Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Charles and Mary decided that the family should go overland to Columbia in order to manage with some ease all of the trunks of clothes and boxes of books they wished to carry with them. Having said their goodbyes, they left Montevideo early on the morning of 1 February 1837. Charles, riding his horse Shannon, led the way down the avenue and on to the road to Riceboro. Behind him came Jack, driving the family’s carriage. Inside were Mary, five-year-old Charlie, three-year-old Joe, and Mary Sharpe, who was not yet two. With them was Jack’s niece, nineteen-year-old Patience. She was single, had no children, and had since childhood been trained to be a cook and domestic servant. The carriage was a four-wheel vehicle enclosed with wood, glass, and cloth, and it provided its occupants some protection from the February weather. And so they went, stopping in homes open to travelers, five days in all, until they arrived in Columbia and were warmly received by George Howe and his new wife, Sara Ann Walthour.20

  Howe, a widower, and Sara Ann, a widow, had married the previous December at the Walthour plantation, not far from Riceboro. The marriage had drawn Howe deep into the circle of Liberty County families and had anchored the New Englander to his adopted southern home. Sara Ann had gone to “finishing school” in Charleston as a young woman with Sister Susan and Cousin Mary Robarts, and it had been to her home in Walthourville that Mary Jones had gone to give birth to Joe in September 1833. A week before Howe’s marriage to Sara Ann, he had turned down the professorship of sacred literature at the new and well-financed Union Theological Seminary in New York City. “I must now say,” he had written the trustees of Union, “that it appears still my duty to cast in my lot and earthly destiny with the people of the South, among whom I have made my home. When I accepted the Professorship I hold, it was with the hope that I might be the means of building up the wastes, and extending the borders of our Southern Zion.” Such a motive, he said, still held him to Columbia. “Though our institution must be a small one through the present generation, and yours will be large, it is important, it is necessary, whatever be the fate of our beloved country, that this seminary should live.” If he were to leave, Howe thought, it would jeopardize the future of the seminary. “If I remain,” he wrote, “though the field of my efforts must be small, and I must live on in obscurity, we may yet transmit to the men of the next generation an institution which will bless them and the world.” Such was the character of the seminary to which Charles was committing himself and his family. And in Howe he would have not only a distinguished Old Testament scholar as a colleague, but a New England friend who was now, through his marriage with Sara Ann, the owner of a plantation in Liberty County with more than fifty slaves.21

  After staying several days with the Howes, Charles and Mary moved the family into a suite of rooms at the Clark Hotel. Patience stayed with them at the hotel, but Jack they sent back to Montevideo. Such was the confidence they had in him that Jack went alone with the carriage on the long trip home.22

  Hotel rooms were not Montevideo, but Charles and Mary tried to make the best of their new situation. Columbia they found to be a place of some contradictions. It was a young city with a rough edge to it, but it had some of the polish of low-country culture that had been transplanted to the state capital. “There is good society in Columbia,” Charles wrote Sister Betsy, “but not a great deal of it.” What was more disturbing was the lawlessness of the place and the continuing influence of infidelity that flowed from South Carolina College. Charles thought that city was filled with “a great many wicked people,” that murder was not uncommon in the city, and that if committed by the well-connected, it was not punished. “There is a great deal of corruption in this Town of Columbia,” Charles wrote after having been there a few months, and he added, “I see very little in it that makes it a desirable place for residence.”23

  But Charles also found Columbia an interesting place, and even a beautiful place in the spring when the dogwoods and azaleas were in bloom and the tea olives perfumed the air. And not least among the city’s attractions was the intellectual stimulation available with Howe as a colleague and conversation partner. Moreover, Columbia had young James Henley Thornwell, who was the professor of logic and belles lettres at the college. “He is a man of fine talents, and a Christian,” Charles wrote, “and if nothing untoward happens to prevent, he must rise to eminence.” And there were others as well whom Charles found good friends—Robert Barnwell, the new president of the college, and Stephen Elliott, an Episcopal minister who had recently been elected the college’s professor of sacred literature. (Elliott had visited at Montevideo and was known as a strong supporter of the religious instruction of slaves.) And there were laymen closely associated with the seminary: businessmen Abraham Blanding, William Law, and Gilbert Snowden and Judge H. W. DeSaussure. They all, together with their families, showed great kindness to Charles and Mary and the children and sought to make them feel at home in the city.24

  But for all the attention that was given them, the family was homesick for Montevideo and Maybank and for all who lived at the Retreat and Sunbury. Three months after they arrived, Charles carried Mary and the children and Patience back to Montevideo for an extended stay at home. Returning to Columbia by himself, Charles was miserable. “My dear wife,” he wrote Mary, “why do we ever consent to separate for a day? Every time I am away from you, I resolve it shall be the last. My spirits, my heart, are heavy as lead.” In the midst of his loneliness, Charles’s own sense of inadequacy as a professor grew. “My exercises of late in the seminary,” he wrote Mary, “have been pleasant, but there is no one that knows, but myself, how utterly incompetent in every respect, I am for the station they have placed me in.” He wondered if he should resign and, like many a young professor, he was surprised that his lectures were “looked upon with any interest on the part of the students. There are many of them that know just twice as much as I do.”25

