Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  The pilau of the settlements was hoppin’ john—a dish that had its low-country origins in Africa. Rice and red peas were its primary ingredients, with a little bacon or salt pork thrown in, together with an onion and some cayenne pepper, also grown in the gardens around the settlements. The peas would be cooked with the pork and onion until tender and then the rice and pepper added. Collard greens, when in season, were often boiled—with a piece of salt pork when avail-able—and eaten with the hoppin’ john. So popular was this combination that it became in time a required meal not only in the settlements but also in the plantation houses on New Year’s Day in order to ensure good luck for the coming year.22

  One of the most nutritious and popular foods of the settlements was the sweet potato. An important source of vitamin A, sweet potatoes were stored in an ingenious manner behind slave cabins, where livestock could not get to them. Hay was scattered on the ground, and on top of it a layer of sweet potatoes. These were covered with more hay, followed by another layer of the tubers, and so on. When sweet potatoes were wanted, the hay would be pushed aside and as many potatoes withdrawn as needed. These were generally baked in ashes, a technique said to enhance the flavor and sweetness of the potato.23

  Of all that was raised in the garden patches at Carlawter and the other settlements, okra was perhaps second in importance only to the sweet potato. An African plant—like sorghum, red peas, eggplant, and benne seed—okra had made the Atlantic passage to become deeply rooted in low-country cuisine (in New Orleans okra would be called gumbo, after the Umbundu word for the pod, ochinggômbo). Easy to grow and prolific, it provided a ready companion for rice in many combinations. When stewed with tomatoes and bacon and cooked with rice, it made a red rice, a kind of okra pilau, to which fish or shrimp or chicken or rabbit or some other meat could be added. Settlement cooks made an okra soup by putting the okra pods into a pot of water with a piece of pork, some tomatoes, and cayenne pepper and slowly cooking the soup for most of the day. Or the okra could be cut into pieces, rolled in some flour, and fried to make a dish of remarkable sweetness.24

  These familiar dishes of the settlement were supplemented during times of heavy labor and holidays with beef killed “for the people.” Charles kept a substantial herd of cattle roaming the woods and fields of the three plantations—in a typical year they would number more than 175, plus another 35 oxen. Indeed, many more cattle were kept than hogs, and beef apparently played as important a role in the diet of the settlements as did pork, which Charles purchased by the barrel in Savannah to supplement those slaughtered on the plantations. “Give the people beef from the stock as often as you can,” Charles had written Thomas Shepard in June 1849—and others would be killed in August and at Thanksgiving and at Christmas and New Year’s. When a cow was killed at one of the settlements, then the cooks could fix a feast, with roasts and stews and other special dishes. And when stray cattle from another plantation were found in the woods, then a secret barbecue could be held in an isolated place—as Cato had done with Elijah Chapman’s cattle—with the men apparently doing the barbecuing. A few slaves kept their own cattle—Cato had six in the mid-1850s. But these were too valuable to be slaughtered and were apparently used primarily for their milk.25

  The skill of settlement cooks in turning few resources into tasty and often nourishing dishes, however, should not obscure the struggle of the cooks and others to secure adequate and varied food for the families of the settlements. Even under the benevolent and watchful eye of Charles and Mary, food was sometimes scarce. This was especially true in late winter and early spring, when many of the supplies from the previous year had been exhausted and the spring gardens and wild fruits and berries had not yet started to produce. Then the diets of the settlements were often more bland and monotonous than usual—corn, peas, and salt pork; rice, peas, and salt pork—and a rabbit, possum, or catfish would be especially welcome in a stew pot.26

  During such times of scarcity in the settlements, Patience was in a position to supplement the diet of her family and perhaps of others with food from her kitchen. Leftovers were no doubt frequently available, and her little ones, who played close by their mother until they were old enough to begin work, could be given a plate of pilau or whatever was being cooked. In all of this, Patience had to be very careful in order to maintain her reputation as a dependable person who could be trusted. She could not allow even a suggestion that she was in any way stealing food from smokehouses or from cupboards or from other storage places. All her actions needed to be aboveboard and to appear to be a natural part of her work. Patience was apparently remarkably successful in creating just such an appearance for her kitchen. As a consequence, she was able to provide for her family not only extra food but also some protection from the ravages of slavery.27

  At the time Phoebe and Cassius were sold, Patience and Porter had had eight children. All of them were alive in 1856, all of them were healthy, and all of them had lived under the protective care of their mother and father in their cabin at Maybank and Montevideo. Patience’s hard work in the kitchen and her deferential ways did not flow from a simple fear of punishment or of the slave markets in Savannah. Nor did they flow from a passive acceptance of a white ideology about her place as a slave. Rather, Patience had a kind of pragmatism as she faced the burdens and dangers of slavery. She knew that most of her labors would be appropriated by whites, that most of the food she prepared was being carried to the dining room tables at Maybank and Montevideo and to the piazzas where whites took their tea. But she also knew that her work and her reputation as an artist in the kitchen had a direct impact on her own comfort and well-being and on the comfort and well-being of her family. Her pragmatism thus provided the strategy for her savvy resistance, the resources needed for persevering, and the means for her to guard against the constant threat of the fowl-hawk.28

