by Edward Ball
The baby boy born from Celia Gadsden’s death was given to a relative to be raised, but he died in childhood.
“The baby boy, my aunt raised him,” said Mrs. Richardson. “They called him B-Boy. And you know what caused him death? He ate the green peach off the tree and that caused him malaria. He must have been around about seven.”
Celia Gadsden and B-Boy weren’t the only ones to die within reach. Georgie had two sisters, Belle and Sing, who died young.
“How did they mark the graves?” I asked.
“They didn’t put a tombstone like they do now,” she answered. “They would cut stakes, cedar stakes, then peel ’em. Cedar don’t rot right off, you know. One stake for the foot and one for the head. The head was bigger. Then they put flowers on the grave.”
Only one other child of Georgie Gadsden’s generation survived, her brother Daniel, called Bubba, two years younger than she.
After her mother died, Georgie Gadsden went to work for the family.
“I went to school for a little while and stopped,” she said, “must have been in the third grade. When I went to school, my aunt came and took me out. She carried me home to dig bait, to go fishing. Pa and them caught the fish, and when they came back from fishing, I had to clean ’em.”
When she turned ten, Georgie Gadsden came under the rule of a new woman. “My father married a mean woman, named Martha,” Mrs. Richardson said. “My stepmother made me wash all the clothes, overalls, everything. I used to have a big pot to scald the clothes, and you put your clothes in the big pot, and stick your stick in it, and put in lye and Gold Dust—you know the Gold Dust with the little black children on the red box? I put four buckets of water on the quilt until that quilt drained, until the water turned light and all that dirty water came out. And if I hang that quilt on the line and it ain’t clean, my stepmother would take it and throw it on the ground and make me wash it again. I used to wring the overalls. I twisted it, and then I rinsed it with three waters, until the last water was clean. Then I cooked flour starch by mixing the flour up. You get a pan, put water in it and dip that thing in it, then wring it and hang it up. And you iron it with a steam iron. To clean the floor, I used the bucket and mop, and brick dust. We used to beat the brick until you get dust, then spread it on the floor. You get on your knee, and scrub it with a big crocus rag.”
There wasn’t much food, and drinking water came straight from the Cooper River.
“Daddy used to get the river water in a bucket, and it was salty water sometimes. He shake it so the dirt would settle.” Mrs. Richardson let her tongue out of her mouth, and put it on her lower lip. “These children today, they ain’t want this for eat, ain’t want that for eat. Shoo! I was glad for get it! ’Cause I didn’t had it! One apple a week, cut in half between the two of us—Bubba get half, I get half. Mr. Ball, for eat, we had a spoon of grits on this side of the plate, a spoon of rice on that side! Sometimes Pa kill a chicken out the yard. Pa get the breast and the leg. Bubba got the foot, and I got the head.”
“What about the woods?” I asked.
“My Pa used to hunt a lot,” came the answer, “for coon, possum, and polecat. He would skin ’em for eat. But something caused me to stop eating possum. One day, Pa carried a dog to hunt. And somebody out in the woods was dead, and they didn’t bury ’em deep enough. The dog bark and bark, and trace the possum. When he got ’em, the possum been dug in the grave and eat the man.”
Mrs. Richardson looked at me with her clouded eyes. “I come up in the rough time!” she said. “Man, these children today, they rich!”
When Georgie Gadsden was a teenager, she had a baby, whom she named Celia Ann, after her mother. “My own child, I didn’t raise that,” she said. “My brother Dan raised her. My brother said I couldn’t carry that girl, because a man could throw it in my face.” She gave up Celia Ann, she said, so that the man she married wouldn’t use the baby against her. Celia Ann eventually settled in New York, married, had a long working life as a seamstress, moved to Pennsylvania, and retired in New Jersey.
When Georgie Gadsden was in her teens, a relative went to work in the house at Comingtee, and Georgie occasionally went with her to do the wash. She worked off and on there and at a neighboring plantation, Rice Hope, until she was married, in 1930, to Robert Richardson. By this time, rich families from the North had bought up many of the plantations, using the old houses as second homes and the land as deer- and duck-hunting grounds.
