A FEW MONTHS after Ballah’s return from his American adventure, Leighton asked him to go with him to visit a village in the interior. Teddah, a Grebo king from a village about thirty miles from Big Town, had come with some of his headmen to see the white couple at Fair Hope. They had never seen whites before and were eager to see Leighton and Jane with their own eyes and to see as well the buildings at Fair Hope. Leighton gave Teddah a calico gown, which delighted the king, and he asked Leighton to come visit his Bolobo people, who spoke a Grebo dialect.56
Leighton and Ballah set out in late October 1836 with four other men from Big Town. During the first part of the day, they followed the trail that Leighton had traveled the previous June with William Davis on their way to Neh’s Town. Only the fields that then had spread out before them lush with rice were now overgrown with grass and weeds—so rapid was the growth of vegetation in a tropical climate. This startling change, Leighton noted, provided hints of the massive amount of labor required to clear the fields and raise the rice.
The group soon left the familiar trail and turned in a more northerly direction, passing through small villages as they entered a country marked by high hills, from whose summits they could see the distant, beckoning Kong Mountains covered with clouds. Late in the afternoon, they approached Teddah’s town. Word of their presence raced before them and they were greeted by laughing, shouting children some distance from the town. As they drew near, they found the whole population waiting in an uproar. The group of travelers was, wrote Leighton, quickly “walled around by a solid mass of naked human beings” who led them to the center of the town. Only a few had seen a white man before, and Leighton’s appearance caused a sensation. They urged him to take off his hat, and when he did so and they saw his straight hair, they gave out a loud shout, and he had difficulty keeping hands off his head. Fatigued from their long hike, the visitors were grateful when a chicken was supplied for their supper. They were given quarters with Teddah and his family.57
In the morning, they were awakened by a woman singing at their door and then the discharge of guns. They went out of the house and were greeted by the headmen, whom Teddah had summoned. A man led a bullock to them, and Leighton was asked if he wished it killed. He said yes, and immediately the man stepped forward and with a powerful slash of his knife cut the animal’s throat. A bowl of steaming blood was brought to Leighton but he turned away, unable to show his gratitude for such hospitality. Ballah took over and ordered the bullock butchered with one portion for the visitors, one for Teddah’s family, one for the headmen, and one for the rest of the people. Everyone seemed to think this was a good and wise distribution.
Later in the day, at Leighton’s request, Teddah had the people assemble for a “God palaver.” Leighton was determined to say at least something about the Christian gospel, but he trembled when he found himself, “a minister of the living God, surrounded by five hundred human beings, not one of whom had ever heard of the name of Jesus or the glad tidings of salvation.” What was he to say to these people, whom he imagined saying to him: “What does the Lord have to do with us?”58
Leighton spoke to Ballah in Pidgin English, in the cadences Leighton had known since his childhood by Boggy Gully, and Ballah interpreted what he said and translated it into Grebo. Leighton told the people that what he had to say could make “he heart be glad plenty.” Who, he asked, “make all dis man, dem bush, dem tree, dem riber; who make de sky, de sun, de moon, and all dem pretty star? He be God and he be he word I come you country for peak.” Leighton then said: “First time no one man lib to dis world. Den God he make one man and one woman. Dat man and dat woman go hab pickerninny and dem pickerninny go hab more, bomby de world come up full people. Some go one country for lib, some go turer way.” God then saw that all, in whatever country, had a “bad heart . . . dey no lub me, dey no do what thing I tell dem for do, all time dey go fight war.” God wondered what to do and decided, because all had “done spile dat world I make for dem,” God would send them to hell—“one bad place.” Then Jesus said “to he father let me go down der to dat world. I go make he heart good. I go show him how for do all time; so bomby de world come up good again.”59
Leighton was uneasy with what he had told the people—it was so simple, so limited, and so much of the gospel was missing—and he wondered about how Ballah was both interpreting and translating what he said. But Leighton felt he had to start somewhere, and he was gratified when the old men of the town asked him to stay longer and to tell them more. His sermon was an introduction for them of a strange story from a white man, but it was also part of an introduction for Leighton. Where was he to start when he sought to tell the Christian story to those who knew nothing about it? What assumptions could he make about what might interest them, and what connections could he make to their world that might provide a bridge of understanding?60
That night the people gave Leighton a sermon, in a very different form, about their world and their understanding of it. The rice harvest had been completed and it was time to dance. The drums began to beat and then a leader appeared. He ran, wrote Leighton, like a “wild horse” around the open space in the center of the town and was soon joined by forty or fifty men. They circled the space in a single line until the music quickened, and then every man seemed to try to outperform all the others by running, leaping, squatting, and jumping, always moving his whole body in rhythm with the music, each man’s face reflecting first fear, and then contempt, and then the next moment laughter or anger. Only the men danced that night, except, noted Leighton, for “some old withered women” who, roused by the recollections of former days, rushed out to join the leaping men.61
The dancing seemed wild and chaotic to Leighton. Like the Grebo music that accompanied it, the dancing must have had a structure and a story to tell about the nature of the Grebo world, its social relations, and its deep assumptions about human life. But whatever that structure and story were, they remained hidden to Leighton, as strange to him as his sermon must have been to the Grebo. He found the whole performance amusing, but then thought of the dances he had seen in Charleston and Savannah. He wrote home: “Perhaps, however, if one of these children of nature were allowed to step into one of your own ‘refined dances,’ he would think his own equally as rational at least.”62