  28

  MONTEVIDEO

  Charles and Mary moved into the renovated Montevideo in the late fall of 1856 after Betsy’s death, at the time that Phoebe and Cassius and their children were sent to Wright’s slave jail in Savannah. The master and mistress of Montevideo, eager to be finally settled in their plantation home, had spent part of the preceding winter in the old section of the house while the carpenters, plasterers, and painters completed their work.1

  Porter and Sandy Maybank, together with their helpers, had substantially enlarged Montevideo. As skilled carpenters they had been able to take a design sketched by Charles and figure how much lumber to order, how to handle the new pitch of the roof, and how to solve the other myriad problems of a major renovation. When they were finished, the two-story house had fifteen rooms, plus the piazzas that functioned in pleasant weather as outdoor areas for visiting, afternoon teas, and evening worship. The house was painted white both outside and inside, and the shutters on each of its thirty-seven windows were painted green. Each window was six feet high and was placed just above one-foot-high baseboards in the ten-foot-high rooms.2 This design provided every room an open, light, and fresh atmosphere and invited the eye to look outward toward the surrounding gardens. Mary described what could be seen from the house:

  The house is beautifully located, on one side fronting a lawn of twenty or thirty acres covered with live oak, magnolias, cedars, pines, and many other forest trees, arranged in groves or stretching out in lines and avenues or dotting the lawn here and there. On the other front passes the North Newport River, where all the produce of the place may be shipped to Savannah and water communication obtained to any point. In the gardens will be found both sweet and sour oranges and the myrtle orange, pomegranates, figs, the bearing olive, and grapes…. Attached to the house lot are a brick kitchen, brick dairy, smokehouse, washing and weaving rooms, two servants’ houses, a commodious new stable and a carriage house and wagon shed, various poultry houses and yards attached, a well of excellent water, and a never-failing spring.

  Across the new rice fields—where the old slough had been—Carlawter had also had
its improvements. The settlement now contained “a two-story cotton house, gin and ginhouse, barn, cornhouse, ricehouse, winnowing house, millhouses, and fifteen frame houses, a brick shed and yard of excellent clay, and a chapel twenty by thirty feet.”3

  Porter and Sandy Maybank, walking toward Montevideo from the simple cabins at Carlawter, did not see the gardens through a tall window, nor did they view the house from a carriage driving down the sandy avenue. Rather, if the carpenters walked across the rice field dikes early in the morning as light first began to break through the fog rising from the river, or if, after a day’s work, they walked toward Montevideo in the evening as shadows stretched across the gardens toward the house, they could see that they had built a place of beauty. They could look toward a plantation house where they knew every room intimately: how joists where connected to beams; how the wide, heart-of-pine floorboards were tightly laid next to one another; and how the doors and window frames were built to exact specifications and carefully placed to enhance the beauty of the house. They had every reason to be proud of their work, for they had built a house that many would admire and not a few would love. But they could see in Montevideo not only a tribute to their skill and hard work but also a bitter reminder of the ways their skill and hard work had been expropriated for the benefit of white owners. So the renovated Montevideo with its gardens and outbuildings could be viewed from two angles, from two perspectives, and these conflicting interpretations of the place would linger long after the house and gardens had returned to the fecund wilderness of the low country.4

  To this plantation home there came a stream of white visitors in the winter and spring, to be followed in the summer and fall by a similar stream to May-bank. They included the expected family members—John and Jane Jones, with Dunwody and their other children; Aunt Eliza, with her daughters Louisa and Mary and the motherless children of Eliza’s son Joseph Jones Robarts; Henry Hart Jones and Abby with their little ones; Sister Susan and Laura and David Buttolph; and the lonely William Maxwell, who would come for extended stays. And there were the old friends who came for visits—Julia King and Audley and his younger brothers and sisters; Mary King Wells, who had developed terrible migraine headaches since the death of her husband, Dr. Charlton Wells; Eliza Clay from Richmond-on-Ogeechee; and Jane Harden—the sister of Joseph and John LeConte—with her daughter Matilda, who had a stunning figure and whose striking beauty drove Charlie, Joe, Audley, and all the other young men visiting on piazzas to distraction.5 And there were new friends—a LeConte from Philadelphia, who came to the island to look for a laurel described by the eighteenth-century botanist John Bartram as “found only on Col. Island;” lawyer friends of Charlie’s and doctor friends of Joe’s; and Mary Sharpe’s friend Kitty Stiles from Savannah, who was not only a lively and pious young woman but also a member of a family with prominent social connections up and down the East Coast.6 All of these guests came to enjoy the well-known hospitality of Montevideo and Maybank, to savor the beauty of winter and spring gardens above a dark river, and to enjoy the smell of the marsh and the sound of the surf on a summer’s evening. And the most important single occasion for showing such hospitality during Charles and Mary’s retirement years was the marriage of their greatly loved daughter Mary Sharpe.

