By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  At the same time that Jane was paying careful attention to the blacks of Fair Hope, she was also growing to love the quiet of the plantation—especially compared to Philadelphia and Savannah, where wagons and carriages constantly banged and clanked down the streets. She was becoming a quiet and reserved young woman, possessed of much self-confidence, to be sure, but preferring the pleasures and pieties of a quiet life to the social swirl that preoccupied many young women of her class. And the beauty of Fair Hope, in all its isolation, had great appeal for her. The plantation house was located on a little bluff above the Sapelo River, and it provided Jane on each of her visits a grand scene of the marshes and tidal rivers that lay between Fair Hope and Sapelo Sound. In the early mornings, she watched the marshes begin to glow as sunlight spread across them. And in the evenings, she watched the marshes slowly dim in the lengthening shadows of twilight—egrets flew in long white lines to roost and the night wind stirred the marsh grass and surrounding oaks. Wildlife roamed the Fair Hope woods, and on occasion she saw animals along the edges of the marsh—deer and raccoons, possums, rabbits, otters, and cooters. The birds were a wonder for Jane, especially in the winter when migrants found their way south. Buntings, warblers, and vireos joined the homebound who stayed year round—the red-winged blackbirds that sang while clinging to a marsh reed, and the wood storks and great blue herons that hunted shallow waters for frogs and fish. And the ducks! Mallards and pintails, teal and widgeons—they arrived in the fall by the thousands to feed in rice fields and under oaks that dropped their acorns into tepid waters.29

  Both the social landscape of Fair Hope—with its black population and Gullah culture—and the physical landscape of Fair Hope—with its lonely marshes, rivers, and swamps—played a part in shaping how Jane saw the world and how she felt about the world and how she saw herself as a young white woman in the world. Like Philadelphia with her Presbyterian relatives, and Savannah with its memories and associations, Fair Hope provided a home—a home that encouraged her quiet temperament and that nurtured her love for flowing rivers and the beauties of a lonely countryside. Even the rhythms of her Southern speech, the way she walked, and the way she held herself with confidence showed the influence of her time beside the marshes of Sapelo Sound. Yet Fair Hope’s social and physical landscape did something more—it helped to prepare Jane for what would be the great adventure of her life and the consuming passion of her religious commitments.

  IN EARLY 1832, Jane and Margaret announced that they wanted to become missionaries. Their friends were stunned. The Protestant mission movement was young, only a few decades old in 1832, and the movement still seemed to many—including many church folk—to be a largely questionable activity.30

  For Margaret and Jane to say they wanted to be missionaries seemed, if not insane, at least naive, quixotic, and fanatical, especially given their comfortable social status. Why would they go, many wondered, to some distant and dangerous land and live among a barbarous people? But the sisters were determined. They wrote the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Boston and offered their services. Back came the reply: the board did not accept single women as missionaries. If they wanted to be missionaries, each of them needed to marry a man headed for the mission field.31

  And so word went out that two young women, attractive and well-placed, were waiting in Savannah for husbands who would take them to a distant mission field. The arrival of two such men—John Leighton Wilson from South Carolina and James Eckard from Philadelphia—and the quick engagements of the sisters was the troubling news that Paul heard in early December 1832. What he did not know was what this news would mean for him and for the other slaves on Hutchinson Island in the years ahead. There was no way for him to know that it was the beginning of a chain of events that would eventually lead them on a journey as remarkable in its own way as the journey of the Gullah who were said to “riz up and take wing an fly lik a bud . . . back tuh Africa.”32

  Chapter Three

  A Black River Home

  John Leighton Wilson, the youngest of the suitors to arrive in Savannah in 1832, had been born near the cypress-stained waters of the Black River in South Carolina. His great grandfather, Major John James, and his grandfather, Captain John James, had fought with the “Swamp Fox”—the wily Francis Marion—against the British and their Tory allies during the American Revolution. Striking quickly from their camp in dense swamps, Marion and his partisans had hit British outposts and lines of communication time and again only to disappear into the cypress bogs and muddy flats that surrounded their hidden camp. Young Leighton had grown up hearing the embellished stories of their exploits and learning that free men and women were called to resist the arrogance and rule of imperial powers—a sentiment he would carry with him to far places.1

  The Wilsons and the Jameses had come to South Carolina in the 1730s with other Scottish and Scotch-Irish immigrants. Settling in what seemed to them a savage wilderness along the Black River northwest of Charleston, they had slowly cleared the land, built modest homes, and farmed the rich soil that lay between the river, creeks, and swamps of the region. Gradually the children and grandchildren of the early settlers moved further up the river. They established new homes and farms, using the river as their primary highway to carry deer and cow hides, corn, and indigo downstream and to bring back goods purchased on the coast. Before too many years passed, they began to return upriver with a few slaves whom they had bought in the booming slave markets of Charleston.2

  As soon as they had secured a shelter for their own households, the first settlers organized the Williamsburg Presbyterian Church, after the pattern of the Church of Scotland, and called a Scotsman to live and minister among them. In this way the Williamsburg congregation became the mother church to an expanding line of Presbyterian churches that followed the flow of settlers up the Black River—Indiantown, Black Mingo, Salem Black River, Mt. Zion, and Bishopville. Each congregation was at the center of a little community, and in time, Mt. Zion became the home congregation of the Wilson family and at the heart of much of Leighton’s world.3