The next day, Leighton discovered two men from a neighboring village who had a slave with them. The wretched man had been visiting in their village when, they told Leighton, they had learned that an order for a slave had arrived. They had waited until he was asleep, they said, and then “fell upon him in the night, bound him, and hurried away.” Leighton rebuked them and said what they had done was wrong, but they replied that no white man had ever told them such a thing before. They wondered, “If we do not sell slaves how will we get cloth, musket power, etc.” Ballah, who was translating, could not contain himself with this and leaped into the conversation, asking with feeling, “How do I get clothes and muskets and powder and everything I want!”63
What troubled Leighton the most, however, beyond the treachery of the men, was the influence of whites even in such distant villages. The influence of whites in Africa, he wrote in his journal, came mostly from the slave traders, whose footsteps were “to be traced in wars, in bloodshed, by tears, in tumults, in distress, in misery and by everything that can degrade and render savage the heart of man.” So with such thoughts about the deceit and corruption of the human heart and the degrading role of whites in the bitter history of Africa, Leighton turned with his companions toward the coast and hurried back to Fair Hope and Big Town.64
BY THE LATE summer of 1836, Leighton and Jane were beginning to think of Fair Hope as home. In the evening, when the work of the day was done and their prayers said, they sat together on their piazza listening to the sounds of the African surf and enjoying the windborne feel of the sea. They watched the nighttime fires at Big Town slowly dim and heard in the distance the Grebo bringing an end to their day. Then, beneath the stars and t
he vast canopy of an African night, they retired to say their personal prayers and to put their heads down at a place they were coming to think of as their place—Fair Hope, this spot of earth jutting out into the rolling surf of the Atlantic on an African cape. This landscape where palms stirred in the night wind, this place with its surrounding towns and villages, its fetishes, rice fields, and funerals, was slowly beginning to shape how they saw the world and what they heard in the world and how they responded as sentient beings to a world as seen, heard, and experienced among the Grebo of West Africa. Perhaps nowhere was the newness and strangeness of this place more apparent than in their discovery of the complex humanity of the people they were encountering here—Freeman and Simleh Ballah, William Davis and little Mary Clealand, Neh and his wife, Baphro and Teddah, and all the others who, in one way or another, had touched Leighton and Jane, and who in turn were being touched by them.65
Yet always, even as Leighton and Jane worked and slept beneath an African sky, there rumbled far down in their memories another Fair Hope in distant Georgia and a boyhood home at Pine Grove by the flowing waters of the Black River. These old home places held their own mysteries as they lingered in the recesses of their imaginations to shape and interpret what they saw, heard, and experienced. Everywhere they went in Africa, and everything they encountered that might challenge old assumptions and values, was being met, and would continue to be met, with the active tenacity of these unforgotten old homes and of former times. So Leighton and Jane knew the struggle between the old and the new, between the shaping dispositions of childhood and youth and a new world they were encountering when they saw a sassy wood ordeal or the richness and verdure of a vast Grebo rice field. No less than Simleh Ballah and William Davis, they were trying to find their way between two worlds, even as they believed that under the providence of God their world was the world of the future.
Not far from Fair Hope, in Harper, Charles Snetter and Anthony Wood and the other settlers also put their heads down at night beneath the stars and the vast canopy of an African night. They, too, were trying to create a new place, a new home—Maryland in Liberia—perched on an African cape jutting out into the Atlantic. How they saw the rolling Atlantic and how they interpreted the Grebo landscape was also being shaped by their daily experiences in this new space they were coming to call home. Yet they remembered, no less than Leighton and Jane, distant homes on another Atlantic coast and specific places where slaves labored and slaves were sold and where slave sorrows reaped rich rewards for whites. Their past, with all of its pain and hard struggles and surprising attachments, had not been left in Charleston or Baltimore or some slave settlement, but had crossed the Atlantic with them to live at Harper, and to live far down in their hopes and dreams and dispositions. So their deep memories and their African experiences mingled together, and out of the mingling there had begun to emerge a settler culture and the sometimes conflicted ways in which settlers interpreted life at Fair Hope and among the Grebo.
In Big Town, the Grebo also watched the evening come. Freeman and Davis and Ballah and all the others—they, too, inevitably heard the sound of the surf and felt the night wind gather and saw the stars of an African night appear one by one. As they sat around their fires, they knew that in Harper the settlers were preparing for the night, and they could see the oil lamps at Fair Hope begin to glow in the distance as the sun set over the Atlantic. They saw and heard and felt all of this not as those seeking a new home, but as those who had known this place from birth, and who felt around them the presence of ancestors who had inhabited and still did inhabit the land. Yet Freeman and Davis and Ballah and all the others must also have known, to varying degrees, that Harper and Fair Hope were now a part of the landscape at Cape Palmas, and that the world that they had known before Dr. Hall arrived with the first settlers was changing, and that some new day, not yet seen, was to follow.
