A primary reason for the study of the language was to prepare books in Grebo for Jane’s school. While Leighton had been working on the language, Jane had been organizing her school with Margaret as her helper. At first they included both settler and Grebo children in the same class, but they found that it was difficult to teach the Grebo using English books. So Leighton hurried to prepare a primer to teach the Grebo children to read, even though he knew it would contain inaccuracies. Other difficulties, however, caused them to move ahead and separate the Grebo and American children.
Tensions had been building with Mrs. Strobel since the outset of their journey. On the voyage out, when Jane had been seasick and needing constant attention, Margaret had not offered to help but had left Jane’s care to Leighton. The Wilsons had thought at the time that her behavior was because of her “elation at her promotion and the attention that was paid her” before she left Savannah, and that she might fear being regarded as a “menial” if she helped. Moreover, they had found her generally to be a cheerful person possessed of “a good Christian spirit.” They had consequently decided to overlook what they regarded as a lack of Christian sympathy and help, hoping that once they arrived at Cape Palmas she would act differently. “But,” wrote Leighton in a confidential note to Anderson, “in this we were also disappointed.” When the fever had struck Jane and Leighton, she offered no help, although she and Catherine were living with them in the mission house. Rather, after she had recovered from her slight bout with the fever, she went off daily to visit settler friends in Harper. When Leighton finally recovered from his fever in July, she let it be known that she hoped to go to Monrovia to live with a man coming out from Savannah. But then a few weeks later, she received a letter informing her that he was a “fallen character,” and she had come to her meals with Leighton and Jane depressed and unhappy.45
For the Wilsons, Margaret was becoming a distraction. They became increasingly irritated and thought of her as irresponsible and unworthy of the trust and help that had been given her in Savannah. Leighton had a long, frank conversation with her and, he wrote Anderson, “she acknowledged her faults and promised to do better.” But nothing seemed to change. So Leighton told Margaret that she had become an encumbrance for the mission and gave her three choices. She could return to her friends in Savannah. She could go to her friends in Monrovia. Or she could stay at Cape Palmas in the employment of the mission, stay in a house in Harper rented for her by the mission, and have a small school under her own control for the settler children.46
Margaret decided to take the last proposal, and Leighton wrote Anderson “that we are doing all we can to make her contented and useful.” The whole business, however, was perplexing for Leighton and Jane, for they liked Margaret, felt close to Catherine, and thought they had been trying to do their Christian duty in regard to them. For Margaret’s part, she appeared to be glad to get away from the Wilsons and from their “Christian duty,” their assumptions of authority, and their constant supervision. She had come to Africa to breathe its air freely, not to be bossed about by white people.47
Margaret and Catherine moved into Harper. There, Margaret could—among other things—use her snuff and smoke her pipe away from the disapproving eyes of Leighton and Jane. She began to teach the settler children, and she and Catherine began to be more a part of the little colony. Jane then turned her attention to the fifteen Grebo boys who gathered every morning in a little school located at the edge of the Fair Hope garden. The Wilsons and the Strobels thus parted and divided their work, but they continued to be drawn toward each other in a kind of mutual affection tempered by deep memories, old habits, and long-established systems of power and authority. For the next twenty-five years, they would find their lives overlapping and intertwining, long after Cape Palmas had become for them all a receding memory.48
BY LATE 1835, the mission appeared to be well established. Two schools had been started, Leighton was busy studying the Grebo language, and the mission’s relationship to the Grebo people appeared promising. Jane and Leighton, as well as Margaret and Catherine, had passed through the acclimating time with the fever, so deadly among whites, and while they all continued to have regular attacks, the fevers were not so severe or debilitating after that first year, for the Americans had acquired immunities that greatly reduced their suffering. Leighton wrote home that he and Jane were as cheerful and as happy in Africa as they had ever been in America. And, he noted, “we enjoy the cheering conviction that we are laying the foundation of a super-structure, which, under the hands of others, and with the blessing of Almighty God, will prove the glory of West Africa.”49
Chapter Seven
Beneath an African Sky
Early on a bright and sultry November morning, 1835, Leighton and Jane walked to the north side of the Cape as the pounding whitecaps of the surf reflected the dawn of a West African day. The young couple climbed carefully into a narrow canoe that had been dug out from a single tree trunk and sharpened and peaked at both ends. They were eager to learn more about the Grebo—the details of their daily lives, their beliefs and rituals, and the ways in which they saw the world—and they also wanted to find a promising location for a new school. Rock Town, about six miles north of the Cape, was known as an important Grebo center and seemed by its prominence to invite an exploratory visit.1
Leighton and Jane settled in the canoe. Seven Grebo men, laughing and talking, grabbed the sides of the canoe and pushed it from shore as they splashed through the water. When the canoe was fully afloat, the men threw their bodies across it, pulled themselves up, and scrambled artfully aboard. They edged the canoe toward the heaving surf while carefully watching the rise and fall of successive waves. Then suddenly with a cry, they leaned forward in unison, dug their paddles deep into the water, and shot the canoe out between the rising swells.2
The Grebo, like their Kru relatives, were accomplished swimmers, using a freestyle that combined alternate overarm strokes with fast scissor kicks. If the canoe had capsized, they could easily have swum ashore, especially since they wore only cotton cloths lightly wrapped around their waists. But Leighton, like most Westerners, knew little about swimming, except for perhaps a dogpaddle, and Jane was most certainly not a swimmer. Dressed as they were in Western-style clothes and with boots on their feet, they would be in serious danger if a wave caught the canoe sideways and flipped it over. The Grebo, however, knew what they were doing and quickly took the couple through the surf to the smoother waters beyond the breakers.3
Turning the canoe north and apparently enjoying the morning, the men were soon singing and reciting poetry—not unlike the Gullah boatmen Leighton and Jane had seen in Georgia. “Had we been better acquainted with their language,” wrote Leighton, “we would have enjoyed these poetical effusions much more than we did.”4 But it was a grand adventure for the young couple, especially for Jane. How far away Savannah and Fair Hope plantation must have seemed to her—and especially Philadelphia! Holding onto her bonnet as the ocean breeze flowed over them, General McIntosh’s granddaughter gazed on a passing African landscape illumined by the morning sun.
