Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Whatever whites thought of the sacred cosmos of the settlements, it provided slaves important means of resistance. The creation at Lambert and other settlements of an alternative African-American culture, with its own worldview and coherence, was itself a major act of resistance to the hegemony of white European culture. This resistance said that the world of whites, with its straight roads leading to plantation houses and patriarchy, was not the only world or the only way of understanding the landscapes of Liberty County. Trails provided avenues of escape, swamps offered the promise of hiding places, and the imagination of the settlements included the possibility of freedom from white oppression.27

  Running away was a direct challenge to the world of whites and to their control of the settlements, and stories of runaways, communicated from plantation to plantation, was inescapably part of the world of Carlawter. Sometimes a slave would simply take what whites came to call “French leave.” A husband would not return on Sunday from his visit to his “wife house” at another plantation but would remain a few extra days and accept the punishment of a whipping or the denial of some privilege such as free time on Saturday afternoons. More serious were breaks for freedom by runaways who had no intention of ever coming back to their settlements if they could help it. Such breaks were especially common when family members were separated by some distance from one another and running away represented a chance to reunite with family members. Those who ran away were not attempting to overthrow the system of slavery, supported as it was with the overwhelming power of whites in the United States. Rather, flight was a way of escaping the immediate and personal oppression of the system, of making life more bearable for the one who ran—and also for those who were left behind, by putting some limits on white behavior. During the years Cato and Cassius were growing up, they must have heard of many such cases. There was Charles, who had been raised by the Irvine family near Sunbury. When he was sold to a planter in the middle of the state, he “absconded” with a “sorrel horse, saddle and bridle” and evidently headed back for Liberty County. His wife, who had been sold to Savannah, also “absconded,” and she was presumed to be hiding with her husband somewhere in the county. Almost a year later their owners were still looking for them and offering rewards in the Savannah papers.28

  Others had simply wanted to get away, to be on their own and not under the immediate control of whites. The year before Cato and Cassius moved to Carlawter, Joe, who had belonged to the Ward family in Sunbury, was sold to a family in Savannah. A “carpenter by trade, of a yellowish complection,” he had made his break from Savannah with Simon, “a young man, about twenty-five years old,” who had a “downcast look when spoken to.” With them had gone two young women. The four of them had made their way to Ossabaw Island and had been hiding for months somewhere on the south end of the island not far from Sun-bury. Joe was finally captured, but again “made his escape.” A $125 reward was offered to anyone who would return them all to Savannah. Charles Jones later remembered that it was “no uncommon thing for camps of runaways to be found in different localities in the county, and parties of men called out to break them up and capture them.”29

  Stories of such runaways traveled the trails of the county, were whispered in Riceboro and Sunbury, and were told openly on the long walks back to the settlements after church meetings. Like the stories of the slaves who dared to leave with the British in 1815, the stories of runaways became a part of the memory of a people that was taught in the evenings around fires to the children of the settlements. These stories were not abstractions about human freedom but stories of real people, of Charles, Joe, Simon, and the young women who risked much for freedom. They were stories of courage and sometimes of reckless desperation. Few of the stories had happy conclusions. Many ended with brutal punishments. But they were all stories that helped to shape the imagination of those who lived in the settlements, which helped to provide a vision of an alternative world and a different future. By the time Cato and Cassius moved to Carlawter in 1817, there were generations of such stories to be told, reaching back to a time at Liberty Hall and Rice Hope and to the days before Old Jupiter had been brought from South Carolina. The memory of these and other such stories provided a powerful defense against the attempts of whites to control the imagination of African Americans and to limit their vision of the future to the harsh realities of the present. In the years ahead, Charles Jones learned to his surprise the strength of these memories and how tenaciously they could be utilized to resist white claims.

