter’s supervision for the next five months, with only an occasional visit from Joseph Jones. No overseer was hired to manage the greatly reduced workforce, and their tasks no longer included the raising of rice but focused now on Sea Island cotton and provisions for the plantation.7

  Sunbury sat on a high bluff a few miles up the Medway River from St. Catherine’s Sound. Protected from the open ocean by the Sea Islands to its east, the town caught both the sea breezes blowing across the sound and the tide as it surged upstream daily, changing the Medway from fresh to brackish waters. In the years immediately before the American Revolution and in the years immediately after, Sunbury had been a thriving little port with its customhouse handling a considerable portion of Georgia’s trade. William Bartram, the traveling naturalist, described it in 1773 as “beautifully situated on the main,” with a harbor “capacious and safe” and “water enough for ships of great burthen.” He had been introduced to “one of the principal families, where,” he wrote, “I supped and spent the evening in a circle of genteel and polite ladies and gentlemen.” Among the gentlemen of Sunbury at the time of Bartram’s visit was not only the first John Jones but also his neighbor Lyman Hall, who in 1776 became one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Signing with him was his friend Button Gwinnett, who in earlier years had left his plantation home on St. Catherine’s Island and crossed the sound to conduct business and talk politics in Sunbury.8

  By the summer of 1808 Sunbury had lost much of its commercial vigor. To be sure, its customhouse was still busy and its merchants were now seeking, beyond business with local planters, the trade of an expanding settlement in central Georgia. But the quest for health and not commerce was now at the heart of the town’s life. The rhythm of the seasons flowed into the rhythm of the town, as summering families swelled its population with their arrival in June and drained it with their departure in early November.9

  The little town itself was laid out, like its big sister Savannah, in a neat grid with squares and straight streets, and with wharves along the riverfront. The house to which Susannah took her children in 1808 was located on two bay lots that extended to the low-water marks of the river. Here during the Revolution the British had burned the home of the first John Jones, and here his widow, Mary Sharpe, had rebuilt following the death of her second husband, Major Philip Low, in 1785. Like others, Mary Sharpe had moved between her plantation and Sunbury, and her children, John and Joseph and their younger sister Eliza Low, had spent their summers and falls in the Jones house by the Medway. In 1798 the children had buried their mother, after a lingering illness, in the lot behind the house. She had wanted to follow the practice on many plantations of being buried near the home she loved and not in a distant cemetery. It was this house, made sacred by the mother’s grave and family memories, that John Jones had ordered repaired and enlarged following the hurricane of 1804.10

  Susannah and the children were joined in Sunbury by the children’s half brother John and half sister Betsy. They had been in school at the Sunbury Academy and had been boarding with the family of the headmaster, Dr. William McWhir. A native of Ireland, McWhir had graduated from Belfast College and been ordained by the presbytery of that staunchly Presbyterian city. Coming to America at the conclusion of the Revolution, he had settled in Alexandria, Virginia, where for ten years he had been the principal of the local academy of which George Washington was a trustee. Frequently a visitor at Mount Ver-non, he was said to have “enjoyed the hospitality of that noted mansion.” He had come to Sunbury in 1793, had married a wealthy widow, and had bought nearby Springfield plantation. The hurricane of 1804 had swept over Springfield, and McWhir’s losses were said to have amounted to $14,000—enough to buy a fine plantation and supply it with a substantial number of slaves. But McWhir had persisted with his academy located in a two-and-a-half-story building not far from the Jones summerhouse. About seventy pupils attended in 1808, and while McWhir was said to be “a terror to all dolts and delinquents,” no one else in the county did more to “impress his character and influence upon the generations in which he lived.” Among those so impressed were the Jones children. Young Charles, later his student and still later his friend, wrote of him: “He was the most perfectly social man that I have ever known. Warm and sincere in his attachments, it was a real, heartfelt pleasure to him to be in the society of his friends, and
to mingle with men of distinction; and his effort was, by cheerfulness of spirit, and ready and easy powers of conversation, to convert the hour or the day, as the case might be, into one of high social and friendly enjoyment. Fond of children, they never escaped his notice.”11

  Joining Susannah and the children at the Sunbury house were Joseph Jones, his new wife, Sarah Anderson, and Joseph’s four-year-old son, Joseph Maybank Jones. Sarah had married Joseph in 1806 (McWhir had performed the service) and had eased the loneliness of the Retreat with its cemetery behind the plantation house. The daughter of David and Mary Anderson, one of the wealthiest planting families along the Georgia coast, Sarah had brought with her, as a part of her marriage contract, thirty-eight slaves to work the rice and cotton fields of the Retreat. When she arrived in Sunbury in early June 1808, she and Joseph had already added one son to the cemetery at the Retreat, and she was seven months pregnant with her second child.12

  Not far away, in another home facing the river and looking out toward St. Catherine’s Sound, was Eliza Low Robarts, the half sister of Joseph Jones and of their departed brother John. Twenty-three years old, possessed of a pretty face and a lively spirit, Eliza was already twice widowed. Her second husband had died only the year before and had left her with their two-year-old daughter, Mary Eliza. They had returned from their plantation home near Greensboro, in the interior of the state where they had briefly lived, to Sunbury to be close to family and friends. The widow and her daughter, like Susannah and her children, were under the care and protection of Joseph Jones. He had thus found himself at age twenty-nine the patriarch of three families. He was determined to hold them together through shared affections and his own indomitable resolve to reap rich profits from rice and cotton fields and from the labors of those whom he called “my people.”13