When the travelers arrived at Rock Town, they were given a tumultuous Grebo welcome. Leighton and Jane climbed a high bank, helped along by many Grebo hands, and walked into the town as the growing crowd pressed around them. They passed a post with greegrees hanging from it warning all who came that way that the entrance to the town was protected by powerful fetishes. Years later, Leighton wrote, perhaps remembering this visit to Rock Town, that when a stranger first plants his feet upon the shores of Africa, his eyes immediately encounter greegrees or fetishes. The traveler, wrote Leighton, finds fetishes “suspended along every path he walks; at every junction of two or more roads; at the crossing-place of every stream; at the base of every large rock or overgrown forest tree; at the gate of every village; over the door of every house, and around the neck of every human being whom he meets.”5
Now, as Leighton and Jane entered Roc
k Town, they no doubt remembered that the Gullah—and other African American slaves—also used charms—what Leighton called “real fetishes, though not known by this name.” These remembered charms that they had seen here and there throughout the Lowcountry seemed deeply connected to what they were now seeing at Rock Town. But in a telling comment, Leighton wrote that Lowcountry charms were used “in a less open form” than what they were seeing in Rock Town. Lowcountry conjurers used their charms—made of material available to them from their own landscape—in the midst of the social, cultural, and religious power of a US slave society. American slaves had to be discreet, “less open,” with their charms, just as they had to hide many areas of slave life from the eyes of whites.6
In contrast, as Leighton and Jane walked into Rock Town they were surrounded by fetishes that were displayed for all to see. What they now saw were fetishes that reflected in their composition a Grebo landscape—here was a piece of camwood, there the hoof of an antelope; here the yellowing horn of a goat, over there the long white tooth of a leopard. With so many of them openly displayed around them, the young missionaries were beginning to understand that these fetishes were not only rooted in this particular spot of earth, they were also an embodiment of a Grebo world, of a Grebo way of understanding human life. The missionaries could sense as they looked around them that these Rock Town fetishes moving slowly in the morning breeze had beneath them and in them the authority of Grebo society. So what Leighton and Jane saw, when they climbed the hill and entered Rock Town, seemed both familiar and unfamiliar to this young white couple who had lived close to Boggy Gully and the settlement at Fair Hope plantation. What was familiar was the presence of the fetishes or charms. What was unfamiliar was their omnipresence, their composition, and their relationship to the dominant Grebo culture and society. And what Leighton and Jane were just beginning to realize was that beneath the familiar and the unfamiliar were deep assumptions that linked the Gullah to the Grebo and other West Africans—assumptions about what causes people to get sick or hurt, or what causes the fishing to be good or bad, or what causes a woman to run away from her husband, or a man to die suddenly.7
The people led the young missionaries to the center of the town, to the palaver house, where they were seated on little stools while a great crowd pressed close around them. Finally a little man came out. He seemed to Leighton silly and stupid looking—a startling contrast to Freeman or William Davis or Simleh Ballah—but he represented the king, who was away. He and Leighton exchanged dashes, and Leighton told him he was considering establishing a school for the children of Rock Town. Everyone seemed very pleased by this announcement, but before the discussion could go further, the little man insisted that Jane take off her bonnet. The people of Rock Town had never before seen a white woman, and as they crowded around Jane they were particularly curious about her hair, which they saw peeking out from beneath her bonnet. So Jane untied the bonnet and took it off. She ran her hand through her hair and shook her head so that her long blond hair fell around her shoulders to what Leighton called “the profound gratification and admiration of the surrounding multitude.”8
If the Rock Town people were surprised by Jane’s blond hair, Leighton and Jane had their own surprise. They were invited to the home of a leading trader, where they discovered, to their amazement, that he had spent five years in Newport, Rhode Island. He spoke English well and had much of the manners and ways of an American. So Leighton and Jane were learning day by day that the Grebo did not fit easily into a stereotype. Grebo culture was not static but already in flux as part of a wider world connected by great ocean highways. And the Grebo, for their part, were also beginning to learn more about whites, and most particularly about this young white couple that had come among them.9
Leighton and Jane were pleased with what they saw at Rock Town—the size and character of the population and the location of the town on a massive rock high above the surrounding country. Before they left in the afternoon for their return to Fair Hope, they decided that Rock Town would be an excellent location for another school.10
NOT LONG AFTER their return, the young missionaries heard gunfire in Big Town. Leighton went into the town to see what was happening, and he learned that an important man had died and that his funeral rites had begun. He found the body laid out in a small canoe in front of the man’s house. Already the people had brought and placed in the canoe gifts of cloth, beads, china, and rice, so that the canoe was overflowing, and the dead man was well prepared for his last journey. His chief wife sat beside his head and brushed flies away with a handkerchief while pouring out her lamentations.
