Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Porter, who was twenty in 1837, was continuing to learn the carpentry trade. His primary teachers had been Sandy Jones at Carlawter—who had learned the trade from old Jacob at Liberty Hall—and Sandy Maybank at Maybank. In 1837 all the carpenters, including Syphax, were spending much of their time at May-bank building new cabins for its settlement and various outbuildings for the plantation.8 But they also had work to do at Montevideo. They cut trees down at May-bank, dragged them with oxen over to the North Newport, and, when the tide was flowing their way, floated them upriver to Montevideo, where they cut them into lumber with a pit saw. It was all hard and demanding labor, but the carpenters were steady workers and over time they built building after building.9 Porter, like the other carpenters, could hire himself out on Saturdays, and in this way he too was beginning to earn some money and accumulate some possessions.10 He was also beginning to take notice of Patience, who worked in the kitchen with his mother. He was, no doubt, pleased when her sojourn in Columbia turned out to be relatively short.

  Lizzy’s husband, Robinson, would have to make the long trip from Hickory Hill for his Saturday night visits to his “wife house” and to see his family at Car-lawter. Traveling with him was Rosetta’s Sam, the majordomo for Eliza Robarts’s household. By 1837 Rosetta and Sam had five children, and in the evenings around the settlement fires the children could hear stories from their mother about how Rosetta had been Charles’s nurse and how she had looked after him when he was a sick, recently orphaned, little boy.11 Their oldest child, Lucy, was learning from her parents the ways of a domestic servant, and her parents could see that she was becoming a young woman of considerable inner strength who—even under the burden of slavery—was able to carry herself with dignity. In the coming years deep lines would begin to mark Lucy’s face, each line telling of the troubles she had seen; but her face would also come to reveal a remarkable strength, the strength of one who had looked straight into the heart of slavery and had not been overcome.12 In 1837, however, she was sixteen and smooth-faced, and young men were beginning to notice her. One in particular, Charles the son of Andrew and Mary Ann at Maybank, would began to pay her special attention. But first she had to spend time in Columbia with Patience and with Phoebe’s daughter Clarissa to help with the housekeeping.

  Hamlet continued to be the driver at Carlawter, and, like his father, Jupiter, and his brother Jupiter before him, he would announce each new day with a blast from the conch-shell horn. Elvira had died in childbirth in 1826, but Hamlet had five children by her living at Carlawter—Syphax was the oldest—and he had another three children from his first wife, Phillis, and they too were a part of the settlement.13 When Charles had left for Columbia, he had placed increased responsibilities on Hamlet, for although Joseph Law had been made manager, Hamlet was to run the day-to-day work of the plantation. “Do tell Hamlet,” Charles would write when away, “the moment he gets through picking over his cotton to push on fast as he can in ginning,” and later he wrote: “Tell Hamlet as soon as Syphax is done at Lodebar to set him to work repairing the chimneys to the Negro houses.”14 But Hamlet was getting old—he turned seventy-two the year Charles left for Columbia—and it was increasingly difficult for him to see after all the many matters regarding the order of the plantation and the health and welfare of the settlement. It was a situation made for trouble, and trouble had already begun to stir at Carlawter. At the center of it were Phoebe and Cassius.

  While continuing to serve as Mary’s personal servant, Phoebe had been developing her skills as a seamstress. Twice a year Charles would buy cloth in Savannah and have it delivered by sloop to the wharves at Maybank and at Montevideo. In the spring big bolts of coarse Osnaburg linen would arrive, and in October bolts of woolen cloth would be unloaded. For winter undergarments there were bolts of flannel, and for the women who worked in the plantation house, rolls of printed calico arrived in the spring to be made into dresses and aprons. Charles, wanting to be just to his servants, ordered six yards for each adult—one yard more than the normal practice in the low country.15 While some families at Carlawter and Maybank apparently made their own clothing from the cloth, Phoebe had the primary responsibility—under Mary’s supervision—for cutting out and sewing most of the pants, shirts, and dresses for the people. Of course she had help—Rosetta spun the thread and helped with the sewing, as did others around the plantation house. But Phoebe was the skilled seamstress—she was the one who took the measurements for size, who saw that the patterns were closely followed, and who sewed the cloth with tight stitches. Such skill made her even more valuable to Mary, who continued to depend on her for many things.16

