Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  As Sharper visited in the settlements he could not only hear the spirituals as they were sung in the arbors and around the evening fires, but he could also hear religious songs and see religious dances that were in their tone and character even closer to Africa than the spirituals. The ring dances and shouts of Gullah people had been remembered from a distant homeland, infused with Christian imagery, and transformed into a seedbed for the spirituals. More incantation than song, the shouts were mystical and powerful, drawing the singers into a kind of ecstasy as emotions from deep currents surged like a turbulent sea. A number of dancers would form a circle and move counterclockwise to a rhythmic step: feet flat on the floor, heels tapping, hips swaying, shoulders stiff, arms close to the body, hands forward with palms up as a supplication, and all the while an undulating flow of song:

  Day, day Oh—see day’s a-coming

  Ha’k ‘e angels

  Day, day Oh—see day’s a-coming

  Ha’k ‘e angels

  Oh look at day (ha’k ‘e angels)—Oh Lord

  Ha’k ‘e angels

  … …

  Who that a-coming (ha’k ‘e angels)—Oh Lord

  Ha’k ‘e angels.33

  Sometimes there was even more dramatic participation in the song. In “Down to the Mire,” dancers took turns in the center of the ring on their knees, heads touching the floor, rotating with the circle while the passing shouters pushed the head “down to the mire.”

  Sister Emma, Oh, you mus’ come dow to de mire.

  Sister Emma, Oh, you mus’ come dow to de mire.

  Jesus been down

  to de mire

  …..

  Lowrah lowrah

  to de mire

  Jesus been down

  to de mire.34

  Those who had been down to de mire often came up ecstatic, believing they had been converted. And for any who wanted to join the Midway congregation, it was Sharper’s responsibility to talk with them to try to discern the spirit that had been at work in them. And what made the discerning process more difficult was that many who had been down to de mire had also had dreams that had convinced them that they had seen the light, that God had touched their hearts and saved their souls. Charles would also hear them tell of their dreams. A man came to him “professing to be under some convictions of sin” and said: “Last night I dreamt that two white ladies, all dressed in white, with smiling faces, said to me, will you come with us and serve the Lord? I answered—I am not ready. Said they, you must get ready and come, and with that they vanished out of sight.” Another man, who had been excommunicated, wished to be readmitted to the church. He went to a watchman and told him a dream he had had: “He fell into a hole, and that was full of fire. A white man appeared and took him out, and told him to go and tell T. the watchman.” The watchman recalled telling him “I could not take his dream; it was no evidence of any reformation. The man flew into a rage. Now,” said the watchman to him, “I know better than ever, that there is no repentance in you.” Another had dreamed that a child, living in another settlement, was going to die, and the child died. And still another said that “she must believe in dreams, because they were the means of her conversion.” She had dreamed “that a man had told her she was going to hell,” and soon after “her friend had a peculiar dream, and these two combined, first led her to serious reflection.”35

  Charles found these dreams “mild and unexceptionable, compared to numbers that they tell,” and he noted that “many place unbounded confidence in dreams, visions, voices and the like.” What Charles was learning as he visited in the settlements and talked with Sharper and the watchmen was that there existed in the settlements a “regular system of dreaming for various purposes”:

  Their dreams for admission into the Church are very nearly the same, which shows how they come by them. When they wish for a favor, or have a spite against any one, they dream for it, and very often very ingeniously. They have what they call travels, or travails. These, so far as I understand them, partake of the nature of Revelations. Allied to these are their trances, and visions, and voices. They encourage each other in these follies, and their religious teache[r]s especially, for dreams, travails, visions, etc. are powerful engines in their hands for the accomplishment of their designs whatever they may be.36

  Charles’s response, and the response that he recommended to others, was to be careful in the manner of “overthrowing their superstitions” in order not to provoke those who had had the dreams. When a person had had a dream that led to a conversion, Charles would respond: “On that point we have little to say, God may or may not have been in that dream. We cannot tell. Let us pass that by for the present and inquire if you have heartily repented, etc.” Charles urged those attacking “their superstitions” to do so “sympathizing with them in their little opportunities of knowing better, and clearing up every thing from the Bible, so that they can not but see the error.” But he noted the preacher and watchman “will find professors of religion among the Negroes, as stubborn in holding on to false hopes, and false evidences, as among any other people. He will find them too, as opinionated, and as fond of an easy way to Heaven as other men.”37

  Charles did not hesitate, however, to preach against conjurers, charms, and dreams. In a sermon on “Simon the Sorcerer,” he said the story of Simon teaches us “what we are to think of sorcerers, wizards, and witches.” We are, he said, “to look upon them as deceivers. They pretend only to do wonders, and tell fortunes and give charms…. And we may defy all of them in the world to tell our fortunes, what is coming to pass, to make us well or to bewitch us, by their old roots and rusty nails and hair and wool and old bags and sticks and marks and mutterings. They lie and do not [tell] the truth as it was with Simon.” What they are after, Charles warned his congregation, is your money.38

