By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  In a letter to Anderson, Leighton wrote about what he perceived to be the particular burden of recently freed people: “All of them who have health might easily render themselves comfortable, happy, and independent, but they keep the chains which once bound them in slavery—and it is not an uncommon thing to hear them say that they would prefer bondage to freedom and this humiliating acknowledgement is made notwithstanding the comforts of life can be obtained with less cost of labour here than at home—I mean where they earn it under taskmasters.” He compared these complaining settlers to the Israelites, who, when they were freed from their bondage in Egypt and were wandering in the Sinai wilderness, began longing for the “fleshpots of Egypt.” Such base ingratitude, he thought now, marked many settlers as they faced the challenges at Cape Palmas. “From their children,” he thought, “if they are brought under the influence of education and religion, much may be expected; but for the present generation, those who were once under the withering influence of slavery, but little ought to be anticipated.”37

  Leighton was convinced that the habits and dispositions of those raised under the “withering” social and psychological conditions of slavery were very difficult to discard. Slavery, he thought, left deep scars and made the careful selection of immigrants a fundamental ingredient for the success of the colony under the daunting challenges of a new settlement. Some settlers agreed with Leighton and reported that too many of them had firmly fixed in their minds the “idea that we cannot do without ‘the fleshpots of the Egyptians.’” But other settlers objected, insisting that the difficulties they faced flowed not from the blight of slavery on their character, but from the way the colonization authorities in Baltimore had misled them in the United States and then neglected them once they reached West Africa.38

  They were all entering an enormously consequential debate that was to last for generations: What were the legacies of slavery’s oppression? Did slavery shape in any consistent way the character of African Americans? Were the habits and dispositions of Paul in Savannah, of the Gullah on General’s Island, of Snetter in Charleston, shaped in any consistent way by slavery’s chains? And what about the character of European Americans? What about Leighton and Jane, and what about Eliza Clay in Savannah and William Wilson by Boggy Gully, and what about Latrobe in Baltimore and Anderson in Boston? Did slavery shape in any consistent way their dispositions, their habits of thought, and their ways of seeing the world, and especially their ways of seeing African Americans and Africans? In the coming years, Leighton would change his mind on these questions—several times.39

  Leighton was doing more, however, in his letters to Latrobe and Anderson than calling attention to what he regarded as the “withering” influences of slavery. He was also exposing the ideological foundation of the Maryland Colonization Society. The primary purpose of the society—for which it received substantial funds from the state of Maryland—was to whiten Maryland. The establishment of a healthy, thriving colony was secondary and incidental to this primary purpose. The society had as a clear objective the removal of slaves and those free blacks whom General Harper had called “a population for the most part idle and useless, and too often vicious and mischievous,” and as a result the society was eager to send whosoever would or could be persuaded to go. Because of Leighton’s increasing willingness to unveil this ideological foundation, the abolitionists used him as an ally in their attack on the colonization enterprise, and Latrobe and other leaders of the Maryland society began to see him as a troublesome and meddling missionary.40

  IF LEIGHTON HAD growing concerns about the immigrants, he had growing admiration for the Grebo, notwithstanding his abhorrence of their fetishes and sassy wood ordeal. On his visits to Big Town, he was often invited into Grebo homes. The houses were circular, varying in diameter from twelve to thirty feet, with high-peaked roofs that looked like neat caps set on top of the walls. Fires were kept burning in the center of each house, and the smoke rose up through the thatch, keeping insects away from both the thatch and the grain stored directly underneath it. The floors, raised ten or twelve inches above the ground, were made of clay that was as smooth and hard as masonry. Some doorways were paved with palm nut shells and acquired in time an attractive metallic luster. The women swept the floors regularly and kept all in order—pots filled with water, wood stacked outside for fires, sleeping mats rolled up during the day and neatly stored, and decorative dishes and pots, obtained in trade from some passing ship, hanging on the walls. The women had, noted Leighton, “a place for everything and everything in its place.”41

  The Grebo women were industrious in other ways as well. They rose early and went laughing and talking in bands to a spring to get water, looked after the needs of their children, and tended their gardens. In certain seasons, they went several miles from Big Town to work their farms. Leighton found the women robust and strong and capable of carrying immensely heavy burdens on their heads, no doubt reminding him of the elegant stride of the Lowcountry slave women he had seen carrying, with apparent ease, bags of cotton from a Pine Grove field, sheaves of rice at Fair Hope plantation, or a basket of vegetables to the Savannah market. Now, in the evenings at Big Town, he watched women trudging home with large water-pots, or heavy bundles of wood on their heads—and perhaps a sleeping child slung to their backs. And he found, to his amazement, that they could walk this way for miles, without ever raising a hand to steady or adjust these heavy burdens. While Leighton thus admired the industry and strength of the women, he thought they regarded themselves “as little better than beasts of burden, and are much below the men in general intelligence.” He and Jane were beginning to believe that part of their missionary challenge was to change the place of women in Grebo society and the women’s understanding of themselves.42

