By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  At noon, dinner was served in Lowcountry fashion—vegetables from the garden that Leighton had started, rice, some corned beef or ham brought across Atlantic highways in barrels, or perhaps fresh fish or chicken, or occasionally the meat of a sheep or goat or slaughtered bullock. Much of this was familiar to the Wilsons. In the Lowcountry, rice had been a staple of their diets—they had eaten it at breakfast with eggs and topped with a little butter; at dinner, they had enjoyed it as a pilau with shrimp, or as a bog with chicken or steaming with a gravy; and at tea they had eaten it in a cake or pudding, all reflecting an African heritage in a rice-dominated Lowcountry cuisine.2

  Many of the vegetables from Leighton’s garden they had known at Pine Grove or Fair Hope plantation, and James had no doubt known most of them in his New York home. Leighton was proud of his garden, which he worked daily—he later claimed it was the best in Liberia—and it yielded year-round supplies of cabbages, tomatoes, okra, onions, beets, squash, guinea squash (eggplant), cucumbers, melons, corn, peas, sweet potatoes, and beans. With the regular flow of the vegetables into the kitchen, the costs for the boarding school were substantially reduced.3

  An American woman from Harper was employed to cook meals at Fair Hope, and she prepared the food as it might have been prepared by the waters of the Black River or Savannah—a little salt pork with the vegetables, okra to make a thick gumbo, and sweet potatoes baked before a fire. The sight, aroma, and taste of such food no doubt evoked for the Americans deep memories of family and friends, of particular places and scenes of tables spread and meals shared.

  But there were also unfamiliar foods that were beginning to find a place on the dinner table at Fair Hope—tropical fruits and palm oil, leafy green callalou, and, above all, cassava. This starchy, tuberous root had made its way generations earlier across the Atlantic highways from South America to become a staple of West African peoples. The Grebo pounded the root in a mortar and made it into a dough, which they rolled into a ball and dipped into a pungent, peppery soup seasoned with the region’s famous melegueta pepper. A Grebo cook who helped with the preparation of meals for the growing number of schoolchildren brought the traditions of Grebo food preparation to the meals served at Fair Hope and no doubt helped to introduce a West African cuisine to Jane, Leighton, and James. The dinner table thus became not only a time evoking memories of distant homes, but also a time for the Americans to explore the world of the Grebo through their senses of smell and taste. As they bit into and felt in their mouths the textures and flavors of Grebo food, prepared in Grebo fashion, they had a taste of another culture that was for them a strange world. And they experienced as well an intimate encounter with physical elements of a West African environment—the fruits of its fields, gardens, and forests—mediated to them through the art of Grebo cuisine.4

  King Freeman enjoyed joining them for the noontime dinner and was a frequent visitor at Fair Hope. He and his brother William Davis, together with Ballah, would sit at the table, and after Leighton had said a prayer of thanksgiving, they all ate the food placed before them. Some of what was spread on the table was familiar to the three men and to the schoolchildren who ate nearby: rice and okra and eggplant as well as palm oil and cassava. But there were also new items for them to taste and eat—at least items not regularly eaten by the Grebo: hams shipped from New York and Philadelphia, salt fish from Boston, corned beef from Baltimore, tea and coffee, and beets and cabbages and peas and beans distinctive to North America. So the Grebo who ate at Fair Hope were also exploring strange worlds. They were encountering products of a North American environment mediated through the practices and cuisine brought from distant places.

  Freeman had learned shortly after the establishment of Fair Hope that if he wanted to eat at Jane’s dinner table, he had to dress for dinner. This meant that the simple piece of cloth around his waist was not enough, and he had to put on a shirt and pants and sometimes a black coat and his favorite hat. And for all three men, there were questions of table manners. How do you eat at a table furnished in Western style with a knife, fork, and spoon? They were used to eating not at set times but when they were hungry, not at a table but seated on the ground.5

