Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Niger Fraser, far right, at Carlawter, 1891 (Charles Colcock Jones Papers, Tulane University Manuscript Department)

  The following January, Cato received from Mary fifty dollars plus interest—money he had given Charles years earlier to invest for him. Shortly thereafter Cato departed Liberty County for Savannah with his wife, Jane, and an eagerness to start a new life. The old couple was part of a movement to the city by a number of Liberty County blacks. Among those going to Savannah from Car-lawter was Peggy, the mother of Eva Lee. Not long after she arrived in the city, Peggy contracted smallpox and died a lonely death in great wretchedness. Mary wondered what became of the five-year-old Eva Lee, mulatto child of a Maybank guest.8

  While Cato was making his plans to leave Montevideo and Liberty County, others were trying to make their way back to Liberty County. Among those who had been taken to Indianola, some wanted to go back to Carlawter. Phoebe’s daughter Clarissa wanted to return with her children, as did Rosetta and Sam’s son Sam and his family. Miley, Patience and Porter’s daughter, wanted to go home to Liberty County with her family, and so did Sylvia, Andrew and Mary Ann’s daughter. Stepney wanted to go back to Arcadia, where his father, Robin, was still living. Some wanted to go to White Oak. Most of the others did not know exactly where they would go, wrote Charlie, but “all nearly decide upon a return to Liberty.” They would soon be on the road to the low country, part of a massive movement of freed people moving about across the South—some would be looking for a spouse who had been “sold away;” some, having been carried away to a distant place, would be trying to make their way back to remembered homes where family and friends lived; and others would be simply trying to get as far away as possible from former owners. They all had to struggle with difficult issues that swirled around a central question: Where were they to live now that freedom had come? Were they to break all ties with their former owners and find some new place to live? If so, where? Where could they find food and shelter? Where could they find work, and what kind of work could they do? Or were they to stay with a former owner in a familiar place? And if they stayed, how would they protect themselves from falling back into former patterns of bondage and dependence?9

  Old Sam had little trouble deciding what he was going to do. He had been the indispensable servant for the Robartses in their Marietta home, but they would have to learn to get along without him. He headed for Liberty County and Car-lawter to be finally reunited with Rosetta so that they could live out their last days together. Their daughter Lucy made the same decision—she wanted to be with her husband Charles, who had not gone with her when she had been carried by the whites fleeing to the Refuge. Tenah and Niger soon followed from Atlanta, where they had gone with the Mallards—Niger’s skills as a fisherman would be a help as deep want began to stalk the county. So Rosetta and Sam had around them at Carlawter not only their children but also their grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. Rosetta, however, lived only a few months with such freedom. She died in the spring of 1866. “Her aged husband was with her and all her children but one.” Mary talked with her before she died and asked her the familiar questions about her faith, and Rosetta “expressed her entire reliance upon the Lord Jesus Christ. Said she hoped her peace was made with God through Christ.” Sam died the next spring, never having made a confession of faith. “We can only leave him in the hands of God,” wrote Mary. And from Marietta, Mary Robarts wrote: “If all servants were as faithful as he was, slavery would have been a pleasant thing to master and servant.”10

  Old Andrew and Mary Ann moved to the settlement at Carlawter. They and their children were to be the most faithful to Mary of allher former slaves. Gilbert in particular would be “irreproachable in word, look or manner. He has never,” wrote Mary, “shown me the least disrespect and serves cheerfully and faithfully.” For years he had driven the carriage and the buggy, had gone for the mail at Rice-boro, and had delivered messages from Charles and Mary to different plantations in the county. His son Young Gilbert was to follow in his father’s footsteps, in time becoming the “rider” for a grandchild of Charles Berrien Jones, going for the mail well into the twentieth century.11

  Charles and Lucy also were to prove themselves faithful to their old mistress. But perhaps it was not so much faithfulness as it was a desire to live in the familiar surroundings of Carlawter with their parents, their children, and grandchildren, together with Charles and Lucy’s brothers and sisters. Their decision to return to Carlawter was made with a new freedom and no doubt with an eye to the economic realities of the poverty and struggle that was before the freed people in Liberty County. Old loyalties lingered, but they were also new because they were in a context of a freedom to say “yes” to a different future. So a little community of overlapping families once again took up residence at Carlawter, but now they were struggling to realize what their new freedom meant and how they might relate to their old mistress with some independence.12

  The contracts that were negotiated at Montevideo required Mary to supply housing for those at Carlawter, all the wood they needed for “fencing, general repairs, fuel, and cooking,” and all the land they desired for cultivation of their own crops. Any crops they grew “were to be managed and disposed of as they may desire.” In return, each adult living at Carlawter was to work for Mary one and a half acres of cotton and a half-acre of corn. They were to “perform all labor that may be deemed necessary in splitting rails, in making up fences, in repairing dams, in general repairs about the Plantation, and generally in such services as may be beneficial for the best interests and successful cultivation of the said Plantation.” Mary was to provide the “plough animals and farming utensils.” Such contracts were at first agreeable to all the parties involved, but it soon became clear that they were too vague, and differing expectations caused tensions to arise between Mary and those who lived at Carlawter. As a result the contracts shifted so that Mary began to pay a wage for specific work. These arrangements were part of negotiations going on all over the county between the white owners of the land and the freed people. At White Oak, Sister Susan simply rented the land to the descendants of Old Jupiter and Blind Silvey, who once again gathered in the plantation settlement. At other plantations, a system was negotiated where the freed people would work two days for the white landowners in return for certain rights—including the right to work land for their own crops.13