1. First African Baptist Church. Organized in 1788, First African was the most influential African American church in Savannah in the nineteenth century. During Andrew Marshall’s long ministry (1826–1856) over four thousand African Americans joined the church. Jane Bayard was teaching Sunday School here when Leighton Wilson first met her. From Edgar G. Thomas, The First African Baptist Church of North America. Courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society.
2. Slave Settlement, Richmond-on-Ogeechee Plantation, outside of Savannah. The plantation was the home of Jane Bayard Wilson’s friend Eliza Clay. The free woman of color Margaret Strobel spent time here when she was preparing to be a teacher at Cape Palmas. Pencil drawing by Edward W. Wells, May 1838. Courtesy of Carolyn Clay Swiggart.
3. Salem Black River Presbyterian Church. Founded in 1759 by Scottish families who had moved up the Black River from an earlier settlement at Williamsburg, South Carolina. Beginning around 1800, it became a congregation of increasingly wealthy cotton planters. In 1860 it had 100 white members and 610 African American slave members. Leighton Wilson spent time here visiting nearby slave settlements with his uncle the Reverend Robert James. Painting by Elizabeth White. Author’s collection.
4. Mt. Zion Presbyterian Church. Founded in 1809 by Scottish families that had moved further up the Black River beyond the area around the Salem congregation. Like Salem, it became in the early decades of the nineteenth century a congregation of increasingly wealthy cotton planters. Leighton Wilson’s Christian faith and commitments were first nurtured here. In 1860 the congregation had 77 white members and 120 African American slave members. Author’s collection.
5. Slave Barracoon by the Gallinas River in Sierra Leone. Leighton Wilson visited in the area on several occasions and regularly saw slave ships of Pedro Blanco that operated out of the Gallinas. Wilson encountered a similar barracoon on his arrival in Gabon. The Illustrated London News. AP4 .I5. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
6. Enslaved Africans in Hold of Slave Ship Bound for Brazil. Most of the slaves the Wilsons and other missionaries saw being shipped from Gabon in the 1840s were being carried to Brazil. Johann Moritz Rugendas, Voyage Pittoresque dans le Bresil. Traduit de l’Allemand (Paris, 1835). Viagem pitoresca altraves do Brasil. F2513 .R925 1972. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
7. Slave Auction, Charleston, SC. Slaves in the older seaboard areas of the US were sold and carried in massive numbers to an expanding Cotton Kingdom in the west. Leighton Wilson would have seen such auctions during his stay in Charleston in 1830. The Illustrated London News. AP4 .I5. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
8. Fair Hope Mission Station, Cape Palmas, Liberia. This drawing reflects the village-like character of Fair Hope by 1841. Drawn in Boston by S. E. Brown, it does not show the beach as described in many of the Wilson letters. The Missionary Herald, 1841, p. 352.
9. Kroo Town. The Grebo were often identified simply as Kru or Kroo. Houses in Big Town at Cape Palmas would have looked much like this, although the town was much larger and the houses more compactly placed. Compare the houses in the drawing of the Fair Hope Mission Station and the mortar in photograph B. Drawing perhaps by a Dr. McDowell. Drawings of Western Africa. MSS 14357. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
10. Toko. A much admired and sophisticated merchant who welcomed the Protestant mission to the Gabon estuary in 1842. He led in the 1840s the Mpongwe opposition to French control of the estuary. Leighton and Jane Wilson regarded him as their best friend among the Mpongwe, although he never converted to Christianity. Drawn by a Dr. McDowell and found as front piece in John Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856).
11. Yanaway. Most likely she was a daughter of King Glass in Gabon. Leighton Wilson thought that both Mpongwe men and women “display great taste in braiding their hair.” He was particularly impressed by the skill women “display in selecting a given style for any particular face.” Drawn by a Dr. McDowell and in John Leighton Wilson, Western Af
rica: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856).
12. Kroo (or Kru) were frequently sailors on European and American ships and were often in the Gabon estuary. The village in the drawing shows the typical arrangement of a Mpongwe village. The “slave cutter” reflects descriptions of Toko’s Waterwitch, which he sold to Portuguese slavers. Leighton Wilson utilized the small cabin on the Waterwitch on his trip with Toko up the Como River. Drawings of Western Africa. MSS 14357. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
13. This medicine dance is from Corisco Island close-by the Gabon estuary. The drawing reflects the description in William Walker’s diary of when a Mpongwe had a “devil in his belly.” Drawing perhaps by a Dr. McDowell who drew many sketches while traveling along the West African coast with Captain Richard Lawlin and Leighton Wilson. Drawings of Western Africa. MSS 14357. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
14. The drawing shows a condemned witch being buried alive. His guilt was most likely established by the sassy wood or “red water” ordeal. Note in the foreground the two containers which may have held the red water. The man on the left appears to be a European or American observer, perhaps Dr. McDowell. Drawings of Western Africa. MSS 14357. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
15. A scene similar to this followed King Glass’s death. A woman, most likely the head wife, stretches out beside the body. Women sit around in lamentation. Drawings of Western Africa. MSS 14357. Special Collections, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA.
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