For Davis, as a Grebo man, wives represented status and wealth. Like their Kru relatives, Grebo men often spent years working on the ships that traded along the West African coast, and the wages they earned were largely spent to secure wives. To find a wife, however, was not a simple matter, as if a Grebo man could simply go out looking for one. Rather, the securing of a wife involved careful negotiations by the headman of a man’s family (the headman controlled the wages earned on ships by the men in the family) with the headman of a young girl’s family. Leighton found at Big Town that the girl’s family generally received three cows, a goat or a sheep, and a few articles of crockery-ware or brass rods. In this way polygamy as practiced among the Grebo was deeply intertwined with the larger economic and cultural systems of the people. While these systems were in constant flux, to radically change any major part of them—such as the practice of polygamy—threatened the whole way of life of the Grebo. How, for example, would a man’s wealth and status be determined if not by the number of his wives? And what would happen to the role of the headman and his control of a family’s wealth if he no longer had to negotiate for many wives? And what about the women—how would their lives and their work change if a wife were not one wife among several working a man’s garden and fields, preparing his food and raising his children? Davis’s conversion and the question of his four wives was consequently more than a question about the content and character of Christian faith and morals. His wives linked him to the cultural assumptions and intricate social structures of his people. Did he have to give up three of his wives, in the same way that he had to give up his fetishes and his participation in the sassy wood ordeal, in order to become a Christian and a member of the church at Fair Hope?19
Davis and his four wives lived in Big Town in a fenced compound with a small house for each wife and her children. One of the women was his head wife, and all four apparently lived in general harmony with one another, sharing work and looking after each other’s children. Leighton had visited the compound, and while he shared the common Western commitment to monogamy, he could see in the Davis compound that it would be a great injustice to insist that three of the wives and their children be suddenly turned out on their own without a protector. He wrote Rufus Anderson in Boston and asked about the position of the American Board “on men who have more than one wife being admitted to church.” “It is generally agreed that the missionary ought not to dissolve existing connections,” Leighton said. “And if so, are we to deprive of church communion and fellowship a man whose conduct in one particular we could wish to have amended?” Later, he asked Charles Hodge at Princeton the same question, wondering if a convert should be required to give up his wives. This requirement would cause “the disruption of an existing union without the mutual consent of the parties by whom it was formed.” Such a disruption, he added, would also allow the converted man’s children to be scattered out of the reach of parental influence and control.20
Before he received a response from the American Board, Leighton had already made up his mind—Davis should be admitted into the fellowship of the church without having to give up any of his wives, but he could not take a new wife and remain a church member in good standing. The missionary was impressed with how Davis himself was handling the issue. Shortly after his return from the trip to Grabbo, Davis assembled his wives and told them that he intended to live a new life. None of them, however, were to be sent away. He would continue to provide for them and would instruct them in the Christian faith, but they must, he said, “set aside every species of immortality, observe the Sabbath, etc.”21
Davis told Leighton that Freeman and others strongly opposed his becoming a Christian and had done everything they could to stop him except making him go through the sassy wood ordeal. Already there had been ten or twelve conversions, but they had mostly been young people, like Wasa, who had been in the school at Fair Hope. But Davis’s conversion was particularly alarming to the other members of the Grebo community. It must have seemed to them not only an abandonment of ancient ways by a leader, and consequently a threat to the social order of the Grebo—intertwined as it was with powerful religious beliefs and practices—but also a provocation to the world of spirits and ancestors. Who knew what retribution might be visited not only upon Mworeh Mah but also upon the whole Grebo community?22
In spite of such opposition, Davis was baptized in April 1838. Standing before Leighton and the congregation, which included Freeman and other Grebo, Davis watched Leighton dip his hand into a bowl of water and then felt—as generations of Christians before and after have felt—the water poured over his head as he heard the words, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” As a part of the liturgy of baptism, Leighton told Davis that the water represented the cleansing from sin by the blood of Christ, which “takes away all guilt of sin” and signifies a “rising to newness of life” in Christ. Davis was admonished to remember that by his baptism he renounced and was “bound to fight against the devil, the world, and the flesh.” Leighton then gave Davis the right hand of Christian fellowship as he welcomed him into the membership of the church.23