  Immediately after the war’s end, Patience and Porter were stuck for a time at the Refuge. Mary appealed to the Federal authorities for passes for them on the railroad, and after much effort was successful. But she wrote John at the Refuge:

  And now my dear brother, before this transportation is furnished, or they are permitted to return, I must get you to bind them by a written contract to remain with me for one year at least—subject to my direction and control. Please make them understand that I will not allow any one to return to Montevideo or remain on the place if they are not respectful, obedient, and industrious. But if they conduct themselves as they ought, I will do my part faithfully by them.

  Mary then added, as if nothing had changed: “Tell Porter and Patience I put my trust in them and do not expect them to disappoint me.”14

  Mary was apparently the only one surprised by Porter and Patience’s resistance to such a proposal. Porter and Patience were themselves in the middle of a rebellion by all of the former slaves of John Jones, who had declared they would no longer work at the Refuge and had simply packed up and left. Even Sylvia, John and Mary’s Old Momma, who for years had run the kitchen at the Retreat and had been so intimately connected with Joseph’s family—she was the only slave to whom Mary had ever sent her love—even she left the Refuge, with her son Joe and his family. Whatever her affection for her “white children,” Sylvia now was able in her old age to show where her deepest loyalties lay.15

  Mary was perplexed by Porter and Patience’s response and wrote John once again to explain her “feelings and views about Porter and Patience.” They have been,
she wrote, “faithful servants in days and years that are past and now that a change of condition has come over them, I do not desire to be hard in my judgments of them but to assist them. Such was my confidence in their good feelings towards myself, knowing that I had been a friend to them.” Mary wrote that she had nursed Patience for months when she was sick, and Mary thought “they would wish to return to my service.” She had consequently “obtained at much trouble and expense too,” their transportation papers. “Of course,” Mary wrote, “if they refuse to form a contract with me, they cannot return either to Montevideo or Arcadia and Porter must see that all my carpenter’s tools in his possession are returned to me, besides those bought for his use.” Perhaps the tone of the letter was conciliatory enough to convince Porter and Patience—and Elsey too, who was with them—that they should accept Mary’s offer. Or perhaps John thought nothing could be gained by keeping them at the Refuge. At any rate, they were all back in Liberty County by early December 1865. But Patience stayed only a few days at Montevideo before she left to take up permanent residence at Arcadia. She intended to set “up for herself,” and consequently she “settled herself at Arcadia,” where her labors and her kitchen art would be used to sustain her own family.16

  Patience and Porter would not entirely break their ties with Mary and Montevideo, but they were clearly establishing their independence at Arcadia, where Daddy Robin’s family, together with other freed people, were creating a new community. Patience’s brother Stepney soon took over the management of Arcadia and helped to transform it into a Gullah community that rented land from their former owners. With their hard work, they would in time begin to buy the land they had once labored upon as slaves. What Porter, Patience, Stepney, and others wanted was autonomy. Their history of owning pigs and cows, horses and buggies, chickens and ducks, together with their experience of raising their own corn, rice, and vegetables and of hunting and fishing, had provided them resources to become subsistence farmers who rented land or owned their own. By the time of the 1870 census, Porter and Patience owned their own small farm near Arcadia and valued at two hundred dollars. And Porter, with his skills as a carpenter, was earning extra income to supplement what cash they got from selling an occasional pig or a little corn and cotton. In such a manner, and in contrast with much of the rest of the South, the Gullah people in Liberty County largely avoided becoming sharecroppers.17

  Mary and Patience thus parted ways. When they looked out on the world of Liberty County in 1865, each saw a different world and each sought to make her own way in her own world. Mary saw a world of chaos and anarchy. Patience saw a new world of freedom being born. Their different ways of seeing Liberty County were rooted not only in their competing self-interests but also in their different memories.

  To be sure, Mary and Patience shared memories as they had shared, or had in common, the experience of living together in a particular place and a particular time. Patience knew, as Mary knew, the flow of the North Newport, and they had both heard its lapping at the banks of their lives. The Gullah woman as well as the white mistress had felt the morning wind blowing in from the sea, had smelled the scented rain on the river, and had breathed deeply of the hot fragrance of the marsh. The low country was the land where both had been born, and the land’s character was deeply imprinted in all their senses and lodged in their most distant memories. They had sung hymns together, had prayed together at Midway and in the plantation chapel, and had cried together as they had buried loved ones. Moreover, Mary had gently nursed Patience when she was dangerously ill, and Patience had done the same for Mary, rubbing her back and soothing her aching muscles; so Mary knew the feel of Patience’s black body, and Patience knew the feel of Mary’s white body, and in their touching each had reached toward some connection with the other’s world.