  The eating customs of the Grebo, it was plain for all to see, were not the customs of the settlers. Leighton described what he observed when visiting in Big Town. After the men carefully washed, a Grebo woman put before them a large wooden bowl of rice whose preparation had been carried to what Leighton called “the highest perfection.” She then poured over and mixed into the rice some fragrant palm oil. When all was ready, each man thrust his hand into the mixture, took up some rice, rolled it into a ball, threw back his head, popped the ball into his mouth, and then, with little chewing, swallowed the rice. Sometimes there was meat—beef, mutton, chicken or duck, fish, shellfish, or game of some kind, “from the leopard to the wood-rat.” But the Grebo used meat sparingly, and when they did it was generally served in soups or stews seasoned with pungent, spicy peppers.6

  For Freeman and other Grebo to eat at the table at Fair Hope consequently provided an experience of a distant, powerful culture. When they had first encountered forks, the men had been uncertain about how to use them and had watched carefully to see what strange ritual or practice was involved. When Jane and Leighton, for their part, each picked up a fork in a natural and unconscious manner; held it properly, as they had been taught in Savannah or Pine Grove; and used it to eat cabbage or a slice of ham, they were showing how deeply they identified with a distant culture and an elite class within that culture. And they, together with James, were also showing their Grebo guests a cultural tradition that was fast intruding into Grebo ways.7

  Yet, in spite of all the cultural distinctions that asserted themselves when they sat down together, a bond was being created around the table at Fair Hope. Leighton, Jane, and James were eating with Freeman, Ballah, and Davis—and the simple physical act of breaking bread (or cassava) together, and talking together over food, drew them closer to one another and into a deeper recognition of their shared humanity. Such regular experiences were not unimportant when tension rose at Cape Palmas and when goodwill played its part in settling disputes.8

  For a variety of reasons, however, Governor Russwurm was seldom a part of these shared meals at Fair Hope; nor was he often the host for such meals at the governor’s home. In some ways, the distance between Fair Hope and Harper seemed greater than the distance between Big Town and Fair Hope, and the greater distance seemed to flow, perhaps ironically, from a shared history. Although James and the Wilsons ate together every day, Russwurm—a proud, reserved black governor from New York—and the white missionaries from South Carolina and Georgia did not find it easy to break bread together.

  After dinner, the Wilsons read to one another for an hour, then Jane returned to her class and Leighton wrote, attended to the secular matters of the mission, and worked in the garden. James had his work with the press. At 4:30, Leighton and Jane took a long walk on the beach, where they gathered shells to send home to friends, discussed the events of the day, and listened to the steady thunder of the surf. Tea was at six, and afterward they assembled their students for devotionals and then conversation together.

  Jane now had in the school not only Grebo but also some African American students, whom she was training to be teachers. The missionaries hoped that as the students studied together and learned from one another, the school would become a means of bridging some of the distance between the Grebo and the settlers. So Jane had their American students learning Grebo, and the Grebo students learning English. When they gathered in the evening, the Americans, Leighton wrote, were required to speak a sentence in Grebo, and each of the Grebo students spoke one in English. Every sentence, he noted, “is analyzed and understood by all present. We are by this amused as well as instructed; and I trust that this acquisition will be devoted to the glory of God.” Evening devotions followed, then James went to his lodging, and Leighton and Jane had their quiet time togethe
r on the piazza to enjoy the night wind, to watch the slow dimming of the fires at Big Town, and to talk together beneath the beauty of the African sky.9

  BY THE TIME the settlers from Hutchinson Island arrived at the Cape, several mission schools were flourishing. At Fair Hope, a school building had been erected on the far side of the garden, and day schools had been established at Rock Town and at Graway on the eastern end of Lake Sheppard. At Rock Town, a young African American named William Polk was living and teaching, under arrangements that Leighton had negotiated during several visits to the town. At Graway, where Yellow Will was king, John Banks was the teacher. Yellow Will, a young man of about twenty-five, had already worked on the island of Fernando Po, hundreds of miles southeast of the Cape, where he had been the head of the Africans employed by the English. Like William Davis, Yellow Will was a Grebo who had already encountered the strange ways of Europeans and Americans. Banks, a native of Baltimore, had immigrated as a young boy to Monrovia in 1831. He had come to Harper as Dr. Hall’s house servant and assistant in 1834. When Fair Hope was established, Hall placed him under Leighton’s care to be educated as a teacher. A year and a half later, he and Leighton went to Graway to talk with Yellow Will about starting a school. Yellow Will, welcoming the idea, summoned all hands to work, and in twenty-four hours a comfortable new house for the teacher stood in an enclosed yard. None of those involved could have imagined the impact that a graduate of this little school would one day have on the religious life of West Africa.10