  Mary Sharpe was twenty-one in the spring of 1857. While she was not the beauty or lively wit that Laura was, and while she did not have the stunning figure of her friend Matilda Harden, she was an attractive young woman with much of her mother’s strength of character. With sparkling blue eyes like her grandfather Joseph’s, she had had her share of beaux. There had been a particularly persistent suitor when she was in Philadelphia. Even after Mary Sharpe had given him a firm but polite refusal, he had not given up, and the next year he had proposed to her once again; she had again politely refused.7

  When Mary Sharpe had returned to Georgia, she had entered a lively social life full of flirting and matchmaking. After attending a wedding in middle Georgia, she had sent her brother Joe a piece of the wedding cake, together with a sealed enveloped for him “to dream upon.” She explained what he was to do: “I have written some names upon the paper and you must not open it until you have dreamed upon it for three nights.” He was to write and tell her which young woman on the list had stirred his dreams. But she added playfully: “If you are like me you wont dream at all. I tried to dream but no visions came into my head.” She added, however, that their friend Mittie Bulloch was marrying “Mr. Roosevelt of New York.” Neither she nor Joe could have dreamed that their friend would become the mother of a future president of the United States.8

  In the meantime, Robert Quarterman Mallard, the youngest son of Thomas and Eliza Mallard, had completed his studies at Columbia Theological Seminary and had accepted a call to the Presbyterian Church in Walthourville. The congregation in Walthourville was a daughter church of the Midway Congregational Church, and its organization reflected a development that was beginning to trouble all those who loved old Midway. Some planting families were finally growing weary of the annual trek between plantation homes and summer and fall retreats. The Thomas Mallards, for example, had stopped spending the winter and spring at their plantation home near Midway—the old Mallard Place—after they built a fine new home in the little village of Dorchester, not far from the home of Abial and Louisa Winn.9 By 1855 those living in Dorchester had tired of making the Sabbath trip to Midway, so they had organized the Dorchester Presbyterian Church. This movement away from long-established country churches such as Midway to village churches was taking place throughout the rice-growing region of South Carolina and Georgia. So it had not been surprising when the members of Midway who lived in Walthourville decided to organize their own congregation. The Walthourville Presbyterian Church they built looked in many ways like a smaller version of Midway—a neat meetinghouse whose clear windows and elegant simplicity reflected a Calvinism that had long flourished in the low country.10

  Abial and Louisa Winn home, Dorchester (courtesy Georgia Archives)

  Robert Mallard was the second pastor called to Walthourville. His predecessor had been none other than the ever-restless John Jones, who had spent less than a year in the village. Grieved by the quick loss of their popular pastor, the congregation had welcomed the young Mallard enthusiastically. Charles heard several of his sermons and thought they were “excellent,” and Mary declared that he “certainly possesses eminent gifts as a preacher.” Mallard was soon a regular visitor at Maybank and Montevideo. On an early visit to Maybank, he had spent the night and gone fishing the next morning with Joe. “They returned,” Mary wrote Mary Sharpe—who was in Savannah—“about eleven o’clock with over a hundred, the best of which I made him take home.” Mallard was, like most young men raised in the plantation houses of Liberty County, an enthusiastic outdoorsman who enjoyed hunting deer on horseback and fishing the rivers and marsh creeks of his low-country home. But it was not long before his primary reason for visiting at Maybank and Montevideo was to see Mary Sharpe. And they were soon very much in love.11

  Walthourville Presbyterian Church (author’s collection)

  Mary Sharpe wrote a school friend from Philadelphia that Robert had “black hair and dark complexion; some say handsome, but I do not think so. He is above medium height.” But he was, in fact, quite a handsome young man who had long attracted the attention of many a young woman. His black hair, olive complexion, and dark eyes reflected perhaps his French Huguenot ancestry. He was, moreover, also pious and studious and what Charlie later described as manly. He had had a conversion experience shortly after graduating from college and had joined Midway with three young cousins who had been hunting companions. With them making his confession of faith had been Charles, the oxcart driver who was the son of Andrew and Mary Ann and the husband of Lucy.12

  Robert and Mary Sharpe did their courting under the watchful eye of Charles and Mary and the many guests who were frequently a part of the Jones household. At Montevideo the young couple could find
some privacy by taking long walks together and by sitting on a “rustic seat” behind the line of cedars that ran down to the river. Here they could speak of their love for each other and dream of their life together. Shortly after their engagement, Robert wrote Mary Sharpe: “What a strange life is this upon which we have entered! In my plans for the future I move not alone, nor yet with an indistinct ideal by my side, but with one whose voice and face and form are familiar to me—my own loved Mary.” He hoped that a kind providence would grant him his anticipation of marrying her. “What an hour will that be,” he exclaimed, “when I shall (as I hope) lead from the altar my own loved bride! The future will have its joys and its griefs, but with another I hope to enjoy the one and to bear the other.” Neither he nor Mary Sharpe could know how clearly Robert saw the future and how soon not only the joys but also the griefs were to come their way.13