  As for the Grebo men, he found them “by no means indolent,” even if they did not perform as much hard labor as the women. They spent much time preparing and planting the farms and harvesting their crops. And they were, of course, in much demand as seamen on the ships that sailed along the coast and, as Leighton knew from personal experience, knew how to handle a canoe with amazing skill. He noted that among European and American traders, the Grebo men had a reputation for being “active and obliging, if treated with justice and kindness; but sullen, obstinate, and perverse if imposed upon.”43

  Leighton was particularly impressed with the cleanliness of the Grebo. “All classes,” he wrote, “perform daily ablution with hot water, and the adults often twice in the day. After the thorough application of water and a coarse towel made of grass-cloth, they rub a small quantity of oil over their entire person, which imparts a bright and healthful appearance to the skin, and is no doubt greatly promotive of their general health.” Leighton thought it was true that the women had little sense of “delicacy” in the way they dressed—they wore only a short cloth around their waists—but such light clothing, together with their frequent bathing and swimming in the surf, helped to keep them, and the men and children, too, free from what he called “those distressing odors” that could quickly arise from the body in hot, humid climates.44

  AS HE LEARNED more about the Grebo of Big Town, Leighton heard stories of the towns and villages in the interior, and on occasion he met someone from “the brush” who came to trade at Big Town, or to see the strange whites who had settled at Fair Hope. From his first visit to the Cape, Leighton had wondered if the interior, with its reported mountains, did not promise a location for a mission station far away from the danger of miasmas and removed from the influence of the colony at Harper. Four days after he wrote the Maryland board about his growing apprehensions in regard to the colony, he left on his first exploration of the interior. Jane, busy with her school, stayed at Fair Hope to manage its affairs while Leighton was away.45

  William Davis, Freeman’s brother, joined Leighton as a guide and translator. Davis had spent a number of years in Sierra Leone, where, according to Leighton, by his industry and economy he had accumulated
a sufficient sum of money to purchase a small boat, which he loaded with a valuable cargo of goods. About three months before Leighton and Jane arrived at Fair Hope, he had left Sierra Leone on board his little vessel hoping to reach his home at Cape Palmas. His boat, however, had floundered in rough waters, and he had lost all the goods that he had so carefully accumulated during his years in Sierra Leone. When he came with Freeman to visit Fair Hope, Leighton found him dejected in spirits but interested in the work of the mission.46

  Davis was, like Ballah, part of an Atlantic Creole world and felt a deep tension between the traditions of the Grebo and the modern Western world he had encountered, both on trading ships and in Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown. Before he and Leighton left for the interior, Davis had already placed his daughter in the mission school. She was fast becoming a favorite with Jane, who gave her the English name “Mary Clealand” after a Philadelphia friend and supporter of the mission.47

  The settler blacksmith, Anthony Wood, joined Leighton and Davis for their exploratory trip. A native of the West Indies, Wood had been taken by his owner to Baltimore, where he had eventually gained his freedom. Restless and smarting from the racism that he felt permeated every aspect of US society, he had fled to Haiti, then to Monrovia, and finally, at Dr. Hall’s urging, to Harper. Energetic, popular, and a leader among the settlers, he was already a thorn in the flesh of the white authorities in Baltimore and their agents at Harper—he did not hesitate to challenge the decisions of Hall or Holmes.48

  In early June 1836, Leighton, Davis, and Wood—together with several Grebo porters—left Harper. They followed the little road that led northeast to the Big Town farms. After walking over rolling country for several miles, they came to the Grebo rice fields. Leighton had seen the rice fields at Fair Hope plantation and Richmond-on-Ogeechee as well as those that lined the Savannah and those along the Cooper and Ashley rivers near Charleston. And yet he was astonished by the extent of the cultivation here and the quality of the rice the fields produced. It was, he wrote, “as good as any I had ever seen in South Carolina or Georgia.” It did not occur to him that the cultivation of Lowcountry rice might be deeply connected to West Africa, and that what he was seeing only a few miles from Big Town was part of a long and sophisticated tradition of rice cultivation that had been carried from many places along the West African coast to the slave markets of Charleston and Savannah.49

  After leaving the Big Town farms, they followed a little foot trail through the bush. At about one o’clock, they came to a village, where they received an excited welcome and were invited to stay for the night. They decided to pass on after only a short visit, however, and soon came again to extensive rice fields that stretched out in every direction. At about four o’clock, they came to large groves of lime and orange trees loaded with fruit, whose beauty, Leighton thought, could be more easily imagined than described. Walking through the groves, they came to Gnambahda, a handsome town which Leighton found exceptional in its cleanliness and in the openness of its streets. Located on a hill, the town was surrounded by a high, spiked wall. They approached Gnambahda undetected by anyone, apart from a few children at play. They passed through a low gate in the wall, and suddenly there was a yell, and the whole town seemed to come pouring out of houses and running down the streets to press tightly around them in an enthusiastic greeting. Leighton felt cut off from fresh air and almost deafened by unrestrained shouts and the loud roar of many voices. The travelers made their way to the house of the headman, who greeted them warmly, provided a place for them to stay, and roasted a sheep for their breakfast. Leighton gave him a dash of trade goods—cotton handkerchiefs, razors, and beads.