  After the sermon, Pompey, the watchman and the driver at the Mallard Place, told him that some of the “people found fault” with him “because he preached against Sorcery, Witchcraft, etc.” Pompey said, “there was a great disposition in black people to hold on to their sins, and to be religious too; but that was impossible.” He then added: “As black a man as he was, he would not give up his hope in Jesus for the whole world.” And when Charles spoke against dreams, he over heard someone say after the service: “I don’t care what he says; can any body make me believe that I did not see my dream, nor hear the voice that came from God to me? Did I not see it with my own eyes, and hear it with my own ears? ” The experience of the slave was providing a way of knowing, a way of interpreting life and religion, which claimed its own authority and that resisted the way of knowing and the authority of the white preacher.39

  Such resistance convinced Charles—and perhaps Sharper encouraged him to think this—that a “religious teacher cannot always meet and put down a superstition. He must depend upon a gradual increase of knowledge. When light enters the mind, darkness will vanish.” What Charles expected “the light” to teach was a modern dismissal of superstition, a dismissal that flowed most strongly from the Enlightenment’s confident smile of reason. But Charles was also reflecting the Calvinist tradition in which he stood and which could be seen in the simple, plain features of the Midway meetinghouse. This tradition insisted that the heart of sin was not so much unbelief as idolatry: the making of a god out of that which is not God. For the Calvinist, the Creator of the heavens and the earth could not be manipulated. Magic, however, was regarded as precisely that—an attempt to manipulate God. And nothing troubled Calvinists more in this regard than the sacraments. They wanted no hint of magic connected with baptism or the Lord’s Supper. Being baptized either by sprinkling or by immersion, Charles insisted, did not save a person. He tried to “refute the notion, dearly cherished by many, that there is a virtue, an almost saving efficacy in the mode, in the water applied to the person.” It did not matter if the Reverend Robert Quarterman sprinkled water on the head of a man at Midway or if the Reverend Samuel Law plunged a woman down into the
dark waters of the North Newport as the tide turned to carry her sins away; if the person did not have a new heart, nothing was gained.40

  In the same way, Charles worried that “some entertain erroneous notions” of the Lord’s Supper, with “some of them believing it a kind of saving ordinance. If they can eat the bread and drink the wine, all is safe.” But what concerned Charles the most were special meals held at night, in gatherings they called the “Society,” where “they have had suppers consisting in the substantials of rice, fowls, bacon, etc. which have been viewed by them in the light of the Sacrament! at which colored watchmen have presided. Most awful!” The Societies were the gatherings in the bush arbors of church members and inquirers not yet baptized, and they represented an almost secret institution in the settlements. Their sacred meals may have been an adaptation of the love feasts of the New Testament revived by the Moravians, but they also may have reflected a tradition from west Africa of sacrificial meals. Whatever the antecedents of the meal, Charles found it “most awful!” and “pernicious” because some watchmen were involved and because the claim was made that the meal had a sacramental character. He evidently saw in the meal not only a ritual that was blasphemous—by claiming to be something sacred, by claiming to put the participants in contact with the holy—but also a ritual, a social drama, that was subversive. This nighttime meal was enacted without the authority of the white church, and as such it had the potential of nurturing a vision of an alternative world where whites were not masters and blacks were not slaves. To make matters worse, watchmen had not only participated, they had presided at the meals. A secret world—incorporating into it biblical images, Christian theology, and Christian leaders—seemed ultimately more threatening to the established order of Liberty County than a world of conjurers and charms.41

  In late May 1833, as Charles was leaving his study, he saw a man riding toward the house. It was Sharper’s son, bringing news of his father’s death. Sharper had eaten some plums, still too green in May, and he had been struck with a violent affliction of the bowels. Medicine had been administered, and had appeared to help, but he shortly fell into a “kind of stupor, and rapidly declined in strength.” Some older members of the church came and prayed with him, and he revived enough to say, “By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace which was bestowed upon me, was not in vain.” Then his strength failed, and he died shortly afterward. The son asked Charles to have the funeral on the next evening.42

  Charles left home on horseback an hour before the sun set and reached Midway just as the moon rose, three quarters full. He drew up his horse by the wall of the cemetery and for a few moments surveyed the “City of the Silent.” He looked at the graves and vaults of his father and mother, of other relatives, and of “many, very many friends.” Some of the stones were “whiter than marble in the moonlight, and others but dark forms under the shadow of trees.” How easily, he thought, “might ignorant and superstitious minds be wrought upon by such scenes.” There were “graves, tombs, railings, vaults—all that we meet with in grave-yards: lights and shadows intermingling, every object indistinct, and ever changing in outline.”