  Phoebe, Sandy, their child John, and Phoebe’s daughter Clarissa lived in a cabin near other members of Phoebe’s extended family. Her father, Jack, and his wife, Marcia, were nearby, as was Phoebe’s recently widowed uncle Robin. Although Phoebe was eight years older than her cousin Patience, they had become good friends working together around the plantation house until Patience left for her sojourn in Columbia.17

  Sandy was frequently away from Carlawter, sometimes at Maybank for an extended period and at other times at another plantation when a neighboring planter hired him for some special project. He was also growing older—he was at least twenty years Phoebe’s senior—and Phoebe was growing restless in their marriage. Cassius, who had evidently been courting Hamlet’s daughter Peggy, began to pay special attention to Phoebe. Before long she was “sharing his blanket.”18

  It was impossible, of course, to keep such a development a secret in a small community such as Carlawter and even in the larger community that surrounded it. Sam, the immediate successor to Sharper, reported to the session of Midway what was being said about Phoebe. She was cited to appear before the session, and Nathaniel Varnedoe from Liberty Hall was designated to determine whether the charges were true. Three months later Phoebe was excommunicated, and Cassius and Phoebe began to live together as husband and wife. Six months later their first child was born, a boy whom they named Cassius.19

  The affair may have taken a heavy toll on Sandy—certainly living in the tight little community at Carlawter must have been difficult for him. His health quickly gave way, and the next year he was reported seriously ill. He lived another few years, but he was never well again.20

  As Charles was preparing to leave Montevideo on one of his return trips to Columbia, Peggy asked to speak to him. Charles wrote Mary at Maybank what he had learned: “Place no confidence whatever in Phoebe. She is now as artful & as great a thief & liar as ever, and she & her husband are linked in & support each other in all theft that they can commit.” Peggy, he said, had told him that Phoebe was trying to obtain false keys to pantries and storehouses. “Do not,” Charles warned, “let her have the handling of any keys about the house.”21

  Mary could hardly believe such a report. Phoebe, after all, was her personal servant, she was the daughter of Jack, and Mary was dependent on her in innumerable ways. “What could have induced Peggy to tell you what she did?” Mary asked Charles. “Please write me as your letter creates great concern in relation to Phoebe. She has done very well indeed thus far.”22

  Charles responded with more details. Peggy had told him that Phoebe had cut a piece of paper to fit the shape of a master key and had sent to Savannah to have a copy made, that Phoebe’s “husband had sent to town also for a key to the corn house, and that they were both dishonest. She assured me there was no mistake.” But Charles did not want to concern Mary unduly while he was away, so he added: “Give yourself no uneasiness, my dear wife; yet with such a representation it is as well to be careful, but not more so than you ordinarily are, for our principle is to lay no temptations in the way of our servants.” He was glad to hear that “they have all behaved well. I believe they will continue to do so, and you will have no trouble.”23

  Within three weeks, however, Mary wrote him back: “There is no dissembling the truth—we have a wicked & corrupt set of Negroes at Montevideo, but I will tell
you all when you come home.” She assured Charles, “You must not think that they give me any trouble. I have got along very quietly.” And she said that, in contrast to his daughter, “Jack has been very attentive to all his business.”24

  And so the matter stood. Mary later remembered the episode as an example of what a master or mistress had to pass through when “attempting to assert the supremacy of their own authority.” She recalled “feelings of mortification, disappointment, and absolute anguish of spirit.” But the experience taught her to “consider these trials not as peculiar to myself but as actually belonging to the sin and ignorance which everywhere pervades the present state of our domestic relations. We must try and be kind and oft times forbearing, not exacting and suspicious whilst we do maintain cheerful and constant obedience—this to those in any subordinate situation is not only requisite to peace but happiness.”25

