Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  In the third item Maybank gave and bequeathed “to the Rev. C. C. Jones and Mary Jones, and their children, the following property: viz. All my lands on Colonel’s Island…. Also the following Negroes: Fanny & Prince, and their children Agrippa, Titus, Phillis, and Niger; also driver Andrew and his wife Mary Ann, and their children, viz. Charles, Sylvia, Gilbert, Dinah, George and Delia; also to them and their heirs forever, with their issue. Also my carpenter Sandy to them and their heirs.”19

  In the other items, eight slaves were given to Robert Quarterman, pastor of Midway; four went to Joseph Jones by way of the estate of Joseph Maybank Jones; “my fellow Andrew” was given to Mary Robarts; and “my fellow Harry” was given to Louisa Robarts. Two slaves—“Kate, a good house servant and fellow Solomon”—went to a young neighbor. Cora and her children he gave to Charles “to dispose of as he thinks proper.” The rest of his property—lands, slaves, farm animals, farm tools, boats, household items—were to be sold and the proceeds were to be given to the new Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Columbia. Charles was made executor, with responsibility to see that the instructions of the will were carried out.20

  So in this way Charles found himself—only three years after his return home from the North—not only the owner of a second plantation and fifteen more slaves but also responsible for the sale of eighteen men, women, and children. Charles had written Mary from Andover that the more he looked at slavery, “the more enormous does it appear.” Slavery, he had said, is a “violation of all the laws of God and man at once. A complete annihilation of justice. An inhuman abuse of power, and an assumption of the responsibility of fixing the life and destiny of immortal beings, fearful in extreme.”21 Now as the executor of Andrew Maybank’s will, Charles had, as he had never before had, “the responsibility of fixing the life and destiny of immortal beings.” He did not appear to find it “fearful in extreme,” but he did make arrangements that seemed to him the most humane way to proceed.

  Charles talked to Cora, whom, along with her three children, he was “to dispose of” as he thought proper. She wanted to be sold to John B. Bacon in order “to be with her husband in Savannah.” Charles negotiated with Bacon and made the sale for $1,000.22 At the same time, he had an ad for an “Executor’s Sale” circulated, and on 5 March 1834 fourteen slaves were brought from their home on Colonel’s Island to the courthouse in Riceboro to stand in the sandy yard under the oaks and experience the humiliation and terror of a slave sale. Old Clarissa Girardeau was among them. She had belonged, with Lizzy, to the parents of Charles’s mother, Susannah, and had been given to their daughter Elizabeth Girardeau Maybank. Standing with Old Clarissa before the courthouse was her daughter Rachael. Rachael’s son Andrew had been the one willed to Mary Robarts, and Rachael’s daughters Sally and Sue had gone to Joseph Jones, as had Sally’s son Jack and Sue’s son Aaron. So Old Clarissa knew, as she stood beneath the long grieving wisps of Spanish moss in Riceboro, that her family on the island, her grandson and granddaughters and great-grandsons, had already been divided.23

  Planters had gathered from around the county for the auction, but most were neighbors from the island or from Sunbury and nearby on the mainline. There was much to be auctioned—everything from land and slaves to a fine new boat to silverware to a wharf in Riceboro. The slaves were put up in the first lot. They were all to be sold together except for Old Clarissa and Old Tom, who, in the appraisal of thee state, had been declared of no monetary value because of their age. When the bidding began, it became immediately clear that a gentleman’s agreement had already been reached between Joseph and Charles. Joseph bid the appraised value for the lot—there would be no bargains here—and they were sold to him. Then came Old Clarissa and Old Tom. Charles bought them together with ten cows, ten calves, twenty-seven hogs, fourteen geese, and four beehives. The two old slaves were returned to their home on the island, and Clarissa was to be able to stay with her daughter and grandchildren at the Retreat whenever she wished and could get a ride there. (No one at the sale could have imagined that the old woman would live another twenty years!) The rest of the estate was quickly sold to neighbors, and all of the proceeds of the auction were used to establish the Maybank Endowment at Columbia Theological Seminary.24