  The next day, they set off again through rich and verdant fields of rice before entering a dense bush of tall grasses, mud, and water, and then once again rice fields, as they began a gradual ascent. The country became hilly and exceedingly beautiful. At the top of each hill, the little band stopped to gaze at the grandeur of the surrounding countryside, its enchantment heightened by lush rice fields that crowned the hills around them. Leighton had difficulty believing that he was in the country of an uncivilized people.

  In the early afternoon they came to their destination—Denah, the town of King Neh on the Cavally River. Dr. Hall had visited the town the previous year by traveling up the river and had brought back from Neh an invitation for Leighton to visit. Neh was not at home when they arrived, but his head wife welcomed them and dispersed the crowd that was pressing around them. She gave them a place to rest and had warm water brought for them to bathe their feet. The king soon joined them, and he gave them his own house for the night. The visitors found it decorated with much china-ware, an indication of Neh’s wealth.

  Leighton was particularly taken by Neh and his wife. He found her to be a remarkable woman—“in dignity of manners, energy and stability of character” she excelled, he thought, any Grebo woman he had met. And his feelings were moved when he saw how she and Neh related to one another with “kindly feeling and conjugal attachment which bound the pair together,” a contrast, he thought, with what he had seen among the coastal Grebo, whose relationships seemed cooler and more dispassionate. So, once again, Leighton was encountering particular men and women who challenged his early impressions and powerful stereotypes about the character of the Grebo.50

  The next morning, after more lavish dashes, Leighton and Neh discussed the possibility of establishing a school in the town. The proposal was eagerly accepted by Neh, although he seemed to Leighton to be more interested in trade than in the education of the children. Their business complete, the little party boarded canoes supplied by Neh and floated down the Cavally. As they approached the coast, Leighton wrote that he was “much reminded of my native Carolina—on both sides of the river there were large fields of beautiful rice—some unsurpassed, rather unequalled by any that I ever before saw.” They reached Baphro’s town, Grand Cavally, at sunset, spent the night there, and the next morning hiked the twenty miles back to Fair Hope and Big Town.51

  Like his trip with Jane to Rock Town, the excursion to Denah opened new vistas for Leighton. Now he had caught a glimpse at least of the interior, with its rice fields and orchards and villages. And from hilltops he had seen in the distance cloud-covered mountains that seemed to beckon and invite him into their mysteries.

  TOWARD THE END of the summer of 1836, Simleh Ballah returned from his visit to Baltimore. The trip had been a great adventure for him. He had proved something of a sensation in Baltimore, with his filed teeth and the blue tattoo running down his forehead and nose to his chin. He had stayed with Latrobe, who was writing, with other members of the colonization board, a “Code of Laws for King Freeman.” Every evening Ballah met with his host, who explained to him the details of the document, and Ballah responded as the “king’s mouth.” He told the board that Freeman “send me dis country. I come for peak his word. . . . I come for look country and peak him words.”52

  In order to “look country,” Ballah traveled around the city. In the harbor he saw sleek clipper ships and sloops and schooners. On city streets he walked into the shadows of tall buildings and church steeples and heard the roar and whistle of the astonishing engines of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company. And everywhere he went he saw black slaves pushing carts or driving wagons or selling fish and vegetables, and he very well may have seen black men, women, and children being sold in the city’s slave markets.53

  When Ballah returned to Big Town, he brought with him a copy of the laws written in Baltimore for the Grebo living at Cape Palmas. Leighton wrote Latrobe that King Freeman had asked him to read the document to all of his headmen. The laws were reasonable and humane—criminals were to be tried before a judge, and if found guilty, punished according to the character of the crime. “If a man kill another man because he hated and wanted to kill him, he must be hung.” But, “If a man kill another man, and did not hate him or want to kill him, but did not take care, and killed him, he must go to jail
and be punished as the judge says.” And so the laws went, just the kind of code one might expect from a group of well-meaning white men living in Baltimore trying to write a legal document for the Grebo living thousands of miles away. A Grebo, they said, was to be tried by a Grebo judge, and the “American men must be tried by the American judges, and when the dispute is between a native and an American man, there must be a native judge and an American judge, and if they don’t agree, the American governor of the colony must settle the business.”54

  Leighton was clearly skeptical of the whole process. For white men who knew almost nothing about Grebo culture and society to write a code of laws for the Grebo seemed naive at best. Leighton was learning only too well the great distances between the world of Baltimore and the world of Cape Palmas. So Leighton was not surprised when he found that the laws “assailed habits and customs of longstanding.” Moreover, he apparently thought that it was an attempt by the Maryland board to assert its authority over the Grebo. But he read the code to the gathered Grebo and explained the laws to them, he told Latrobe, “just as I found them.” The Grebo listened and gave their assent to the code, which must have seemed exceedingly odd with its modern Western assumptions. But having accepted the code, they promptly ignored it—for accepting and ignoring did not seem odd to a Grebo way of thinking. So the Grebo kept to their traditional ways, and in the evenings around communal fires, Ballah no doubt told about the strange things he had seen in Baltimore as he tried to help his people as they encountered the power and aggression of the “Merica man.”55