  The whole episode, following as it did Phoebe’s unfaithfulness to Sandy, left Charles suspicious of her. He was never dependent on her the way Mary was, and her behavior was a challenge to his image of himself as a benevolent master. If he could not keep his own “household” in order, how could he preach to others about theirs? An uneasy truce developed between Charles and Phoebe, but the next time he left for Columbia he sent Phoebe to work on a neighboring plantation, and he took Clarissa to Columbia to help with the housework and to be under the supervision of her grandfather Jack.26 As for Cassius, he continued to live with Phoebe—they had a daughter, Jane, in 1838 and another son, Prime, in 1840—but he had two other families as well. He and Peggy had a son, James, in 1842, and had a daughter, Nanny, on a neighboring plantation.27

  In May 1837, shortly after Mary had returned with the children from her first stay in Columbia, Jack came to Mary early in the morning and told her that Lizzy was very sick. She “complained of great pain in her bowels which had suddenly swollen up during the night.” Jack said they had given her “such remedies as we knew to do good,” and she seemed to be relieved. Mary ate a quick breakfast and, taking Charlie and Joe with her, she went immediately to Carlawter and found Lizzy lying before the fire in her cabin. Her sister Willoughby was with her. “She appeared very weak,” Mary wrote Charles, “but told me she had eaten her supper & drank her coffee as usual.” Mary, finding Lizzy’s pulse weak and her extremities cold, sent Willoughby running back to the plantation house to tell Jack to send some laudanum and mustard, by which she hoped to stimulate Lizzy’s system. In the meantime, Mary lifted Lizzy up and gave her some “some strong hot, catnip tea which she drank with perfect ease but said, ‘Mistress, I am done. I shall never do any thing more.’” Mary said, “Lizzy, if it is the will of God, I hope you are willing & ready to go.” She replied, “Yes mam, I am willing & ready to go. I put all my trust in Jesus Christ. I look to Him.” Mary, following the familiar ritual with the dying, white or black, said, “Do you indeed feel Lizzy that your sins are forgiven & that you have taken Christ for your own Saviour?” She answered, “Yes mam, I look to Him alone and I am willing & ready to go.” Mary then laid her gently back down, “telling her how happy I felt to hear her talk so, for Christ was our compassionate and almighty friend.” Lizzy said, “I am very weak” and turned on her side; and “the catnip tea poured from her mouth.” Mary heard “the death rattle in her throat, saw a few contortions of her face, a low murmuring sound of the voice & her soul was in Eternity.” All that Mary could feel or say was “Lord Jesus receive her spirit.”

  Willoughby had not yet returned with Jack, and no one else was in Carlawter. Robinson was at Hickory Hill, and all of Lizzy’s children had evidently gone to their work thinking that the medicine Jack had given their mother had revived her. Mary was alone with Lizzy’s body, except for little Charlie and Joe, who “were weeping bitterly & saying ‘Is Mom Lizzy dead? Dear mother, where is her soul? Has her soul gone to God? Mother she does not move. Oh! Mother will we too die!’” For a half an hour, with “the poor little fellows crying around me over the lifeless corpse of poor Lizzy” they waited for Jack and Willoughby. “Death & Eternity,” declared Mary, “were then realities & never did I feel more the responsibilities of owners.” 28

  Charles was moved to tears when he received Mary’s account of Lizzy’s death. “Poor Lizzy,” he wrote Mary. “Though the scene was so peculiarly trying, yet I rejoice that you were with her, and were enabled to converse with her. I lament her death for she was a quiet, faithful Negro, & one of the oldest on the plantation.” Charles thought Lizzy’s professions were sincere and that “she is now in a better world.” He agreed with Mary about the responsibilities of owners. “We should indeed feel our responsibility as owners more; nor should we forget to make efforts for their salvation, while they are in health.” He regretted that “we are prone to procrastinate, and to crowd all our conversation, & prayers, and their salvation, in the compass of a few brief & painful hours, immediately preceding death.” As for Charlie and Joe, they “never before saw death! May God sanctify the scene to them!”29

