Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  But Cato’s character was not so simple. Years earlier, Charles had written that “persons live and die in the midst of Negroes and know comparatively little of their real character. They are one thing before the whites and another before their own color.” Much of what Charles saw in Cato was what Cato wanted him to see. Day in and day out, year in and year out, Cato seemed a faithful servant to Charles. And ironically his faithfulness—especially during these years of Charles’s absence—provided greater independence for himself and for those who lived at Carlawter, for as long as Cato was trusted, there was less need for white supervision. From time to time in the years to come, however, Charles was to catch a glimpse of another face behind Cato’s familiar smile. The glimpse would not be enough to challenge Charles’s image of Cato, and Charles would go to his grave believing Cato a “good and faithful man” to him. It would be Mary’s lot, rather, to have a bitter revelation of another world behind Cato’s subservience.15

  So Cato, as he went about his work as the driver at Carlawter, was adeeply complex man. He was neither all internalized subservience nor all clever deception. He seemed to have two competing impulses within his heart and mind—one impulse that said “the settlement is my place in life,” another that cried “resist!” During the coming years he sometimes followed one impulse and sometimes the other as he carefully read the signs of the times and the social landscape of Liberty County.

  If Cato had become the person in the settlements whom Charles trusted the most, Phoebe had become the person whom Charles most distrusted. His distrust had many roots: her adulterous affair with Cassius in the 1830s that had been so hard on her husband, Sandy Jones; her alleged plot—reported by Peggy—to get keys to the storerooms; and, perhaps most of all, her self-confidence and independence that sometimes took her near the edge of insubordination. She knew how far she could go without provoking harsh punishment, but she would go far enough to irritate Charles and to convince him that she could not be trusted. Moreover, he apparently recognized in her a rage that burned just below the surface of her cheerful manner. He knew that most of the time she kept her anger under control, that she bit her tongue and did not “answer back” when spoken to. But there were times when she could be what whites would come to call “uppity.” She could give an occasional look of insubordination even as she went about her work, and she had a way of crossing her arms when something was said to her that she did not like. For all these reasons, Charles felt that Phoebe had to be treated carefully and given close supervision. Over the years Charles’s respect for her father, Jack, had apparently acted as a buffer between Phoebe and serious trouble, but Jack’s death had left her more vulnerable than ever to the power of her white owner.

  Phoebe, however, was Mary’s personal servant, and Mary was deeply dependent upon her. Phoebe was a link to Mary’s mother, to the Retreat, and to all the associations of Mary’s early years. Mary had—for all of her strong will and independence—a reliance on Phoebe that went beyond the pragmatic matters of a plantation household to complex emotions nurtured by memories and associations. Phoebe apparently understood this dependence even as she knew that she was herself dependent upon Mary’s emotional attachment to her and protection of her. For decades the two women had lived in each other’s presence, and over the years Phoebe had observed her mistress carefully. With the possible exception of her cousin Patience, Phoebe had entered the world of whites more deeply than anyone who now lived at Carlawter or in the settlements at Maybank and Arcadia. Daddy Jack and Mom Sylvia had no doubt talked to her when she was a child, explaining what she saw when she observed white people eating elegant meals at the Retreat and interpreting for her the meaning of what she heard white people saying. As a young woman, she had been close by when Charles and Mary had met and poured out their hearts to each other in the little garret at the Retreat, and she had slept on the floor of Mary’s room when the white children were young and Charles was away. For years she had heard Charles and Mary talk with family and friends on piazzas and in dining rooms and parlors, and she had filtered it all through her own experience and her own analysis and her own deep rage at the injustice of it all. So she knew how whites talked and acted, and she understood something of the world of whites that was often hidden from those in the settlements who spent their days plowing fields and harvesting crops.16