  6

  SAVANNAH

  In the late spring of 1817, shortly after the move of Cato and Cassius to the settlement at Carlawter, the wind began to blow from the northeast, bringing with it days of rainy weather and thunderstorms. Water in the rivers, creeks, and swamps of Liberty County began to rise, overflowing their banks; rice fields flooded; and, wherever there was a low place, pools of stagnating water began to pulse and quiver with the larvae of mosquitoes. By early June the air was filled with great buzzing clouds of mature mosquitoes as they arose from breeding places to torment all creatures that offered exposed skin and a possible meal of blood.1

  Among the several species of mosquitoes that filled the low country air that summer were members of the genus Anopheles. From the compact head of the female emerged thick spikes of hair, two antennae, and powerful mandibles. Its six legs were bristled and jointed, its wings light and strong, and its back arched for attack. Hunting at night, from dusk to dawn, the female Anopheles punctured the skin of victims with her long proboscis and sucked blood until her engorged body turned red. When she bit a person infected with the protozoan species Plasmodium falciparum, the Anopheles became infected herself with the malaria parasite. When she bit another person, that person became infected. The parasite entered the person’s liver, grew, spread into the blood, and invaded the red blood cells.2

  Of course, those living in Liberty County during the summer of 1817 knew nothing of the Anopheles mosquito’s role in spreading malaria. They thought that “miasmas,” the noxious vapors of summer swamps and rice fields, were somehow the cause of what they called “the bilious remitting” or “country fever” or “marsh fever” or, often, simply “climate fever.” What they did know was that Africans and their descendants were more resistant to the fevers, that summer and early fall was a “sickly season” when no white dared to stay overnight on a rice plantation or near a swamp, and that during rainy summers the fevers spread even to retreats in the sand hills or on the coast.3

  On June 21, 1817, a Mrs. Williams who lived at Byne Swamp on the North Newport died of the fever. The next day Mrs. Samuel Law died of the fever in Sunbury and a week later, General Stewart’s son Edmond died. They were the first of many who would be struck down that summer as fevers spread from family to family—Bacons and Walthours, Cuthberts and Elliotts, Wards and Stevens—so that there was a great grieving throughout the county and the gravediggers were kept busy at Midway and in the little family cemeteries on the plantations. Out of the Midway congregation alone, with no more than 340 whites, 39 died in four months.4

  Sometime after dusk in late July an infected Anopheles entered the Jones house in Sunbury and bit Sarah Anderson Jones. A low-country doctor in a manual for planters described the course of the disease that soon wracked the body of Sarah: “Slight chills [are] immediately followed by flushes of heat, which disappear and return every quarter of an hour, or so, the chills becoming shorter, and the heat increasing, until a fever comes on…. Soon afterwards, the whites of [the] eyes become tinged with yellow, [the] tongue is covered with a brownish fur, [the patient] becomes sick at his stomach, and now and then throws up bile.” Following this onset of the disease, the fever cools, but the remission lasts only one or two hours, and then the fever returns “as high or higher than it was before.” And so the disease progresses, day by day, with rising and cooling, until it comes to a crisis.

  When the disease has advanced as far as this, the lips become of a purple co
lor and swollen, the tongue dark brown, or black, clammy and offensive to the smell, the eyes dry, or red and watery, the urine either very small in quantity, or entirely stopped, or of a dark brown color, and has a bad smell. The passages are either black, bloody and in quantity, or reddish and watery. The belly feels soft and as if it was filled with air, in which state it is said to be tympanitic, and sometimes, just before the patient dies, blood will be discharged from his bowels, or nose, or mouth.5

  In such a way the disease ran its painful course through Sarah as her family watched with distress and increasing anxiety. Physicians tried to arrest the progress of the fevers with the powerful purgatives calomel and jalap, and then with the Peruvian bark quinine. But the thirty-four-year-old Sarah was weakened from childbirths and sorrows, having already buried much of her heart with five of her seven children in the cemetery at the Retreat. The last had been little Hannah Sharp, “aged three years lacking seven days.”6

  On 9 September 1817 Sarah died, and the next day she was taken in her coffin down the sandy roads that led from Sunbury to the Retreat, where she was buried beside her gathered children.