  If they had been together in all of these shared experiences, however, they had also been apart. A great distance had separated them even in the most human moments of touch and healing. That distance had been most visible when together they had seen old man Jackson come for Phoebe and Cash and the children, and they had heard the cries of separation and the rattle of the wagon as it moved down the long road toward Savannah and its slave market. Such a distance marked the world of a mistress and the world of a slave, and the great space between their two worlds meant—in spite of all that they shared—that their memories were different. Mary’s memory flowed from the piazzas and dining rooms of Maybank and Montevideo; Patience’s memory flowed from the kitchens at Maybank and Montevideo and from the cabins of the settlements.18

  Because their memories were different, because their memories emerged out of two different if overlapping spheres, they saw different worlds in 1865 and interpreted their present moment in different ways. As Mary watched Patience and others assert their independence, she wrote: “My heart is pained and sickened with their vileness and falsehood in every way. I long to be delivered from the race.” Mary, however, still felt a sense of duty toward the black people who surrounded her, and she would struggle with stoic fortitude to do her duty for a people she was convinced were finally unable to take care of themselves. Patience, on her part, looked at the world of 1865 and saw freedom and an opportunity to be faithful to a new future. Her memory would challenge what Mary remembered about how things had been at Montevideo and Maybank in “happier days,” and Patience’s independence would assert that she did not need or want Mary’s dutiful care.19 Each woman’s memory thus acted for its possessor as a filter through which to interpret the war, Yankee victory, and emancipation. Now at the beginning of a new day, the two women, each guided by her memory, responded in different ways to the strange events unfolding around them.20

  Patience and Porter, Charles and Lucy, Niger and Tenah, together with the other Gullah people of the county, found themselves not only struggling over labor and land, but also forging new ways for themselves in other areas of their lives. Almost immediately they began to assert their freedom by claiming family names and family histories. Before emancipation they had been called only Patience or Porter, Stepney or Charles, Lucy or Tenah. To be sure, there had been an occasional last name when needed for identification—Sandy Maybank the carpenter had needed to be distinguished from Sandy Jones the carpenter. But for the great majority of slaves, there was only a first name. This use of first names only had been a powerful instrument of control by whites, for it said that slaves had no family and no history, only an immediate relationship to white owners. Consequently in the records of Midway Church, Charles was “Charles, servant of the Rev. C. C. Jones”—not Charles the son of Andrew and Mary Ann, not Charles the husband of Lucy, not Charles the father of Tenah, only “Charles, the servant of …”21

  Of all those who had lived at Carlawter or at the Maybank or Arcadia settlements, only a few of Old Lizzy and Robinson’s descendants took the name of Jones. Most of the people took names that linked them to a more distant past, often to earlier owners who were remembered in secret traditions and whose names marked the beginning of an African-American family tradition. Old Andrew and Mary Ann, together with their children, took the family name of Law-son; when they came to put their mark on their contracts, they marked Gilbert Lawson and Charles Lawson and George Lawson. Niger and Tenah took the name Fraser. Porter and Patience claimed Way as their family name and history, while Old Robin and Stepney claimed West as theirs. Some of Sam and Rosetta’s children took the name Reese at first, while others took Roberts, which soon became the family name for all. At White Oak, the descendants of Old Jupiter and Blind Silvey claimed Stewart. Other families claimed the name Anderson, or Bacon, or Holmes. And so it went as freed people publicly declared that they had a history, that they and their ancestors were linked through hard trials and a Gullah culture, and that at the deepest level of self-identity they knew who they were.22

  As they claimed their names, they also began to assert their independence in regard to religious matters. In the early days following emancipation, the ol
d patterns persisted. Mary would attend on occasion, with a few other whites, the North Newport Baptist Church, where there was still a white preacher for the large African-American congregation. And blacks continued to come to Midway, where David Buttolph was preaching. But change was in the air. Mary noticed it first when she dutifully tried to gather her usual Sunday class. “I have never been without my Sabbath class of young and old,” she wrote in her journal, “until this emancipation has separated them spiritually as well as temporally from us. I have invited but they do not appear disposed to come.” She tried to console herself by remembering that she no longer occupied “the responsible position of mistress,” which had “so long weighed heavily upon my spirit.” She would simply wash her hands of those who lived at Carlawter and feel free to leave them with “those who have created this separation and made a break which is likely to become only a yawning gulf of ignorance and misery.” But in spite of such resolutions, she felt betrayed, as if her years of teaching, counseling, and encouragement had been dismissed and were of no value. So that Sabbath she wrote in her journal: “Let not the infidelity and neglect of servants, from whom I am assured I have the right to expect different treatment, mar my peace this day.”23

  The “spiritual separation” was soon to come to the churches in the county. The black membership of Midway was soon dismissed to a newly established Midway Presbyterian Church under the leadership of Joseph Williams, the black preacher who had written such a kind note when Charles died. Under his leadership, the congregation was united with the Northern Presbyterian Church and quickly grew to more than six hundred members. They continued at first to use the familiar Midway building, but in time they built a church north of Midway and made its cemetery the Old Field where Sharper, the black preacher who had taught Charles so much, had been buried among his ancestors on a moonlit night.24