  Unlike later boarding schools among Native Americans and Australian aboriginal people, which were linked to the power of the state, Grebo children were not forcefully removed from their families and placed in schools in the name of assimilation. Rather, Grebo parents, who had been interested from the first in having their children taught by the missionaries, were enthusiastic supporters of the schools, especially when they saw their children learning the mysteries of reading and writing. Soon, parents from surrounding villages and towns began bringing their children to Fair Hope, urging the Wilsons to admit them, but most had to be turned away for lack of room—a disappointing experience for the parents, and difficult reminders to Leighton and Jane of their limited resources.11

  Jane was the heart of the school at Fair Hope, shaping its character and overseeing the details of its daily life. She used the “Lancastrian System,” where the more advanced students helped to teach the less advanced ones—a method that not only provided more individual attention than Jane could have given to each student, but also helped the more advanced students advance even more. It was a system that assumed that the one who teaches learns.

  With the exception of the young settlers who were being trained to be teachers, all of the students at Fair Hope were Grebo. They began their lessons with reading and writing, utilizing a Grebo primer that Leighton had written and James had printed. They were also introduced to English grammar and European history, and they had regular lessons in mathematics, natural science, and astronomy. Geography was popular—they had classroom globes and could find on them Cape Palmas and Maryland and England, see their relationships to each other, and see the continents and the oceans and the great expanse of Africa’s interior. Leighton ordered books from America that Jane wanted to use in class—a dozen of Peter Parley’s popular geography for children and of J. L. Comstock’s Youth’s Book of Astronomy; two dozen copies of Frances Fellows’s Astronomy for Beginners; Miss Mary S. Swift’s Natural Philosophy; Euclid’s Geometry; and after a few years, for more advanced students, Ebenezer Porter’s Rhetorical Reader. They soon had a telescope sent out from Boston so they could look at the craters on the moon, peer at the wonders of an African night sky, and learn that the earth circles the sun. They had a prism to see the colors of the rainbow, and Jane had a bell that announced a regular schedule and the rhythm of a clock. In all of this they were exploring new worlds and being taught new ways of seeing and experiencing the world around them, even as they were having old knowledge and old ways challenged. Once they saw Cape Palmas on a globe, once they learned of the Copernican Revolution, once they studied European history and natural science, their Grebo world was never the same for them. It was not, of course, that the traditions and ways of their people had no more power in their lives—the students were not passive, as if Jane and other teachers were simply pouring Western knowledge and ways into their heads. Rather, they were active interpreters of what they were being taught. Nevertheless, their Grebo world was being transformed by their school experience, even as the Western world they were studying was being interpreted by their experience as members of the Grebo community. They soon found themselves in the awkward position of having one foot in one world and one foot in another, and not being fully at home in either.12

  At first the school at Fair Hope focused almost exclusively on boys—a dormitory had been built for them—but a few girls, such as William Davis’s daughter, Mary Clealand, had also been admitted. The Grebo children under Jane’s care were boarding students, as Leighton and Jane hoped to immerse them in the cultural traditions of Western Christianity. Their religious beliefs, their dispositions, their assumptions—all were to be shaped by the spirit and routines of Fair Hope. To lodge such beliefs and dispositions at the deepest level of their hearts and minds, the students needed to be removed, the missionaries were convinced, from the competing influences of Grebo culture in Big Town and its surrounding hinterlands. By establishing a boarding school at Fair Hope, they were drawing on a familiar strategy of Protestant missions worldwide, for they believed that it was only through such acculturation that a native ministry could be raised up and indigenous churches established. The Grebo parents, of course, were not unaware of what was happening in the school, but for their own varied reasons, many brought their children to Fair Hope and placed them under the care of the young missionary couple.13

  Among the boys, Jane’s most promising student was Wasa Baker. His father, a headman in Big Town, had brought him to Fair Hope as soon as the school was opened. Bright, articulate, with a ready smile and winsome ways, Wasa quickly won Leighton’s and Jane’s admiration and affection. He already spoke a Creole English when he came to the mission as a young teenager, so for a while, when Ballah was in Baltimore, he served as Leighton’s translator. Leighton found him “a most amiable and worthy boy.”14