  Charles and Mary had known their new plantation as “The Hut,” a name given by Charles’s mother, Susannah. But such a name, though it reflected the simple character of the summer cottage on the place, seemed somehow inadequate for a fine plantation. And so they named it Maybank in honor of the one who had been so kind to them when they were children and so generous to them in death. The main body of the plantation was situated on the northwest end of Colonel’s Island overlooking marshes and the mouth of the Medway River, but its 700 acres also included a 150-acre tract on the southern edge of the island. This tract, located where the North Newport River had cut a crescent into the island, carried the old name Half Moon.25 Here in the deep water of the Half Moon, ships could dock to load Maybank cotton or unload supplies from Savannah. Years after Andrew Maybank’s death, Charles wrote in his journal, “We must ever hold Uncle Maybank in grateful remembrance for bestowing upon us this quiet and healthful retreat, where we reared and educated our children until prepared for college, and where we have experienced unnumbered mercies from above.”26

  In early June 1834 Charles and Mary made their first of many annual moves from Montevideo to Maybank. They adopted the old pattern and left the miasmas of Montevideo, as their parents and grandparents had left those of Rice Hope, Liberty Hall, and the Retreat, for the healthier climate of the coast. With them in 1834 were Charlie and his little brother Joe, who had been born the previous September. Before the family left Maybank in November to return to Montevideo, Mary was pregnant with their third child, Mary Sharpe.27

  When they arrived at Maybank in 1834, they were welcomed by Andrew the driver. He and his wife, Mary Ann, had come to Maybank in 1826 with their children Charles, Sylvia, and Gilbert. They too had stood beneath the oaks at Riceboro to be auctioned by the sheriff. Their previous owner, James Holmes, had borrowed money from Andrew Maybank and had mortgaged Andrew and his family as surety for the loan. When Holmes defaulted on the loan, Maybank foreclosed on the mortgage, and the sheriff brought the family to Riceboro for their sale at “public outcry at the Court House in Riceboro.” The “said Negroes” were “knocked off to Andrew Maybank for the sum of one Thousand Dollars which was the highest and best bid that was made.” Since their arrival at May-bank, Andrew and Mary Ann had had three more children: Dinah had been born in 1828, George in 1830, and Delia in 1833.28

  Andrew, who was twenty-six when he came to Maybank, was a large and agile man with powerful hands that were already thick and tough from swinging a hoe and handling a plow. So hardened were his calluses, he could pull a roasting oyster from the fire and shuck it in his hands. While he was not good with numbers, he knew about cotton and corn and how to manage a plantation, and so he became the driver at an early age. “Andrew is such an intelligent man,” a neighboring planter later wrote Charles, “and one of principle—it is a pleasure to see his work.”29

  Andrew and Mary Ann were island Gullahs—“genuine Africans” they were sometimes called. The settlement where they lived was some distance from the Maybank plantation house and was tucked away under oaks and palmettos near a bluff that overlooked the marsh. This meant that of all the isolated settlements, of all the settlements that saw whites only on occasion during part of the year, none was more isolated than that at Maybank. Andrew and Mary Ann lived in this settlement for more than thirty-seven years; they raised their children here and buried one of them in its sandy soil; and they came to think of this place overlooking the marshes of the Medway as their home. Here they knew the smell of the marsh and how the dawn wind could stir the palmettos as the sky in the east began to pale over St. Catherine’s Sound. Here at their little settlement they would sit with others around evening fires to rest from the day’s labors, and, year in and year
out, tell in their Gullah dialect the secrets of their world while listening to the sounds of the marsh and the distant surf.

  With the isolation of Andrew and Mary Ann there would come remarkable contradictions to their lives—or at least apparent contradictions. As ones who had stood in the sandy yard at Riceboro, they knew only too well the harsh realities of slavery and the arbitrary ways of white power, and they were to have occasion to experience again such harsh realities. Yet they had at Maybank a freedom of spirit that was not crushed by the confines of slavery; they had within their little island world a cultural freedom, even a freedom of movement on the island and in the marshes, that marked their daily lives and the routines of their years. Yet strangely they and their children, of all the Joneses’ slaves, were to be the most loyal to their white master and mistress when years later Federal ships appeared off the coast. Of course, it may have been precisely their isolation that made such loyalty possible. Perhaps their distance from Charles and Mary kept them loyal when others, who knew the ways of whites more intimately, were eager to get away from the benevolence of kind owners.

