Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Charlie joined Joe in the gathering of these wild specimens, but his interests were focused more sharply on the shell middens and Indian mounds, where he found arrowheads, spear points, and scrapers, hatchets, mortars and pestles, fishing plummets and hooks, and pieces of pottery on which “various images were curiously wrought.” His prize find, however, was a burial urn of “graceful outline” measuring “fifteen inches and a half in height, nine inches in diameter in the widest part, and ten inches and a quarter across the top.” Charlie had found the vase in an upright position in a small shell mound on the island. Its surface was imprinted with ornate geometrical designs, and when he looked within there were the “bones of a young child.” All of these artifacts intrigued him and stirred his imagination as he arranged them in the museum. They made him wonder about the mother whose child was buried in the urn and about those who had once lived on the island and hunted its woods, who had gathered such huge numbers of oysters and clams from the adjoining creeks and marshes, and who had now vanished from the earth. “We question,” he later wrote, “but there are no voices of the past in the ambient air.”13

  Mary Sharpe also had her corner of the museum where she would put her treasures, more modest in scope than those of her brothers and consisting of what was considered more appropriate for a young lady—no marsh rats or skeleton in a burial vase for her! She would have rather a “small piece of linen from the pyramids of Egypt” and a “few owl feathers” from an “old owl from the pyramids” brought to her by a visiting missionary. And there would be shells and fossils brought by her father for her to see and wonder over, but she would not shoot, catch, or dig for any items to place in her corner of the museum.14

  For all the children, but especially the boys, the museum was a place to teach them how to look and look again and analyze and think about what they were seeing. And in remarkable ways, the boys’ busy activities connected with the museum nurtured interests that came to shape their lives and vocational choices. Charlie would become a lawyer, but his passion would be as a historian and as a kind of early archaeologist exploring the ancient ruins of the aboriginal people of Georgia. More than 150 years after the little museum was built at Maybank, his research on the Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Particularly of the Georgia Tribes (first published in 1873) would be reissued and declared a “landmark publication,” and his collection of artifacts begun at Maybank would find their way to the American Museum of Natural History and to the Peabody Museum at Harvard. Joe would become a doctor, but his passion and the focus of his life would be as a scientist who would seek to understand the causes of disease, especially malaria and yellow fever, and he would gain an international reputation as an advocate for public hygiene as a way to combat the ravages of epidemics. As for Mary Sharpe, she was equally bright and disciplined as her brothers, but as a woman her vocational choices were limited. She would become an affectionate wife and mother, a leader of women in the church, and a person of uncommon good sense and strong character. Her gender, and the circumstances and the contingencies of her birth, limited her freedom to explore other options and to choose other paths.15

  The education of the children, of course, did not go on only in the schoolhouse and museum or in the surrounding woods and marsh. Much was taught and much was learned on the piazza when Jack and Phoebe and Patience served tea in the late afternoon and when the family and guests gathered for dinner. At such times the manners of elite southern whites were carefully instilled in the children, as was their position as young masters and young mistress. And much was also taught when Charles read to the family in the evenings when they gathered before the fireplace in the parlor as the weather began to turn cold. These evening gatherings were especially memorable for the children. Years later Mary Sharpe wrote:

  This early cold always carries me back to Maybank. Well do I remember the first fires that were kindled in the fall, and how we used to gather around the hearth—Father reading aloud, Mother knitting or sewing, Brother Charlie sitting upon the floor with a bunch of wire grass and ball of flax thread making mats with Taddy at his side (or else sinewing arrows), Brother Joe with his paint box and some megatherium skeleton model before him, and I think I used to make mittens or sew my hexagon quilt. Sometimes a hoarded stock of chinquapins would engage the attention of all the children, each one counting his store.16

  Charles and Mary in their disciplined life of study and work were themselves models for the children. In 1841 Charles, in addition to his missionary labors, was busy completing his Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States. For years he had been gathering books, pamphlets, and reports on the slave and free black population in the United States. The book provided a historical sketch of religious instruction from the earliest colonial period to 1842, a summary of “the Moral and Religious Condition of the Negroes,” a call for the church to “Attempt the Improvement of the Moral and Religious condition of the Negroes in the United States, by Affording them the Gospel.” The study was earnest and patronizing, as one would expect, but it was also filled with valuable reports, summaries, and observations that would be used for years by historians.17

  Mary was also a model of disciplined work for her children. In the early years of her marriage she read widely, largely under the direction of Charles, and saw after the increasingly complicated work of a plantation mistress. She was particularly interested in the education the children were receiving, and she would continue to be a deeply engaged critic of their work even when, in college, the boys were making names for themselves as scholars. She always pushed them to express themselves clearly and simply—especially encouraging Charlie to abandon a florid and pompous style that marked his early efforts. And Mary had a special concern that Mary Sharpe’s education, though limited by her gender, be full and rich. She wanted her, for example, to master French: “I am anxious,” she would write, “for your thorough knowledge of the language and that you should speak as well as read and write it.” Later she would warn Mary Sharpe: “How degrading to the intellect is the way in which young females particularly spend their time! With the mass of mankind there seems very little conscientious appreciation or improvement of the talents—for which they will have to render an account.”18