  At the time of Jack’s death in 1850, Phoebe had been working at South Hampton under the supervision of Julia King—Charles had sent her and her younger children there, as he had on earlier occasions, to keep her out of trouble when he and Mary were away. Later that summer, when Charles and Mary had returned to Maybank, Mary had sent for Phoebe and the children to come to the island.17 Clothes had to be prepared for the move to Philadelphia, and Phoebe was indispensable as Mary made careful arrangements for the family’s departure. As the time approached for Charles and Mary to leave for the North, Phoebe asked to be sent to live at Carlawter. Cassius had been making the long trip from Carlawter to Maybank to visit at his “wife house” on Saturday nights and Sundays. He had his own little buggy and a mare to pull it—they had probably been purchased with money he had made from selling his baskets—and this had made the trip easier for him.18 Still, the family was separated during the week, and they wanted to be together at Carlawter. After some apparent hesitation, Charles agreed. This meant that Phoebe would now be sent to work in the fields under Cato’s directions and Thomas Shepard’s supervision—and not only Phoebe but also her son John and her daughter Jane, who had been house servants in Columbia under the eye of their grandfather Jack. Jane, who was turning thirteen, would join four other young women who were being sent to the fields for the first time.19

  Shortly after Charles and Mary arrived in Philadelphia with Mary Sharpe, Charles received a letter from Thomas Shepard. William Maxwell, Shepard wrote, who was looking after Maybank, had “sent me Phoebe and her family on Friday last and I have put her right in the field with the rest picking pease and she turns around as though it was fine sport. I hope she wont get tired of it too soon.” Phoebe seemed like “Buh Rabbit” thrown into the brier patch, “de place me mammy fotch me up!” She had gotten to be with Cassius, even if it meant “picking pease” rather than sewing clothes. But Shepard was keeping an eye on Phoebe and her family, and within two weeks there was trouble. “I gave John a pretty little brushing,” Shepard wrote Charles in mid-November 1850, “which I think will do both him and his mother good for a long time.”

  I gave Cato a note to Mr. Rahn and directed him to send it by John that night, as I wanted an answer in the morning. So next morning Cato found that John did not go but kept the note in his pocket and said to Cato that if he could not spare time to send him on an errand in the day time, he would not go at night. Cato knowing I would be there in the morning, did not trouble him till I came. I was well pleased to find he hated a flogging so bad.20

  Shepard’s “pretty little brushing” was a flogging intended to teach John a lesson and to give Phoebe a warning. Shepard wanted John to know that even if he had been in Columbia, and even if he was Jack’s grandson, he was to go when he was sent and he was to do what he was told. Neither Shepard’s nor Cato’s instruction was to be ignored. Equally important, no sass would be allowed. Cato had simply bided his time when his nephew had been “smart” with him and had waited for Shepard to use the whip. The flogging had apparently been both brutal and shocking for the young man, who had so recently been a house servant protected by the reputation and wisdom of his grandfather. While John’s flogging may not have been the first at Carlawter, it was the first to appear in the plantation records. It was not, however, to be the last.

  As for Phoebe, Shepard was waiting for her to take a misstep. “Phoebe behaves herself very well so far and does her work readily,” he wrote Charles, “which I hope she may continue to do, for my mind is made if the very first time she crooks to lock arms, believing it to be the first for her and me too.” The whipping of John must have evoked a deep r
age in Phoebe and do doubt left her with a searing memory of his agony and perhaps a sense of humiliation that she could not protect her son. But Phoebe knew that Shepard was watching her on his visits to Montevideo and she apparently determined there would be no “first for her” with Shepard’s whip. Four months later, in one of Cato’s letters to Charles, he said of his sister-in-law: “Phoebe and I get along so, so. So far as yet, she does her work very well, but there is a strong notion now and then to break out. But she knows well enough how it will be if she does, and I am in hopes she will let her better judgment rule her passions.” But Cato thought Phoebe had not been a good influence on his brother Cassius—or Cash as he called him.