  Living at the settlement, in addition to the fifteen slaves Charles and Mary inherited, were the twelve slaves left to Laura and Charles Edward Maxwell by Andrew Maybank and seven given to them by their grandfather Audley Maxwell. Among the Maybank slaves was Jacob, who had made a break for freedom ten years earlier. He had been a young man at the time, in his early twenties, and he had left his wife, Cora, and daughter Sary to head for Savannah, where his father lived. By hiding out in the slave quarters in the city, he had remained free for a few months before being caught and returned to the island. By the time Andrew Maybank died, Jacob and Cora had had another four children. In the evenings around the settlement fires, he could tell of his escape from the island, about life in Savannah, and about how he had paid dearly for his freedom with lashes of a whip.30

  Montevideo and Maybank each had a distinct environment that shaped the character of the plantation and those who lived on it. Montevideo was a river plantation, with its river swamps and slough. And while it had plenty of sand, it also had rich alluvial soil, especially where dark waters had slowly swirled and left behind the decomposing wealth of past summers. Maybank, on the other hand, was a Sea Island cotton plantation, as different from Montevideo as Montevideo was different from the plantations on the rolling hills of middle Georgia.

  Colonel’s Island—with the other Sea Islands that stretched along the South Carolina and Georgia coast—had been formed by ancient geological forces, especially as fluctuating sea levels had deposited layer upon layer of sediment. These islands stood as barriers between the open ocean and the mainland, and they had their own maritime environment.31 William Bartram, the eighteenth-century naturalist, had visited Colonel’s Island in 1773 and had probably roamed over what was to become Maybank Plantation. In his Travels he described what he found:

  The surface and vegetable mould here is generally a loose sand, not very fertile, except some spots bordering on the sound and inlets, where are found heaps or mounds of sea-shell, either formerly brought there by the Indians, who inhabited the island, or which were perhaps thrown up in ridges, by the beating surface of the sea: possibly both these circumstances may have contributed to their formation. These sea-shells, through length of time, and the subtle penetrating effects of the air which dissolve them to earth, render these ridges very fertile; and, when clear of their trees, and cultivated, they become profusely productive of almost every kind of vegetable.

  Bartram described the thick maritime forest that covered the island and “the great variety of trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants” that thrived in its soil. Most notable were the Sea Island oaks, massive and strong enough to withstand the hurricanes of many centuries, and especially valued in the making of keels for sailing ships. In Bartram’s time the island was still home to the black bear, the cougar, and the southern red wolf. By the time of Andrew Maybank’s death those species had been long gone, but other animals remained, including deer, raccoons, rabbits, bobcats, otters, and minks. And the birds! They were beyond counting, especially during spring or fall migrations, when the island was a resting place along the Atlantic flyway.32

  To the north and west of Maybank, and to the south of Half Moon, were salt marshes with a maze of tidal creeks running through great plains of cordgrass—Spartina alterniflora —the backbone and lifeblood of the marsh. Green in the summer, brown in the winter, the cordgrass endured twice-daily flooding as the tide rose and twice-daily drought as the tide flowed out. Its roots held the thick black mud of the marsh, and the detritus of broken and decaying wracks of the cordgrass fed a great chain of life. Mullet and sheepshead, flounder and shrimp, crabs and oysters, conchs and clams all flourished in the creeks and along the mud banks and provided an important source of food for those who lived in the Maybank settlement. This marsh became a great schoolhouse for the male children of the settlement and of the plantation house at Maybank. Charlie and Joe, during each summer and fall they spent at Maybank, learned to study the marsh objectively and to collect and analyze marsh life, but young Charles and Gilbert and the other sons of the settlement were the ones who learned the ways of the marsh most intimately, as they lived on its edge and explored its recesses.33