  William Wilson and Jane James Wilson, Leighton’s parents, had married in 1801 and had established a farm about forty miles up the river from the original settlement. The home they built was a plain clapboard farm house, two stories high, with a chimney on each end of a gabled roof. A wide porch—a piazza they called it in their Lowcountry way—provided a place for relaxing at the end of the day and for visiting when neighbors or relatives came calling. As children were born and the farm began its evolution into a plantation, more rooms were added—not with any particular aesthetic sensibility, other than a concern for what was practical, so that the house grew room by room in a rather gangly, awkward fashion.4

  Leighton was born in 1809, the fifth of eight children. He became particularly close to his two older brothers, William and Samuel, and to his two younger sisters, Sarah and Mary Martha. It was a loving family marked by deep commitments to one another and to the community in which they lived. All around them—and up and down the river—were families that were connected in bewildering webs of relationships: Witherspoons and Scotts, Muldrows and Chandlers, McCutcheons, McBrides, McCoys, and McLeods, and a host of other entangled families. Young Leighton grew up calling many of the white adults around him “aunt” or “uncle,” and most of his contemporaries he called “cousin.”5

  As rooms were being added to the Wilson home, acres were being added to the Wilson farm. The original tract ran from the little road that paralleled the river to the river itself. Along the eastern boundary was Boggy Gully, a stream that meandered north until it was lost in swamps and a narrow section of the river. To this original tract of some 500 acres were added lands—some across the road, some down the road, and some on the far side of Boggy Gully. Cotton, after the invention of the modern gin in 1794, was becoming a highly profitable crop and had begun to make the settlers along the Black River prosperous—including William Wilson as he added acre up
on acre to his holdings.6

  Raising cotton, however, was no easy task, and the Black River farmers believed that they needed slaves to chop the cotton, pick the cotton, and press the cotton into bales for the waiting gins. Like rice planters before them, they began to invest—with loans from Charleston merchants—in black men, women, and children, becoming ever more deeply entwined in a rapidly expanding slave economy. In this way the few slave cabins that had been built on the edge of Boggy Gully in 1801 had become by the 1830s a substantial slave settlement, and what had been called the Wilson farm began to be called the Wilson plantation.7

  Among those who lived in the slave settlement were some who had been given by Captain John James to his daughter Jane when she was a child. They and their descendants—that is, the descendants of the women—were entailed to Jane and her children. Leighton had thus become the owner of some young slaves who, as he said years later, became entailed “to me twenty years before they or I had an existence.” In time, these and the other black men and women who lived in the settlement would have their own memories of this land, their own stories to tell around communal fires, and their own interpretations of life as lived close by the Black River. These memories, stories, and interpretations would challenge what whites remembered, the stories whites told, and the interpretations whites gave to how things had been at the Wilson place and on the other plantations of the area.8

  LEIGHTON GREW UP on the Wilson farm before it became a plantation. From an early age he had his chores—he helped in the kitchen garden, he learned how to plow a straight furrow, and he worked side by side with the black slaves who were carrying the burden of the day. He learned the way they spoke and how to talk with them in their dialect. And no doubt he heard their stories—at least the ones they wanted him to hear. He listened to their proverbs about how a person should live wisely, and in the evenings he heard the sound of their voices, and sometimes their singing, in the settlement. On occasion he watched root doctors make a poultice to heal an ache or pain and caught glimpses of charms used to keep evil at bay, and he learned of a secret world inhabited by ghosts and haunts and how hags could come at night and take your breath away by riding on your chest. All of this he remembered later, as these early experiences made deep impressions upon his mind and imagination and helped to shape the way he saw a broader world.9

  But Leighton also remembered black men and women in church with him and his family. Sharper and Ben, Nelly and Sabrina, Abraham and Matilda were among those from the Boggy Gully settlement who made their public confession of faith and were baptized and numbered among the members of the Mt. Zion congregation. They, along with slaves from neighboring settlements, traveled weekly down sandy roads to the Mt. Zion meetinghouse, where they heard the scriptures read and long sermons preached. Together with the Wilsons and other whites they sang the hymns that did so much to shape a Protestant piety among them. And twice a year these black men and women came and sat at a long table that stretched across the front of the church while white elders served them the bread and wine of the communion service. And like the whites who had been served before them, these black slaves took from the elders the plate with bread and the cup with wine and passed them around the table to one another. These scenes made their own impressions upon young Leighton. They, too, helped to shape the way he saw a broader world and stirred feelings that in the years to come marked the deepest commitments and clearest contours of his life.10

  The people of the settlement consequently did not seem strange or threatening to Leighton. They were people with names and familiar personalities. Jacob was the patriarch, and as he grew older he was moved from working the fields to working around the farmhouse. There he began to help in the kitchen, a little house located behind the Wilsons’ home. Kitchen work was unusual for a black man, but Jacob learned to cook the peas, collards, and sweet potatoes from the garden; how to make rice dishes with chicken and its broth, mixed together with okra and tomatoes; and how to prepare the hams from the smokehouse and the sausages stored in crocks packed with lard. He became a favorite with Leighton and was respected by all in the white family.11