  As for Cash, I am afraid he has given up himself to the old boy, for since his wife has been with him he appears more petulant and has not only given up going to prayers but I have several times heard him make use of bad words when he was displeased and have shamed and talked to him so often that I have felt it my duty to report him to the church and Mr. Law has cited him before the next meeting.21

  So Cato acted not only in his role as driver but also in his role as a watchman at the North Newport Baptist Church to try to bring his brother in line. Perhaps he saw some handwriting on the wall for Cash and Phoebe and their family. But whatever he saw, Phoebe’s skills as a seamstress were too valuable to leave her picking peas and hoeing cotton.

  Mary soon sent instructions for Phoebe to begin making clothes for those in the settlement and for the white family in the North. “If she does her work properly,” Mary wrote, “she may remain at Montevideo.” But if “there is any difficulty about it,” then Phoebe and her youngest children were to be sent down to May-bank, while Cash and Jane were “to continue in the field at Montevideo,” where John was also working.22

  Later that summer, while Phoebe was busy with her sewing, Shepard reported that the “skeets are bad, bad, very bad in the settlements this summer.”23 Much rain had fallen from clouds sweeping in from the Gulf of Mexico, and the swamps, canals, and rice fields of the county had been filled with water that was soon pulsating with the larvae of mosquitoes. By midsummer great clouds of mosquitoes were filling the air, ready to attack any creature with warm blood. The consequence was particularly dire for the elderly and the young in the settlements.

  A number of the older ones became sick with fevers—old Tony the gardener, Sandy Maybank the carpenter, Cato’s older brother Lymus, and others—for although they had a greater resistance to malaria than the whites, they were not immune to the ravages of the disease. Already that year there had been death among the very old in the settlements. At White Oak, Old Fanny had grown increasingly weak during the previous winter. She had been allowed in her old age to leave the Retreat and move to White Oak, where her grandchildren could look after her and where she could be near her great-grandchildren. There in the evenings around the open fires she could tell in her Pidgin English how she, with her children Elvira and Marcus, had been captured in Africa and brought through the terrors of the midpassage to a strange land. She could tell of being bought by John Jones in Savannah and by Joseph Jones at his brother’s estate sale in Riceboro in 1808. She had known the deep sorrows and terrors of slavery and the isolation of one who had struggled to learn not only the English of her captors but also the Gullah of the settlements. When Thomas Shepard wrote to Philadelphia and reported that “poor old Mom Fanny died last week,” he had “no doubt” that the “old woman is safe in heaven.” He had “several times talked to her on the subject of religion and from what little I could understand in her broken English and from the signs she made but what her religious feelings were unmistakably genuine.”24

  In the middle of the summer of 1851, after the mosquitoes had been swarming, Mom Flora became sick and appeared increasingly weak. She had come to the Retreat in 1806 when Sarah Anderson had married Joseph, and she had been moved to Carlawter in 1832 as a part of Mary’s inheritance from her mother. Flora and her husband—who lived on another plantation and whose name was never listed in plantation records—had had seven children, and by the summer of 1851 she had twenty-nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild living at Carlawter or Arcadia. As she grew weaker that summer, she “took the notion she was about to die,” and she got Thomas Shepard to send someone and “beg Mr. Rahn to let her children come and see her for the last time.” Rahn consented to let them go for “a part of a day much to the satisfaction of the old lady.” The visit of her children had “given her new life,” and both she and Shepard were of the “opinion she will live perhaps much longer.” But within a week “poor old Momer Flora died.” Shepard wrote Charles:

  I done all I knew and thought necessary for her comfort and relief. And tried to talk to her the best I knew and ascertain her own comforts in the near prospect of death. She said she was willing and expected to go. She had been sick a great while and now no service to herself or others. And it was time for her to be gone. And I hope although her ignorance prevented her from saying all she wished, yet her stay was by faith upon the all sufficiency of an atoning Saviour and her children and sister from Mrs. Jones on the Sand Hill all came to see her before she died.