  The varied landscapes of Montevideo and Maybank had a profound influence on Charles and Mary, on the ways they saw the world and understood their place in it. Charles had developed as a boy a love for nature as he had explored the woods and swamps of the Retreat, and as he had roamed the oak forests and shell ridges of Maybank and Orange Grove. And Mary had grown to love “the beautiful and rural scenes of nature” and to delight in the sights and sounds of a winter’s walk down a sandy road.34 To be sure, both of them had experiences of what they called, in the language of nineteenth-century Romanticism, “the sublime.” Charles had experiences that struck his heart and mind with the overwhelming power and majesty of nature and nature’s God, that filled him with awe for the beauty, vastness, and grandeur of a storm at sea or a starry winter’s night in New England. And Mary, when she visited Sapelo Island, had declared the “indescribable sublimity” of a “moonlight excursion.”35 Such experiences of nature reminded them of God’s power and might and filled them with awe when they thought of standing before such a God. But it was not so much these sublime moments that shaped their hearts and minds as the ordinary moments, their daily experience of the beauty of the low country and the picturesque character of the landscape of Montevideo and Maybank.

  When Charles and Mary looked across the landscapes of their plantations, they saw not simply economic opportunities but specific places—Montevideo and Maybank—and these specific places were living works being shaped by a vision they shared of the good and the beautiful. As sentient beings they delighted in what they saw when they looked across the lawn at Montevideo to the flowing waters of the Newport, and they found deep joy in the smell of the marsh as they rode to Maybank and felt for the first time each year the wind bringing them the rich fragrance of their summer home. They grew to love sitting on the piazza at Maybank and having as a family their evening devotions. The summer twilight would linger around them like an old friend reluctant to leave so pleasant a place before slipping away, and the Medway marsh would glow and then blush as it welcomed the shadows of the night. Evening by summer evening, the family would watch these transformations of the marsh and listen to the sounds of a low-country night that slowly enveloped them. These ordinary experiences and these familiar landscapes of their daily lives—these were what they treasured.36

  In it all Charles and Mary experienced the presence of God. They knew, of course, that what they saw was not a perfect world. They knew at some deep level that the harmony and order and quiet, the peace and beauty of Montevideo and Maybank, were only partial. Sin, sickness, and death were all too real along the banks of the Newport or by the Medway marshes for a sentimental romanticism to flourish.37 Moreover, they knew at least in the
ir heads that the prosperity of the plantations was built upon slavery—a social system, Charles was to say over and over again, that was rooted in the fallen character of humanity. In the same way, they believed the landscape itself—the rivers and the gardens, the marshes and the woodlands, and all that crept upon them or flew above them—was marked by the harsh realities of a fallen world, that, in the words of St. Paul, the “whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain” (Romans 8:22). But when they looked at the world around them in all its brokenness, they saw a God of goodness and beauty whose grace and love, whose redemption of a groaning world, was finally and most completely revealed and accomplished in Jesus Christ.38

  This vision of the world and of God’s activity in it was at the heart of their spirituality. To confess Jesus as their personal lord and savior was for them a way of seeing the world, a way of knowing the depth of the world’s brokenness, and a way of seeing from afar the wholeness of a new heaven and a new earth and the hope for a new home where there would be no more pain or suffering, death or separation. Because it was a new way of seeing, the confession of Jesus meant for Charles and Mary a new way of living. Their devotional life, Charles’s missionary labors and Mary’s support of them, their arrangements for the running of their plantations, their treatment of their slaves, and Charles’s advocacy on behalf of slaves were all rooted in this confession and its resulting spirituality.

  But if Charles and Mary believed that their spirituality shaped what they saw when they looked around them, they were less well aware of the ways the landscape itself, with its history and social arrangements, shaped their spirituality and their understanding of God. Like the cypress and live oaks that grew along the river, their spirituality was rooted in the landscape and the history of the low country. Their spirituality was part of a rich Christian tradition reaching back many centuries and stretching across many cultures, but it was also a spirituality that reflected the particular contours of land and life in the low country. So how they saw the world around them was shaped by their faith; and their faith was shaped by the world around them.39