  Clearly time was a gift and resource to be used frugally and responsibly. All of the family would learn to sing vigorously the hymn of Charles’s friend Lowell Mason: “Work, for the Night Is Coming!” Day by day Charles and Mary modeled for their children a belief that disciplined work was both a religious responsibility and the only road to distinction. “All excellence,” Charles would write Charlie, “is the fruit of careful, persevering labor.” And Mary would confess that the “monitor within” was always reminding her: “There is something to be done.” Disciplined work, rooted in a sense of duty, was a lesson all three Jones children were to master.19

  Along with their parents, the influence of the children’s close relatives, especially their Aunt Betsy and their grandfather Joseph, helped to shape their characters and interests. Betsy regarded the children, together with Laura and Charles Edward Maxwell, as her own and treated them with great affection, an affection that they returned in equal measure, for she was to them a second mother. Married when she was only seventeen, Betsy had little formal education—only a few years under William McWhir at Sunbury—and would always be, in spite of her prominent connections, a countrywoman known for her hospitality, plainspoken ways, and sense of humor. She may have been dyslexic—she would write in a terrible hand “Jhon” for “John”—or she may have simply spelled as she spoke with her low-country accent—consistently writing “both” as “boath.” Years later John Jones wrote of her: “There was in her a most marked individuality of character…. I have never known anyone who has left behind them more distinct impressions of what they really were. None who knew her can ever forget the intense humanity that pervaded her whole nature; the bold generous heart, her willing, helping hand, her transparent candor, her quenchle
ss zeal in all good works, her ardent devotional spirit, and her unshrinking piety faithful to God and man. Is it any wonder that she was loved and honored by all who knew her?” What she provided the children as they were growing up was a sense that they were loved and honored for who they were. She would speak to them frankly and tease them and encourage them and always let them know how much she cared for them.20

  Their grandfather Joseph contributed something else to the children’s growing years. He was for them Captain Jones, the honored patriarch, and in him and in his affection for his grandchildren they had nurtured a sense of belonging to an extended family and being connected to a particular place over the generations. In him they found the security that comes from being linked not only to a geographical place but also to a social place and to a history that had shaped and been shaped by the landscape of the low country.21

  Charles and Mary hoped that all of these influences would lead above all to the conversion of their children. “Oh! How holy should we be in heart and in life,” Mary wrote Charles, “striving daily by precept and by example to lead our own beloved ones to the lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world.” Morning and evening prayers, daily Bible reading, faithful attendance at church, and their own example—these were the ways the parents hoped to lead their children to Christ. As the children grew older, Charles and Mary would feel an increasing anxiety for their children’s conversion, and this concern played a growing part in their relationship to all three.22

  For the children themselves, all of these influences came together to help shape their understanding of who they were and of their place in the world. Fundamental for them would be a Calvinist insistence on the value of ordinary life—an insistence that permeated the air of Maybank and Montevideo. This focus on ordinary life meant that home and family—not a cathedral or even a meetinghouse—constituted sacred space, especially as that space was marked by disciplined family prayer and devotions. The ordinary occupations of men and women—including those of doctors and lawyers, scientists and historians, housewives and mothers—were seen as vocations, as calls of God, that had dignity and possessed spiritual worth and contributed to the public good. In the coming

  Low-country oxcart (from Drums and Shadows, photograph by Muriel and Malcolm Bell, Jr., used by permission of Muriel Bell)

  years the Jones children would give themselves to their callings with remarkable discipline and profound identification with their work. Laziness they would regard as a sign of ingratitude and as harmful not only to the individual soul but also to the community. All the elements of their education and nurture would help to shape in the children personalities possessed of an intense consciousness of personal worth and self-respect, a powerful sense of vocation, and a feeling of great privilege and immeasurable responsibilities and duties. Not incidentally, all of these characteristics were well-suited for paternalistic elites in a slave society who felt that without their governing hand and benevolent impulses, chaos would be set free to rule the land.23

  While the children of planters were being educated in this manner, another kind of education was going on in the settlement at Maybank. Gilbert, the third child of Andrew and Mary Ann, turned fifteen a few weeks after James Dubuar began his classes. Every morning on his way from the settlement to the stables, Gilbert had to pass the little schoolhouse, and he no doubt heard on a regular basis Charlie and Joe, Audley and Mary King, and the others reciting or working on their different lessons of which he could have no part. And he must have watched with some amazement the stuffing and mounting of animals in the museum. Certainly he, with others in the settlement, kept an eye out for arrowheads and spear points and other relics of the original inhabitants of the island, for a reward was possible for a good find.24