“After I married, I moved to Glebe plantation,” Mrs. Richardson said, naming a place six miles from Comingtee. “We fished on Glebe, then sometimes we go to hoe the bank. When the Yankee people come down to shoot duck, you had to hoe the bank, and cut grass so they could walk to the duck blind. My husband carry the Yankees out in the boat, and put them in the blind. Sometimes he hoed the path for your foot, so there weren’t no snakes. Snakes were bad then, you know. I know a man who die from a rattlesnake. He was puttin’ up his shovel, where he hide it, and a rattlesnake hit him on the arm. Killed him right there. At Glebe, we lived in a house with another family. There was two big rooms—one family on this side, one on that side. The room was big enough I could put two beds, a trunk, and a dresser.”
Robert and Georgie Richardson next moved to the little piece of land where I met Mrs. Richardson and family. “My husband piece up the house. He had to get board off the river, and patch ’em up,” she said, pointing at the window. The house was the one damaged by Hurricane Hugo and finally pulled down. “It ain’t had but two room.”
Soon Robert Richardson got a job in Charleston, thirty miles away. The United States had entered World War II, and the Navy shipyard, a big employer, put out a call for men. Mr. Richardson cleaned the pipes used in ship repair and lived away from home.
“Did you have a job?” I asked.
Mrs. Richardson’s expression went flat. She thought for a moment, looked down, murmured something. It was a stupid question. The idea of employment didn’t fit country life, with its daywork, chicken coops, and corn fields.
“I had a job one time,” she said finally, “doing laundry at Mepkin plantation. And I did laundry at Rice Hope, when Miss Luce used to be there.”
When she married Henry Luce, who founded Time magazine in 1923, Clare Boothe Brokaw became Clare Boothe Luce—”Miss Luce.” Henry and Clare Boothe Luce bought Mepkin plantation, the homestead of Eleanor Ball and her husband, Henry Laurens, in the 1760s, three miles from Comingtee. The Luces made Mepkin their second home, traveling to South Carolina from New York for weeklong stays. At some point, the Luces decided to build a house at Mepkin, designed by architect Edward Durrell Stone in a Modernist style. The result was the only piece of white, rectangular, flat-roofed architecture on the old rice banks of the Cooper River. Evidently, while the house was under construction, the Luces spent part of their time at Rice Hope, next door to Comingtee. At Rice Hope, Georgie Richardson did their laundry.
“Miss Luce come from up North,” said Mrs. Richardson. “They used to come shoot duck, and muddy up them jackets. When I came, Miss Luce give me them things for wash, and they ain’t had no electric machine. I did it by hand, on a washboard. She would come back, give me ten dollars, or something. Sometimes during the week, Miss Luce and her family have us come around the back of the house. There was a porch where they sat on. They used to like to hear colored people sing.”
“What did you sing?” I asked.
“ ‘Old Time Religion,’ songs like that.”
A sawmill that went up near Comingtee gave other jobs. “A lot of people used to work at that sawmill. My brother Dan used to work there, and all them—Frank Fayall, Mackie Bennett,” Mrs. Richardson remembered. “They didn’t pay much, but you got money.”
Barbara Jean came into the room.
“Mother, how is Mr. Ball treating you?”
Barbara Jean, in her late thirties, was friendly, loud, and solid. By this time I had gotten to know her a bit.
“All right,” said Mrs. Richard
son, scratching a laugh.
Barbara Jean came in with Shanice, who was tall for her age, and beautiful, with big eyes. She wore an orange tank top and little shorts, and she sat in Mrs. Richardson’s lap. I knew that Barbara Jean wasn’t Mrs. Richardson’s daughter, and asked about her parents.
“My father, Rias Richardson, was her sister-in-law’s son,” said Barbara Jean, pointing at Mrs. Richardson. “The sister-in-law didn’t want my father, so she and her husband raised my father from a three-months baby. When he growed up, my father became a young man in the military, and had me by my mother. My mother didn’t want me, wanted to give me away. So she, Mrs. Richardson, took me in as a three-months baby, just like my father, and raised me.” She pointed again. “That makes her my mother,” said Barbara Jean, looking at her great-aunt, Georgie Richardson.