  Mary wrote no details of Lizzy’s funeral. But whatever the rituals performed at her grave, Lizzy’s burial in the plantation cemetery meant that for her children and grandchildren—and during the coming years for her great-grandchildren—Carlawter was a place of ancestors. The network of family relationships that marked Carlawter as a little village included not only the living but also ancestors who were now part of the land and the landscape.30

  A year after his mother’s death, Porter began courting Patience in earnest. Patience had from an early age worked in the kitchen with Lizzy and had learned from her something of a developing African-American cuisine. Porter had opportunities, no doubt, to learn something of Patience as he had seen her at work with his mother and as they had been together in the evenings around the fires at Carlawter. In the summer of 1838 it had become clear that the white family would not be going back to Columbia to make it their home and that Patience would be staying at Montevideo and Maybank. Before the next Christmas the young couple were married. They had joined Midway together in February 1835, and during the coming years both were faithful and responsible members of the church. Indeed, responsibility was to be a characteristic that marked both of them as they went about their work and their lives.31

  Patience was large, big-boned, and stout—her shoes were “the largest woman size” available in Savannah. Perhaps growing up around the plantation kitchen had provided the nutrition needed to reach her size. At any rate, her size reflected her growing stature in the slave community. She was very close to her uncle Jack, and her husband, Porter, was becoming a skilled carpenter who was already filling in for an ailing Sandy at Carlawter and who one day was to replace Sandy Maybank as the chief carpenter of the Joneses’ plantations. Patience was herself beginning to replace her cousin Phoebe as Mary’s closest personal servant. Such a replacement did not come quickly—it would not be complete for years—nor was it apparently something that Patience sought. Rather, this slow process of replacement had more to do with the ways the two cousins responded to slavery and how they negotiated the complex relationship of mutual dependence between mistress and slave.32

  In remarkable ways, Patience came to embody her name. Unlike Phoebe, who had to struggle to conquer her impulse to open defiance and whose rage lay near the surface of her cheerful demeanor, Patience was a self-possessed woman who met life with a deep composure and with a capacity to endure the burdens of slavery. A white visitor at Montevideo and Maybank would remember her “with pleasure” as “adept in her art, reliable, and refined in manner and conduct.”33 Her way of resistance, her struggle, was to see after the welfare of her family. Rather than rage against the system, Patience tried to work the system in such a way that her family was protected from the harshest aspects of slavery. She wanted her children to have the best food, housing, and clothing that she could provide, and she wanted them to have a stable family life with her and Porter. Of course Phoebe also wanted these things for her family, but she was never able
to give herself to these concerns in the way in which Patience was able. On the other hand, like Mom Sylvia at the Retreat, Patience was no “Mammy”—no hefty cook who smiled and was happily submissive.34 Rather, she was patient, doing what she could for her family, and when freedom came, she was to show where her deepest loyalties lay. These differences between the two cousins in time played out in their family histories, as each sought to resist in her own way the degradations of slavery.

  About the same time that Porter and Patience were marrying, Cato was also courting a daughter of Jack’s, Phoebe’s half-sister Betsy, who lived at the Retreat and who worked as a domestic servant under the tutelage of Mom Sylvia. After Phoebe’s mother, Lizett, died, Jack had married Marcia, and in 1838 they had three adult children living at the Retreat. (Charles rented Marcia from Joseph so she could live with her husband both at Montevideo and when Jack went to Columbia.) Betsy was nineteen when she married Cato in 1839, and he was thirty. The next year they had their first child, Rinah; then would come Ned, and finally Madison, named for his uncle, Betsy’s brother. Cato and Betsy would never live together—he would have to make the trip to his “wife house” at the Retreat on the weekends. But they were devoted to each other and managed through their devotion to face all the stress and hardships of their separation.35

  Cato and Betsy’s marriage was followed the next year by that of Lucy, Rosetta and Sam’s daughter, to Charles, the son of Andrew and Mary Ann at Maybank. Because Lucy worked in the house, she traveled with the white family between Montevideo and Maybank. While at Maybank, she and Charles could see each other regularly. In 1840 they married, and in 1841 they had their first child, Tenah, who in time became the personal servant of little Mary Sharpe Jones.