  As Wasa grew accustomed to the routines at Fair Hope and experienced Jane’s quiet and kind ways, he slowly began to feel that it was his home. He loved to sing hymns, and he listened carefully to the Bible stories being taught and to the messages of Leighton’s sermons on Sundays. As he became more at home at Fair Hope, he found that the mission and its church were becoming a new family for him as he began to develop a sense of identity as a Christian, with new assumptions and values. Still, he kept his Grebo name, Wasa, even as he accepted an English family name, Baker.15

  After Wasa had been at the school for about eighteen months, he went one day to Leighton’s study, taking with him a girl who was completely naked. In his Creole English, Wasa asked, “Misser Wilson, how you like disher gal?” Leighton responded, “Very well,” and asked him what he meant. Wasa explained that her father wished to betroth her to him, and that if the Wilsons would take her, “learn her book and all Merica fash, my heart be very glad for dat palavar; for,” he said, “bymby I be proper Merica man myself, den I no want dese here woman for my wife, cause he no sabby anything but for bring water and wood.” Leighton told him they would take her if her father would request it, but that they “would not recognize any right on his part to control her, and would allow no connection between him and her until she became marriageable according to American usages.” In addition, Wasa must also pledge himself never to have more than one wife. Wasa, eager to be a “proper Merica man,” agreed to it all, as did the girl’s father, and Leighton and Jane took the girl into their school family. They gave her the English name Maria, and she soon joined Mary Clealand and a few other girls at Fair Hope.16

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bsp; Leighton and Jane were coming to the conclusion that they needed to make the education of girls a more formal part of the mission. The boys they were educating to become teachers would eventually need wives who could do more than “bring water and wood,” as Wasa had put it. Young Grebo men who converted to Christianity needed Christian helpmates who would be fully a part of the mission effort. Moreover, the Wilsons came to believe that the education of Grebo girls was an important means of improving the relationship between the settlers and the Grebo. Leighton wrote the board in Boston that he and Jane had become convinced that colonization would be a deep and lasting curse to Africa unless there was a free amalgamation of African Americans and the Grebo. The colonists, he reminded the board, were bitterly prejudiced against the Grebo, and he thought they would remain so until the Grebo were raised, through religion and education, to equality with the African Americans. When settlers found Grebo men and women who were Christians and educated, then their prejudices against them would be mitigated, and the two peoples could begin to live together in peace as one community. He did not say, of course, whether he thought this same process would work with whites and African Americans in Savannah or along the Black River.17

  One of the first things Jane had to do for Maria was provide her with some clothes. During her time at the Cape, Jane had grown accustomed to seeing not only naked children but also nearly naked men and women—and sometimes completely naked adults when they were bathing and swimming. For a Bayard woman raised in Savannah and Philadelphia, the sight of a Grebo man coming naked out of the surf, or of a naked Grebo woman bathing in the ocean, must have been startling at first. To be sure, Jane as a young white woman was at ease being surrounded by the Grebo—their dark complexions and numbers did not seem strange or threatening for one who had spent so much time among the Gullah at Fair Hope plantation and in Savannah. Unlike so many whites, she was not frightened or repulsed by black bodies. But the sheer physical reality of a naked body—with all of its emotional and inevitable sexual power for those who were accustomed to seeing only fully clothed men and women in public—must have been disquieting for Jane. What did she think when she saw these African bodies, these Grebo men and women famous for their handsome physiques? Whatever she thought, both she and Leighton were discovering that naked African bodies, like naked European bodies, came in all sizes and shapes, showed the inevitable marks of time, and exhibited the peculiarities of personal experience. Grebo bodies, no less than Grebo personalities, were varied. At any rate, Jane quickly adopted a kind of practicality about this aspect of Grebo culture and made little note of it. She did, however, have her expectations about dress at Fair Hope—as Freeman had experienced—and she insisted that her younger students always wear, in Grebo fashion, a single piece of cloth around their bodies, while the more advanced students began to adopt some aspects of Western dress.18