“My birth mother never had another child but me,” Barbara Jean went on. “She died when I was five, in a car accident, so I never had a chance to know her. When I found out who my natural parents were, I was twelve years old. I went to spend a Christmas with my father. This man came knocking to the door. I said, ‘I don’t know you!’ He had a hard time convincing me he was my uncle, my birth mother’s brother. Then we got to know each other. When we went to see my grandmother, she thought I was my uncle’s girlfriend. He said, ‘No, this is your granddaughter.’ Nobody in the family knew me.
“I grew up with two names,” Barbara Jean said. “My birth mother named me Doreen Smith. But I grew up with the name Barbara Jean Richardson, and wanted to keep that. When I was eighteen, I legally changed it on my birth certificate. My natural father, Rias Richardson, he lives in Charleston. He’s a longshoreman who works at the Port Authority. It’s a good-paying job. What he would make in two days, it would take me two weeks to make it. With him, I have three sisters and two brothers, and there is a bunch of other ones. One I just found out about a couple of weeks ago. It felt good because she was older than me. I go and see them sometimes. I would like us to be close-knit, but it’s not that way. Because of all that happened, that’s why I try to tell my children who their parents are, so when they grow up and go out, they won’t say, ‘Momma didn’t tell me this, Momma didn’t tell me that.’ ”
Barbara Jean’s three children came by two different husbands. When she left her second husband, Barbara said, he had a fit of jealous rage. One day she went to the grocery store and came home to find that her trailer had been burned to the ground. Barbara Jean signed up for public assistance.
“I went on the welfare system for a while, but didn’t like that,” she remembered. “I said to myself, I had to get a job. Finally I got one, at the power company. Then I bought the trailer where I live now.”
I looked at Barbara Jean’s beautiful child Shanice.
“Do you work around the house, like your grandmother used to?” I asked.
“I help her do the dishes,” said Shanice, “and mop up the floor, and clean the house.” She rolled her tongue around her lips, in the style of Mrs. Richardson.
“Have you been to Charleston?” I put in. Shanice shook her head.
“Don’t shake your head,” said Mrs. Richardson. “Cows shake heads.”
Shanice wrapped her arms around herself. Then she unlaced them, and cracked her knuckles.
The old slave cemetery at Comingtee had been off-limits to black people since the 1930s, when it fell behind the lines of new owners. The cabins came down, paths disappeared, and, with no one keeping them, graves vanished in the thicket. Georgie Richardson’s mother was buried on Comingtee, and her sisters and brother also ended up there, but Mrs. Richardson had not been to the cemetery since she was a young woman. It was too late for her to go, she said, because she could no longer navigate the brush. With Mrs. Richardson in mind, I looked for the graveyard in the woods.
There were other slave cemeteries on the old Ball lands. The one at Kensington plantation had a stone marker that still stood, placed there by one man’s owner. “To the memory of Old Peter,” it read, “who died 10th Jany 1816 about 90 years of age faithful & honest thro’ life Born & died in the family of Ball’s.”
It was cool and bright the day I went to Comingtee to hunt for the graves, accompanied by a search partner, Stanley Richmond. Mr. Richmond, in his early sixties, stood about six feet, had a full head of hair with no gray, and the body of a man half his age. He had worked thirty-one years for the forestry company that owned Comingtee and knew the place like anyone. Mr. Richmond was married to a woman whose family descended from Comingtee slaves. “That’s what her granduncle told me,” he said. “All of them had to move to Sawmill.” I looked in the records, and his wife’s forebears indeed appeared there.
Stanley Richmond’s skin was deep black, with the gleam of graphite, and his hands were rough from a life of handling tools and brush. He had an oval face, with heavy jowls, a flat nose, and full lips. His smile showed one gold tooth in the middle of a full row of white, while from behind the teeth came a deep voice, like the blast of a tuba. When he shouted into the woods, the leaves seemed to shake. The day we went to the plantation, Mr. Richmond wore a plaid shirt, green camouflage pants, a cap and boots, and thick eyeglasses.