  Charles wrote back to Shepard: “The poor Lady is gone! I saw not much change in her, but she said, she did not think she would ever live to see us return. My conversation to her was pleasant, and my hope is that she had a saving interest in the Redeemer. She was one of the most kind and inoffensive people I ever knew.”25

  For the last years of her life, Mom Flora had been a nurse at Carlawter, looking after the little children in the settlement. When she died, her responsibilities were shifted to Rosetta. Shepard and Cato told her “to take up the switch and go on as she had been doing—attend to the yard and dairy and see that the little ones was regularly fed and nursed by the larger ones and keep them out of the creek from being caught by the alligators.” Rosetta was herself still grieving the removal of Sam to Marietta. When Sam had returned to Marietta after his Christmas 1849 and January 1850 stay at Carlawter, Rosetta had become sick. Charles had wondered whether Rosetta’s grief “for Sam’s going back to Marietta made her sick in part.” Then when Sam had not come at Christmas 1850 for his annual visit in the low country, Rosetta had become alarmed. Shepard told her “she must not grieve so much after old Sam.” But she said she thought he was “married again in the up country, by his not coming down with his mistress which he might, she said, had done if he wished.” Charles sent word to his old nurse that she should “keep a good heart about Sam,” and he told Shepard to keep her well supplied in tobacco. He sent her and the other old ones a dollar each, and he also sent a dollar to Patience, but nothing to Phoebe.26

  Shortly after Mom Flora died, Rosetta was busy looking after sick children—especially the little ones of Phoebe and Cassius. Shepard wrote Charles:

  There has been more sickness this season at Montevideo than any other since I have had charge here, particularly among the children. Phoebe’s family has all been sick from big Cassius down to youngest, and the three youngest Albert, Lafayette, and Elizabeth—have really been very sick. I tried first one thing and then another, and after getting all the worms away and the system cleansed, the stubborn fevers in spite of all the horehound and cherry bark and dogwood bark, it would not yield till I got a dollar’s worth of quinine before it was broken. Phoebe looks as slank as a whippoorwill yet but she has also missed her fever and are all again up and several of the other families of children has been sick from whom lots of worms has been taken but all better.

  Within two weeks nine-year-old Albert was dead and, wrote Shepard, “Lafayette and Jane’s cases hangs on … and rather the longest now than any other. Theirs has gone into the old fashioned fever and chill.” Charles noted in his plantation records that the cause of Albert’s death was “worm fever;” the next year he learned that of all the children at Carlawter, those of Phoebe and Cassius were most afflicted with the worms.27

  Both Shepard and Cato apparently bel
ieved that worms—the roundworms Ascaris and Trichuris, the scourge of slaves—were the primary causes of the deaths. But Joe, in his medical investigations, later reached a different conclusion about such cases. “Do not,” he would urge white planters, “attribute the diseases of children in the summer and fall to worms.” He noted that at “this period of the year, when children are most liable to climate fever, it is the habit of so many planters to dose them with various drastic and disgusting mixtures, to rid them of worms, under the idea that the worms are the cause of the fevers of this season of year, because, when the children are taken sick, the worms travel away from them through every avenue and in every direction.” Joe believed that the explanation of “this striking phenomenon” was that the fever altered the habitat of the worms and caused them to move. The worms had been, he wrote, “quietly housed all winter in comfortable quarters, without exciting any injurious effects upon the unconscious landlords, are suddenly sickened and disgusted with their altered fare and habitations, and beat a precipitate retreat in the most convenient and natural directions.” The real disease was climate fever, or malaria, and the proper treatment was to administer a “gentle purgative” to get rid of the worms and then quinine to stop the fever.28

  The children of Phoebe and Cassius seemed, however, especially susceptible to the worms and to the fevers that caused them to come crawling up the throat and out of the digestive tract “through every avenue and in every direction.” And the children’s susceptibility was probably linked to their diet.29 Phoebe was apparently less successful than her cousin Patience—or Rosetta, Lucy, Mary Ann, and most of the other women in the settlements—in providing the necessary nutrients needed to keep the roundworms from interfering with the digestion and health of the children. Lack of adequate food made a child more likely to have an infestation of worms, and the worms, not getting enough food to sustain them and the child, began to interfere with the digestion and absorption of nutrients. In this weakened condition the child became more vulnerable to the ravages of malaria and other diseases.30