  As soon as classes were over in July, Charles headed for Maybank, where in the evenings he could sit on the piazza with family and friends and watch the shadows lengthen over the Medway marshes. During the days he gave himself to hard study so that he might be a step or two ahead of his students on his return to Columbia, and on the weekends he preached and taught at the old stands. He was determined not to return to Columbia unless a house could be found for his family, and during the long break he learned from Howe that a place had been secured. So he made up his mind to give the seminary another go, to see whether it really was his vocation to be professor of ecclesiastical history and polity rather than a missionary to slaves.26

  In October, Charles was back in Columbia, teaching and making preparations for the family to join him in December, but he was as miserable and uncertain about being there as ever. “It is indeed a question if I am doing as much for the Religious Instruction of the Negroes here,” he wrote Mary, “as I was doing at home. If the seminary was larger, I might do more, but small as it is, and is likely to be, it is a question.” And the separations from Mary and the children left him lonely and despondent: “My darling wife,” he wrote from Columbia, “I love you a thousand fold more now than the hour I first embraced you and called you my own. My youthful passion for you is still a passion, but it has increased with the lapse of years: it carries in it the strongest, tenderest friendship. Words cannot describe my attachment to you…. All of that heart which is mine to give, I give to you.” 27

  After two months alone in Columbia, Charles returned to Montevideo to bring Mary and the children to the rented home that was now waiting for them in Columbia. Coming with them were Patience, Jack and his wife, Marcia, Rosetta’s and Sam’s daughter Lucy, who was seventeen, and Phoebe’s daughter Clarissa. With the rented house and the servants, Charles and Mary were at least giving the appearance of trying to make a home in Columbia.28

  There was much about Columbia that was more inviting for the family as they began a new year in the little city. A house, even a rented one, was far better than a suite of rooms in a hotel, and Jack and the ot
her servants not only provided their skills and hard work in making the household run smoothly, they also added reminders of Montevideo and Carlawter with their Gullah accents and all the associations that swirled around them. Certainly kind friends, especially the Howes, did all they could to make them feel at home and a part of Columbia. And there were visitors from the low country—Bullocks and Kings, Robartses and Dunwodys. But best of all was the presence of Mary’s brother, John Jones, at the seminary. He had had a conversion experience while a student at the college in Athens and had determined to follow Charles’s path into the ministry. John was a regular guest in their home, and he helped Charles with his work in a Sabbath school for slaves that Charles started down by the river.29

  Still, in spite of their efforts and the efforts of their friends, they were homesick. Letters arrived that evoked for them the sights and sounds of the low country and reminded them of faces and voices of family and friends. Sister Betsy was the most faithful correspondent. Big sister that she was to Charles (she sometimes called him “my child”), she longed for them to return to Liberty County. She told of the comings and goings at home, and, while not a gossip, she was a good storyteller and a persistent believer that Charles’s place was in Liberty County. She wrote that she and William Maxwell had hosted the wedding for their friends Abial Winn and Louisa Ward at the Maxwells’ new plantation home, Lodebar. It had been a grand occasion, with friends and family from far and wide. Tables had been set on the piazza, and the dining room sideboards had been loaded with hams and tongues, wild ducks and turkeys, sauces, oyster pies, and eight different kinds of puddings, together with preserves and cakes and three pyramids with jellies and syllabubs. And if such a feast were not enough to tempt one to come hurrying back home, there was the call of duty and the cries from the settlements—all the people, said Betsy, wanted Charles to come back and help “them on the way to God their Heavenly Father.”30

  If the pull of Liberty County were not enough to make Charles and Mary restless, they had a continuing concern about the character of the city, about its lack of piety and of the polished ways of the low country, and they wondered about the influence of such a setting on their children. And to make matters even worse, the Presbyterian Church was in the midst of a national division, and the uproar was having its effect on the seminary. Old School Presbyterians, staunch defenders of orthodoxy who were firmly lodged at Princeton and in most of the South, had accused New School Presbyterians of having absorbed too much theology from New England Congregationalists and of having abandoned too much of Presbyterian polity in their enthusiasm for interdenominational benevolence societies. Moreover, it was clear that the New School faction was much more hostile to slavery and that a number of abolitionists were a part of the New School. Charles liked none of it—the charges or the countercharges. He had, after all, studied at both Andover and Princeton. His irenic spirit, his experience of working with different denominations, and his piety all left him less than enthusiastic about denominational divisions.31

  It consequently came as no surprise to any who knew Charles that, following the summer break of 1838, he returned alone from Liberty County and announced his resignation. “I have come to the conclusion,” he wrote in October, “that it is duty to return to my old field of labour.” Ever since the synod first called him to the seminary, he acknowledged, “my mind has been unsettled, and ofttimes harassed and distressed, and my family has been moved from place to place at the loss of a great deal of domestic comfort and enjoyment.” His official reason for his resignation was that he was more fitted and could do more in his old field than at the seminary. All of his qualms about life in Columbia he kept private. And as for the church controversies, he wrote Mary, “I sigh, my dear wife, for relief from the conflictions of party: for my old & quiet field of labour. If there is any curse to be dreaded in a church, it is the introduction of Heresy & and the consequent array and war of party.”32

  And so in December 1838 Charles left Columbia and hurried back to Liberty County, where he intended to take up once again his work among the settlements and his life at Montevideo and Maybank. He had given the call of synod and its accompanying duty its chance in Columbia. But another call—a deeper, more familiar, and more insistent voice—had never left him. This voice he now followed with a new eagerness as he returned to the landscape of home and to the duties of missionary labors. What he would find on his return was, of course, that life had not stood still in the settlements while he was away. Even in Carlawter.