  All of these familiar patterns of daily activity were part of the structure of the plantation, the way life was ordered at Maybank, and that order had an educational purpose—to teach Gilbert that he was a slave, that he was to go when he was sent and to come when he was called; that he was to walk past the school-house and the museum as a spectator and not go in to learn their lessons or acquire their power. And he was expected to do this without murmuring or complaining, but cheerfully, as one who acknowledged at a deep inner level that this was his place and these were his duties. Such indoctrination had behind it the power of the familiar, of everyday practices at Maybank and Montevideo.25 Yet in spite of such indoctrination, there must have been anguish for Gilbert and a sense of deprivation among all the children of the settlement who had to walk past the schoolhouse and hear the lessons being taught and know that they could not be included. And never would their resistance to the indoctrination of the plantation be clearer than when freedom came. Then they would flock to the schools for the newly freed people and with great sacrifice seek education for themselves and their children.26

  But there were other lessons that had to be learned in 1841. When Gilbert reached the stables, he had lessons under the direction of his older brother Charles, who was teaching him how to drive the gig, the little two-wheeled, one-horse carriage that Gilbert would use to make the long trips to Riceboro to pick up the mail or to go to Montevideo to get something needed on the island. It had been decided in the plantation house that Gilbert’s vocation, his calling, would be that of a “rider,” and, like his brother Charles, a driver of oxcarts and a general handyman rather than a field hand. This meant that he had to learn from his brother how to care for the horses in the stable and how to be sure the oxen were properly fed and watered. He needed to know how to put on a harness so that it would not rub the horse, and how to hitch an ox to a cart without getting gored or kicked, and how to navigate an oxcart so that it would not tip over with a full load of cotton or plantation supplies.27

  Gilbert would become in time particularly skilled in handling the oxen that were the primary draft animals at Maybank and Montevideo, and at Arcadia, too. The oxen were adult male bovines—generally Durhams or Devons—that had been castrated and were less excitable than horses and mules. A yoke of these oxen in their prime had roughly the same amount of pulling power as a span of large draft horses, and while they were easier to train to the line and to voice commands than horses, they had a tendency to pull against each other. Gilbert learned, however, that if he tied their tails together, they would pull together as well as any horses. He also learned that their short legs and cloven hooves made oxen particularly useful on a low-country plantation. With their short legs they could ease around huge stumps left to slowly decay in cleared fields. And unlike the cupped hooves of horses and mules, the oxen’s cloven hooves did not create suction as they plodded through muddy fields or along flooded roads. They were consequently much less likely to get bogged down in swamps or rice fields or when spring rains spread swampy waters over sandy roads.28

  Perhaps being drivers of oxcarts influenced the way Gilbert and his brother Charles learned to see the world. As the carts moved slowly but steadily around the plantations, hauling manure from the cow pens and bags of cotton from the fields, and as Charles and Gilbert loaded and unloaded the carts, they both grew to be patient and strong men who met the world as it came their way and persevered. In time Charles became known for the dignity with which he carried himself, and in his old age his broad shoulders would still reveal the strength of his youth, even as his face showed that he had seen more than his share of hardship and sorrow. Gilbert, like his older brother, grew into a steady and reliable man who did not easily change his ways or his course once he had set upon it. He wore in the future a pocket watch with a chain and used it to check the time when he had to drive the gig or carriage to get someone from the stage or later the train. The watch helped to make him punctual, and consequently he was regarded as all the more reliable.29

  With Charles and Gilbert in the Maybank settlement was young Niger, who was beginning to receive a different kind of education. During the coming years he would be designated the fisherman, and while he would have other w
ork to do as well, it was fishing, shrimping, crabbing, and gathering oysters that would be his primary vocation until the Federal ships began to appear off the coast. This meant that of all the people who lived at Maybank, white and black, no one would know the marshes and their creeks or the rivers and their inlets like Niger. Much of his early education would be focused on learning to navigate his bateau through the winding creeks of the marsh that were a labyrinth for the uninitiated. He found, as he went out day after day, the deep holes in the creeks where the young shrimp would gather as the tide went out, and he learned how to make a shrimp net and cast it just before the tide turned. And he learned how to make simple basket traps for crabs. Most of the year he would use a fish head in the basket for bait, but in the fall and spring, when the females were molting and shedding their shells, he would put a big male in the basket, and female “peelers” would come crowding in seeking a mate. And Niger would take these soft-shell crabs to Patience, who sautéed them and stacked them on a big platter for the dining room table at Maybank, although no doubt not a few were carried to the settlement. And Niger learned how to fish for trout in the creeks, and for spots during their fall run, and how to use fiddler crabs—they darted everywhere over the marsh mud—to catch the highly prized sheephead that tended to nibble with their big incisors rather than swallow the bait. “Niger succeeded in procuring some fine fish for two dishes; we had also an excellent oyster pie,” Charles wrote; the oysters, no doubt, had also been gathered by Niger from their muddy beds.30