  Charles had been told that the funeral would be held at the Old Field, so he rode on north of the church about a mile. He turned off the road and entered an old plantation avenue that led to the settlement where Sharper had lived as a child. The settlement was gone, abandoned years earlier, and only the foundations of the cabins and the old graveyard remained. Here Sharper’s parents and other relatives were buried, and here, in this sacred place of ancestors, the old preacher had picked out his own gravesite, where he would rest undisturbed until Judgment Day. Charles stopped his horse and awaited the arrival of the funeral. He looked and saw “not a living thing in the extensive field. Dark woods skirted it on every side. It was a perfect solitude on the earth.” An owl hooted down in the deep swamps and was answered by another. Charles could hear in the distance the low rumbling of a plantation mill. But no one arrived. After about an hour, he called out, and his voice echoed far and wide, but no one answered. He rode back to the road and met a man who told him that for “the convenience of the people the funeral would be held at the Church.”

  Hurrying back to Midway, he found “between three and four hundred Negroes, already assembled.” They were sitting and standing quietly on the green before the church, while on the edge of the gathering were fifteen or twenty horses held by their owners. Charles was the only white man present. The moonlit scene with the white meetinghouse and the silent people on the green, he thought, “partook of the mysterious.” The wall of the cemetery ran out of the moonlight into the shadow of the church and lost itself in dark woods. “We seemed,” he thought, “to be in a mysterious world; the living had come to commune with silence and the dead.” Overcome by the power of the scene, he waited silently for the arrival of the body.

  Finally, they could hear the oxcart moving quietly down the sandy road. As it came toward the church door, the people rose and followed it. The procession came to a stop. The old members of the church, together with Sharper’s sons, lifted the coffin off the cart and placed it on a bier a few steps before the church door. Charles mounted the steps, and the people gathered around. “The blue heavens,” Charles wrote, “were stretched over us, and the moon was our chandelier.” A soft “tremulous voice,” as if “afraid to break the silence, commenced the song.” Charles prayed and then took as his text: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord, from henceforth: Yea saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors: and their works do follow them.” He spoke of the eternal world and of the glories of “our exalted Redeemer.” And then he spoke of Sharper, of the old man now in Heaven, resting from “his labors among them, as a friend, a brother and a Minister.” And as he spoke the people “wept and wept aloud.” And Charles himself choked with emotion and found tears coming again and again.

  Charles concluded the sermon, another hymn was sung, and the benediction was given. Then the “lid was removed and they passed around the coffin, and took a last, a farewell look of their dead Minister. The moon shone full upon his face, forever fixed in death. Many were the tears there shed—many were their farewells and their expressions of sorrow.” The lid was replaced, the coffin put back on the oxcart, and the body was “committed to his Sons” to carry it to the silent field of the old settlement. As Charles and the crowd watched, the cart moved through the shadows of the surrounding oaks. All around was “the rich, heavy foliage of the forests … wet with dew and hanging in silvery masses.” The cart came out of the shadows. The moonlight illumined a road of white sand running before them toward the old settlement and its cemetery. Sharper’s family, now by itself, may have sung as they walked along with the creaking cart one of the most beautiful of the spirituals:

  I know moonrise, I know star-rise,

  Lay dis body down.

  I walk in de moonlight, I walk in de starlight,

  To lay dis body down.

  I’ll walk in de graveyard, I’ll walk through de graveyard,

  To lay dis body down.

  I’ll lie in de grave and stretch out my arms;

  Lay dis body down.

  I go to de judgment in de evenin’ of de day,

  When I lay dis body down;

  And my soul and your soul will meet in de day

  When I lay dis body down.

  The little procession turned off the road and went down the ancient avenue toward the settlement. When they arrived at the chosen spot, the sons dug the grave, lowered their father to his resting place, and tossed the sandy soil on the old preacher. With these and perhaps other private rituals they committed their father to the place of his ancestors and to the Savior whom he had trusted.43

  14

  COLUMBIA

  As the executor of Andrew Maybank’s estate, Charles found that he had continuing responsibilities for the management of the legacy left to Columbia Theological Seminary. The money that had been collected at Ricebo
ro from the sale of Rachael and other Maybank slaves to Joseph Jones, from the sale of cattle and hogs and beehives and silverware and real estate—all of the money had gone into a legacy for the seminary and Charles had to oversee its investment for several years until the estate was finally settled. Such a responsibility, together with his publications and work for the religious instruction of slaves, made him not only well known throughout Georgia and South Carolina but also a churchman of increasing influence. In 1835, at age thirty, he had been elected a member of the board of directors of the seminary, and the Synod of South Carolina and Georgia had appointed him chairman of a committee to investigate the possibilities of a “Southern Union for the Religious Instruction of the Slaves.”1

  Charles was clearly the one behind the proposed “Southern Union,” although a number of prominent clergymen and lay men—including Thomas Clay—were on the committee. The plan was to form a regionwide benevolence society—modeled after those he had come to know in New England—which would coordinate and encourage missionary work among the slaves. The society would be composed only of southerners who were desirous of reforming slavery and making the experience of slavery into one of religious and moral training for African Americans. It all sounded reasonable and prudent to Charles, but he had not anticipated the hostility such a proposal would evoke among the radical defenders of slavery, who feared “religious meddling” with the institution and any movement that might challenge the prerogatives of masters. And nowhere would the hostility and opposition be stronger than in South Carolina.2