  15

  CARLAWTER II

  When Charles had first taken his family to Columbia in February 1837, the men, women, and children from Carlawter had come and stood in the yard at Montevideo to say their goodbyes. Standing among them was Lizzy. She watched as Charles, riding on Shannon, led the way down the long avenue, followed by Jack driving the carriage. It had been thirty-six years since Lizzy had left her own childhood home at Cedar Grove Plantation to go as a young woman to Liberty Hall with her mistress Susannah Girardeau. As she watched Charles riding down the avenue, she may have remembered the morning in 1805 when his father, John Jones, rode off for his fateful hunt. Certainly over the years she had seen many comings and goings of the white family, and she knew only too well how her life and the life of her family had been shaped by such leave-takings and homecomings and by the decisions made by white masters and mistresses. From slave sales in Riceboro, to summers in Sunbury, to sojourns in Greensboro, to time at the settlement at the Retreat, to the move to Carlawter, to the separation from her husband, Robinson, when the Robartses’ slaves had been moved from Carlawter to Hickory Hill—all of these important moments in her life bore the marks of white decisions and white power.1

  As the carriage had moved out of sight, Lizzy returned to her work. Charles had left Colonel Law’s son Joseph as the manager of Montevideo, and there had been careful instruction about the work of the plantation.2 Lizzy, however, had not been in good health for several years, so her workload was now lighter, confined primarily about the plantation house. She had to dust books and sweep the sandy yard, and on warm days air pillows and quilts.3 With Jupiter she had become one of the old ones in the settlement. He had been made the gardener, with responsibility for keeping the crabgrass out of the flowerbeds and for pruning the roses and for seeing that the birds did not eat the strawberries in the spring or get in the young fig trees in the summer. He would turn seventy-seven that year, and he knew that his life was drawing near its end. So he had gone into the woods and he had found a young oak and, after carefully digging it up so that the roots were intact, he had planted it in the bend in the avenue. He said he wanted it as a way “to be remembered by.”4

  It had been twenty years since Joseph had moved them from the Retreat to the settlement at Carlawter, and during those years Carlawter had been taking on its own character as a village among the settlements of the Gullah people. With its close ties to the settlements at the Retreat, at Maybank, at Hickory Hill and Lambert, Carlawter had its own rhythms of work, its own ways of doing things, and its own growing memory of fields that had been cleared and barns built. But during the coming years nothing was to mark Carlawter so much as a distinct community as would its spreading web of family relationships. Networks of kinship, long present, became increasingly dense as children raised in the settlement began to marry.5

  Lizzy and Robinson had eight children living at Carlawter in 1837. Lymus, the oldest, was thirty-two; Adam, the youngest, was twelve. But it was their three middle sons—Cato, Cassius, and Porter—who were becoming central figures in the life of Carlawter. Cato, who was twenty-eight, had become after Jack the person in the settlement closest to Charles. They had walked the fields together, and Charles, who had become a great walker during his time in the North, would brag to Cato that he could out walk him. But Cato was the one who knew the land most intimately, who knew the secrets of the woods and of the river in its seasons. And while he knew the land belonged to Charles, he would look on i
t as somehow being his own, not in a sentimental way, but as a landscape that reflected the work of those who lived and labored upon it.6

  Cassius, like his brothers Cato and Porter, was a big man. He was strong and evidently handsome, and he was becoming, in addition to a good field hand, an excellent basket maker—work that brought him some money when he sold baskets in Riceboro or to a neighboring planter. Adapting patterns and techniques rooted in West Africa, he would split the leaf stems of a cabbage palmetto and with a knife shape them into a uniform size. Turning the smooth outer surface of the stems to the outside, he would weave them into a basket that had a fine polished look. He could also take sweet grass and make a light, flat basket for fanning rice. And in the afternoons after completing his tasks, he could cut green branches, and then around evening fires he could make stick baskets from them that would grow tight and strong as the branches dried and shrank. For these stick baskets with their many uses, neighboring planters would pay 37½ cents each. Over the years his basket-making skills allowed Cassius to accumulate substantial possessions—including a mare, a colt, and a buggy—that rivaled the possessions of anyone who lived at Carlawter except those of his brother Cato and the plantation carpenters. But Cassius also had a hot temper, and while he kept it under control most of the time, it could flare suddenly and sometimes get him into trouble. He also had a way with women—and that too could get him, and also others, into trouble.7