  The death of Sarah cast a pall over the Retreat. Nine-year-old Mary was particularly affected by her mother’s death. While her brother John was only two and not old enough to know the meaning of his mother’s absence, Mary was of an age to grieve deeply and to feel the sting of death and the pain of separation. She was to remember Sarah as “my own dear mother” and was drawn closer to her father than ever before, giving him the affection and adoration of a motherless child.7

  For Joseph, the death of Sarah brought not only a remembered loneliness to the Retreat but also questions about his responsibility for those under his protection as the patriarch of an extended family. He invited his sister Eliza to come and see after the children and to make the Retreat her winter home. He also began to make plans for the older children of the family, for their education outside of Liberty County, with its close circle of friends and relatives. Of most pressing concern were his nieces Susan Jones and Mary Eliza Robarts. The teenage girls needed to be introduced to a broader society and to the more sophisticated ways of urban life. Joseph wrote to a cousin in Charleston, Eliza Ferguson, and she agreed, together with her cousin Judge Charles Jones Colcock, to see after the girls for as long as they wished to stay in Charleston.8

  In early 1818 Joseph sailed with the girls to Charleston. The city was known among its citizens as “the Capital of the South” and they liked to boast that in its harbor “the Ashley and Cooper rivers come together to form the Atlantic Ocean.” With Joseph and the girls went Sara Ann Walthour, whose father, Andrew Walthour, was the largest slaveholder in Liberty County. Settled in Charleston under Eliza Ferguson’s supervision, the three young ladies took, in addition to directed readings, lessons in music and drawing, and once a week at the school of Mr. Peter Fayotte they were taught the most fashionable dances of their day. In the late afternoons they made calls on friends, mastered the etiquette of tea drinking in parlors and on piazzas, and took walks along the battery with its high seawall. On Sundays at the Circular Congregational Church they meet Pinckney and Legare cousins and could see such political leaders as Senator Robert Young Hayne and Thomas Bennett, soon to be elected governor. Such experiences were as important as their more formal lessons, for their time in Charleston was intended to help refine their manners, to broaden their circle of friends and acquaintances, and to introduce them into Charleston society.9

  With the girls settled in Charleston, Joseph placed fourteen-year-old Charles Colcock Jones in a Savannah countinghouse in preparation for the life of a merchant. At first Charles worked for Joseph Pelot, a cotton factor and merchant. But Charles did not like or admire him, and after two years he moved to the counting-house of Nicholas and Neff. Here he became friends with a young Scotsman, Robert Hutchinson, who was a clerk in the countinghouse of his fellow Scotsman Andrew Low. Hutchinson was to become, like his mentor Low, a wealthy man, but in the early 1820s he and Charles were teenagers learning the intricacies of buying and selling cotton and rice on world markets. They also were learning how to keep careful accounts and how to balance a ledger, and, equally important, they were learning an accountant’s habits of mind as they internalized values of disciplined work, prudence, moderation, and frugality. Charles’s disposition and his love of the Liberty County landscape—its rivers and swamps, its islands and marshes—kept him from ever becoming a pale accountant busy only with income and expenses. But throughout his life he would carry with him an accountant’s love of order, a resolve to use time wisely, and an inclination to seek a prudent middle way.10

  At the Retreat, Eliza Robarts saw after Joseph’s three children, Joseph, Mary, and John, and her own two little ones, Joseph and Louisa. Eliza had the help of Jack and Sylvia and her own personal servant, young Sam. Sylvia was John’s nurse, and she became Mom Sylvia for the little boy in an even more intimate manner than she was Mary’s Momma, for Mary had known and still remembered Sarah Anderson in ways unavailable to the two-year-old John.11 So they all lived together in this way, blacks and whites, adults and children, for three winters and springs at the Retreat as they followed the routines and rules of plantation life in the Georgia low country. And during the summers and in the fall of these years, they went to Sunbury, and the whites visited among relatives and friends on Colonel’s Island, and the blacks made time after their long hours of work for their own visiting, and the five white children grew close to one another under the protection and the affectionate rule of Joseph.