  Leighton knew, of course, that Jacob and the other blacks on the place lived in the little cabins down by Boggy Gully, and not in his parents’ expanding farmhouse. And he came to understand as a young white boy that beyond the distance between house and cabin was the greater distance between owner and owned, between white and black. Each day taught him who was boss and who was bossed, who ate the food prepared in the kitchen and who ate from the cook pots of the settlement, who cleaned the stable and who rode the horses, who made the beds in the house and who slept in the beds. And Sundays had their lessons as well—he saw where whites sat and where blacks sat, and he heard sermons preached by whites, and he sang hymns chosen by whites. It all came to seem natural to him, the way the world was ordered, a part of a coherent moral universe.12

  In the midst of these daily routines, Leighton began to become aware that although Jacob and the others in the settlement were a part of his world, there was much of their world that he did not know or understand. Still, his experience taught him that these two worlds—and their histories—while separate, overlapped and were entwined. When the Wilsons gathered on the piazza in the evenings with visiting aunts and uncles, cousins, or friends to talk about what was going in the county or to remember earlier times, Jacob and other slaves came creeping into their stories from the margins—sometimes as central players in a scene, sometimes as incidental actors, but always as a seemingly natural part of the landscape and of the imagination of a white world.13

  For their part, Jacob and those who lived by Boggy Gully knew only too well that the Wilsons’ world was a powerful and bitter reality in their own lives. A white world not only overlapped their black world, it also lay heavy on it; it was a great pressing, breathtaking burden that intruded into every aspect of their lives. Where they slept, what they ate, the clothes they wore, and the work they did, from the rising of the sun to the last dishes were cleared away and the horses fed at night—in it all, whites tried to govern what blacks did and what they thought, to control the imagination of the settlement and to limit the horizon that lay beyond Boggy Gully. And standing behind these white attempts at control, waiting and watching, was white military power and its readiness to use bloody, terrifying violence.14

  Because Jacob and the others in the settlement knew all of this only too well, they tried to use strategies to frustrate white control without provoking white wrath. They could shuffle along during the day when told what to do, and in the evening when they were alone together before the settlement fires, they could tell their own stories and laugh at jokes about whites. And when rage boiled and someone could take no more white bossing, the swamps offered a temporary refuge even with the threat of a whipping. In these ways the Wilson place became contested ground, and young Leighton grew up hearing, in the daily coming and going of his Black River home, the often muffled sounds of conflict.15

  THE WILSONS CALLED their home “Pine Grove”—not “Fair Hope” or “Richmond-on-Ogeechee” or “Strathy Hall” or some other such name used on one of the great rice plantations of the Lowcountry—but rather a modest name to fit the home’s modest character and the character of those who lived in its spreading, gangly farmhouse. Longleaf pines, Pinus palustris, surrounded their home and—together with cypress swamps and growing cotton fields—dominated the landscape where the whites of Pine Grove and the blacks of Boggy Gully lived separate but tangled lives. The pines, soaring high above scattered oaks and sweet gums, were largely impervious to the fires that burned the undergrowth, and they created open, park-like stands with a ground cover of grasses where deer could graze and quail flourish.16

  Leighton became a fine horseman in these open forests, and in the Black River swamps he learned to hunt and became aware of the physical world around him. He knew the explosive flight of quail rising before a pointing dog, and the quail’s evening whistle callin
g together a scattered covey. He could distinguish a buck’s track from a doe’s and could read the bloodstained story of rabbit fur and bobcat track. He became skilled at quietly paddling a little boat through swampy waters—a skill that later served him well—to hunt the wood ducks and mallards that fed in the dark waters of a cypress swamp. And in the evenings after a hunt as he walked home along the hedgerows that lined the cotton fields, he could hear the lonely song of the cardinal settling over the land, and the twilight hoot of an owl could sometimes be heard coming up from the swamp and in the distance the mordant bark of a fox.17

  In all of this Leighton was not only learning how to look and to listen and to interpret the natural world around him—he was also becoming deeply rooted in the landscape as place and personality mingled. No less than the social world of family and church, of slave and owner, this physical world was becoming an intimate part of Leighton’s world. At some deep level of affection and self-understanding, he began to identify with this spot of ground, this particular place along the Black River. No matter how far he traveled from these pine forests, cypress swamps, and cotton fields, no matter how long he stayed away from these home grounds, they lingered in his heart and in the places of his imagination. Leighton’s memory and therefore his sense of self became intertwined with this specific place as the place insinuated itself into his most elemental senses: the sound of the night wind in the pines outside his bedroom window, the fragrance of new-plowed ground in the spring, the feel of matted pine straw beneath his feet, the taste of food prepared in a plantation kitchen, the sight of winter smoke rising from home fires, and the light of a winter sun on a forest floor. Leighton’s experience of distant places would always be filtered through these early memories, and his voice, however tempered by other places, always carried the sounds and intonations of a Black River home.18