When all was ready, two men lifted the canoe over their heads and began hurrying with the body down one of the narrow streets of Big Town toward the little island a few hundred yards off the shore—the place of the dead. The wail of the women grew more intense, but the Grebo men showed no emotion except through the sound of their beating drums and the noise of their guns, which they fired continuously as the procession flowed quickly toward the edge of the town. Suddenly the pallbearers began to stagger and then they turned around and rushed back along the route that they had come. Leighton asked what was happening and was told “the dead man was not willing to go.” Finally, after some entreaties and assurances by Freeman that he would not be forgotten by the living, the dead man consented and was carried to the island, where he and his accompanying provisions were placed on the ground. The men tipped the canoe over to protect him as best as they could from exposure to the wind and torrid sun.11
Leighton and Jane could see the island from Fair Hope, and during the days that followed they watched as the man became a ripening feast for gulls and scurrying crabs. And in Harper windows had to be closed for several days when the wind blew in from the sea.12
Who was responsible for the death of the man lying on the little island beneath the canoe, sun, and swirling gulls? The death of anyone–but especially the death of an important man–led the Grebo to search for the person who caused the death. The Grebo knew, of course, that the man might have died because he had a fever, or because he slipped and hit his head on a rock, but the question was, why did he have the fever, or slip and hit his head? And while they might acknowledge multiple causes for a misfortune, they looked beneath any empirical reason for some sinister intention and act—the grudge of a neighbor, perhaps, or the jealousy of a husband who utilized witchcraft or sorcery to inflict harm. In order to discover the specific cause of a misfortune and to identify the person who had inflicted the harm, they relied on divination.13
In contrast, when Leighton had been commissioned in Philadelphia, Rufus Anderson had spoken of a modern understanding of cause and effect. The connections, he had said, “between causes and their effects are fast being developed in these latter days.” Anderson and those gathered in Philadelphia may have known nothing about the role of mosquitoes in causing malaria, but as children of the Enlightenment they believed that science would soon provide an answer—an answer that would furnish what Anderson called “a life preserver for every man.” They believed that natural causes were behind sickness and death and misfortunes.14
But Leighton and his people, like the Grebo, also looked beneath empirical causes to a deeper question of “why?” And what they found when they asked why was not sorcery or witchcraft or the breaking of some taboo, but the providence of God’s will and purposes. They believed that human history had a purpose and a direction guided by the Holy One of Israel, the God of the Bible, who used natural causes for God’s own good, loving, and just purposes. This tension between natural causes and God’s providence marked Leighton’s and Jane’s world—indeed, it marked with growing intensity the world of much of nineteenth-century Protestant life, even as it encountered an increasingly secular understanding of human life and human history.15
For Leighton and Jane, the tension between these two understandings of history—of whether it was driven by natural causes or guided by God’s providence—wa
s ultimately resolved by the deep and unfathomable mystery of God’s being, the God of the Bible, who had declared in Isaiah: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” This high and holy One, they believed, had revealed Himself most completely and clearly in Jesus, “the Word made flesh.” And what they believed Jesus revealed was God’s love and gracious purposes, which sustained and guided human history, even the seemingly inexplicable suffering and sorrows of human life.16
As missionaries, it was Leighton’s and Jane’s task to invite the Grebo into their world—a world with a modern understanding of cause and effect where at the same time the providence and will of God governed and directed human life. What was clear and unambiguous to Leighton and Jane was that this world, their world, was not the world of the Grebo, and that the world of the Grebo was not only wrong but also barbaric. Such claims were rejected by many of their contemporaries in the United States and Europe and would come in time to be viewed with disdain as “missionary hubris” and expressions of cultural imperialism. Others, however, scorned such missionary efforts as “casting pearls before swine,” as attempting to convert Africans who by their very nature were unable to be anything more than “primitive,” people who could not give up their attachments to their world of fetishes—or who, for the entertainment of whites charmed by the exotic, were to be kept primitive, undisturbed by either Christianity or modernity.17
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