  Joseph, however, was lonely in spite of a house full of children and the cheerful company of his sister Eliza. In the summer of 1819 he began to court a young woman, Elizabeth Hart, who was living in Sunbury and whose family had deep roots in low-country soil. Her grandfather, General James Screven, a hero of the Revolution, had been killed during a skirmish near Midway Church, and her family had its own Retreat plantation, across the Medway River from Sunbury, where many slaves produced much rice and cotton.12

  Joseph’s courtship of Elizabeth was short, and in January 1820 they were married by Dr. McWhir. Joseph was forty-one. Elizabeth was a month short of her nineteenth birthday and only three years older than her new stepson Joseph May-bank Jones. Elizabeth was an affectionate and lively young woman and devoted to her husband, but Joseph’s relationship with her always carried the marks of an older husband’s protection of a much younger wife. At the time of his first marriage Joseph had been only twenty and Mary Maybank eighteen. And when he had married Sarah Anderson in 1806, she had been twenty-three and he twenty-seven. In his relationships with them his patriarchal assumptions and behavior had been tempered by a degree of mutuality, perhaps because they could never think of him as a father figure. But for Elizabeth, who had lost her father when she was thirteen, Joseph filled the role of a fatherly husband, and she would encourage in him the full development of his strong patriarchal instincts.13

  For twelve-year-old Mary Jones, her father’s marriage to Elizabeth appeared as a desertion and as a betrayal of Sarah Anderson’s memory. While polite to her young stepmother, whom she must have regarded as an interloper at the Retreat, Mary never gave her the affection of a daughter, nor did she consider Elizabeth a parent to whom obedience was due. “I have been all my life,” she wrote ten years later, “pretty much my own mistress there being no one but my Father to whom I felt it a duty to submit and his great indulgence made his requisitions of the most lenient kind.” Mary called Elizabeth “Mother,” in deference to her father, but in later years she referred to her simply as “Mrs. Jones.”14

  Elizabeth, as the new mistress of the Retreat, felt the tension with her strong-willed stepdaughter and encouraged Joseph to see that Mary had the education a young lady needed. So six months after his marriage to Elizabeth, Joseph sent Mary to school, not to the Sunbury Academy, but to an academy in adjoining McIntosh County at Barsden Bluff. With her went her older brother, so that neither brother nor si
ster was with the newlyweds when they went to Sunbury for the summer and fall of 1820.

  Barsden Bluff, on the waterway south of Colonel’s Island, overlooked Sapelo and Doboy Sound. Located on what was called the Sapelo Main, the little village at the bluff served as a summer residence for local planters and as a launching spot to the plantations on Sapelo Island. An advertisement in the Savannah Republican described it as “a healthy and pleasant situation.” But Mary evidently did not think it a particularly pleasant place and was homesick. In September, Joseph wrote to encourage her. “Continue to be a good girl,” he said “and every body will love you and don’t think too much of home as you are acquiring that which will ever make you useful in Society.” Mary didn’t have, nor would she ever have, much interest in everybody loving her—she was far too independent and too possessed of her own sense of self-esteem. But for other reasons, reasons she herself chose in the years ahead, she sought to be good and to be useful in society. So Mary persevered in her work at Barsden Bluff and began to concentrate on her studies and to develop a love of books and to focus on what she was to call an “intellectual craving.” By 1822 she was concentrating on French and geography and writing two compositions a week. “I have commenced,” she wrote her father, “translating Telemachus and write French Exercises.”15

  While Mary and her brother Joseph were studying at Barsden Bluff, their cousin Charles Colcock Jones was becoming more deeply acquainted with Savannah. The little city was the metropolis for the Georgia low country, drawing to it much of the trade from its scattered hinterland. General James Oglethorpe had laid out the city in the 1730s with a vision of urban life built upon distinct neighborhoods. At the center of his plan were squares with twenty lots to the north and twenty lots to the south, each lot sixty by ninety feet. To the east and west of each square were four larger trust lots designated for public use. While not all of Oglethorpe’s plans had been sustained during the following years, the parklike squares and the surrounding grid of streets had become a mark of Savannah, providing not only an orderly network of thoroughfares and avenues but also a foundation for the growing elegance of the city.16