The Comingtee land had been corporate property for some decades. Westvaco Corporation (the old West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company) used it to court customers, whom they flew to South Carolina to hunt and fish. Mr. Richmond and I raised dust on the narrow road as we drove onto the estate, and the acrid smell of the dirt mixed with the slender odor of pine needles. The road passed between walls of forest, along the edge of swamps, and through more woods. Although he had not been to the slave cemetery for twenty years, said Mr. Richmond, he thought he could find it. I was skeptical. The barns and slave houses, carpenters’ shops and stables, smokehouses and kitchens, were all gone, and many of the old fields had grown up with trees. Even some of the paths between the white and black settlements on the place, trampled down for two hundred years, had disappeared.
“There was like a ditch around the cemetery,” said Mr. Richmond, getting out of the car on a skinny dirt road. “Water come in there, and during that time, you could only get across when the tide is low. When the tide is up, the cemetery is an island. Some of the older people, who is dead and gone, they said that’s the only way you can bury people there, was when the tide is down, then you can go across.” Mr. Richmond’s baritone voice echoed like a broadcast between the trees. The woodpeckers stopped their knocking, and the mockingbirds fell silent.
The hunt was made harder by the effects of a storm. In September 1989, when Hurricane Hugo came through Charleston and swept past the Cooper River district, great pines broke off in midtrunk and heavy brush was rearranged like balls of dust. The worst damage came from the river, when the tide surged and washed a five-foot wave over the cemeteries. As the water receded, it scraped away topsoil and, presumably, wooden grave markers.
Mr. Richmond had been to the site several times after someone showed it to him, but my only clue to the location of the graveyard came from the Ball memoir:
The negro cemetery—in plantation parlance, the Buryin’ Groun’—is a grove of tall white-oaks and hickories, half-way between the house and the river. … Shade and silence reign there, and under the carpet of fallen leaves lie generation upon generation of a simple people, who were, in the main and according to their lights, faithful and attached to their masters.
If Mr. Richmond pointed out a place near the one described in the Ball memoir, I could be sure it was the right one. I brought a photocopy of an eighteenth-century plat of the property, which showed that the oldest road, the path from the main house to the river, had never changed. As we walked in the white dust, suddenly Mr. Richmond stopped and pointed into the brush. On the treeline were the tops of the white oaks.
“Them wood markers probably done rotted out,” said Mr. Richmond, “because there was some rotted out when I been here last. They wasn’t nothing written on it. They just had ’em at the head of the p
eople. At the foot they put these little things with the name, and the year you born and the year you die. But them things so light, they been washed out.”
We tramped into the woods along the remains of a path. Fallen pines blocked the way, and brambles pulled at our clothes. There were clumps of palm fronds at waist height that looked like big green hands.
“I recognize this thing,” said Mr. Richmond, grabbing a big frond. “These were near the graves. We used to come right by these things to go to the graves.”
We came to a muddy channel, crossed it, and walked onto higher ground. An area of half an acre appeared a little clearer than the rest of the forest floor. Mr. Richmond stopped and fell silent. His voice, for the first time, was quiet.
“This is it,” he said. “You see right here, it’s a grave.” He traced a sunken place the length of a body on the ground with his foot. “It’s sunken in the ground, it’s the width of a grave, and it’s the length. Once that box get rotted, the earth been on the top goes down. And here too.” He stepped on another sag in the leaves.
Mr. Richmond said in passing that he used to have a job with an undertaker in a nearby town. He dug graves, drove a hearse, and spent a lot of afternoons in cemeteries.
“This is our place,” he said finally.
Around the ground were other sunken shapes, where a coffin beneath had rotted and the earth collapsed like a lung. I looked down and realized I was standing on a grave, and wondered if it was that of Georgie Richardson’s mother, or her ancestor, Maum Mary Ann. There were no stones, and no wooden markers.