After his baptism, Davis sat with Leighton and Jane, with James and Margaret, with Wasa and his young wife, and with the other church members at the Lord’s Table as the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper was celebrated. A long, thin table was set in the front of the little church at Fair Hope, and Leighton invited the church members to come forward and sit together around the table, like those members at Mt. Zion near the Black River had done when Leighton was a boy at Pine Grove. With Freeman and other Grebo watching, Leighton prayed, read scripture, and gave those at the table bread, a common loaf on a plate, and wine in a single cup. Then those sitting at the table passed to one another the bread and wine, elements confessed to be holy signs and seals of the covenant of grace, a commemoration of Christ’s offering up of himself upon the cross, once and for all. Christ, said Leighton, was the Host at the table, and they were all Christ’s guests.24
A bond was being created among them—no one sitting around the long table was an alien or stranger, but all were bound to one another in the social act of eating and drinking together as the guests of Christ. In this way, Davis, as a new member of a community that reached far beyond the pounding surf at Cape Palmas, received the holy meal in anticipation of a Heavenly Banquet. Only, unlike the congregation at Mt. Zion, in the congregation at Fair Hope there was no separation of white and black members—all sat together around the table as they received from Christ and one another the bread of life and called upon the name of the Lord.25
Soon after his admission to the church, Davis began a night school in Big Town for Grebo men and women who wanted to learn how to read and write in their own language, and thus he began to be a Christian teacher among his own people.26
However, Davis soon began to feel bitter opposition to his conversion—and to his teaching—from the African American settlers in Harper. For an influential Grebo like Davis to become a Christian seemed to many settlers a dangerous step toward Grebo equality with the settlers. “Natives,” they wrote in a petition to the Maryland Colonization Society board, are “beginning to be admitted into church and say they are civilized.” The petitioners expected that “soon there will be application made for citizenship.” They called specific attention to “one W. Davis” who had several wives and as a member of the church was now able to take his oaths in the courts of the colony. “We,” they wrote, “born in a civilized country, instructed by our superiors, yet we have to submit to be brought down with Heathens, their oaths taken with ours what would not be done in America under our masters.” Davis, though he had become a Christian and had been admitted into the fellowship of the church, was still regarded as a heathen because he was a Grebo. Like their masters in America—and like the white members of Mt. Zion—the settlers wanted to be certain that church membership did not mean any social equality or rights of citizenship for those whom
they regarded as their inferiors. The unity confessed at the Lord’s Table was being challenged at Cape Palmas no less than at Mt. Zion.27
For Leighton and Jane, the settlers’ opposition to Davis’s conversion and baptism seemed the strongest possible confirmation of their deep hostility to the mission. The work of the mission was, he thought, demanding enough. Those who worked at Fair Hope did not need antagonistic settlers complaining that “Heathen” were being admitted into the church and might claim equal rights with the colonists. So, in spite of their years of building up Fair Hope and their deep commitments to the Grebo, Leighton and Jane felt they must leave this place—this place where they had known so many sorrows and hopes, where in the evenings they had sat together beneath an African sky listening to the sounds of the surf.
SHORTLY AFTER DAVIS’S admission into the church, Leighton and Jane sailed south on the Emperor with their old friend Captain Lawlin who had brought them out in 1834. They wanted to explore other areas of the West African coast in the hopes of finding a new place and a new start for the mission. As they sailed along the coast, they passed Spanish and Portuguese slavers carrying their stunned, struggling cargoes to the slave markets of Cuba or Brazil. Lawlin was trading for camwood, palm oil, and ivory and knew the coast well from his many trips along its shores. Everywhere they dropped anchor, canoes came rushing out and the deck of the Emperor was quickly covered with men trading their goods for American products. Leighton noted that while whites generally thought the Africans “stupid,” the Africans knew how to drive a clever bargain and turn the tables on the whites. He thought that for every case in which a white trader outsmarted an African, five cases could be found where an African trader outsmarted the captain of an American or European ship. Lawlin, as an experienced trader, knew and trusted some of the chief merchants along the coast, and with some he left considerable goods, to be paid for when he returned. Leighton and Jane were generally impressed with these merchants. One Leighton described as a “square” man about six feet tall with a jet black complexion and a sober and dignified demeanor. He dressed in European clothes and lived in a large house filled with European furniture. Others, especially those hardened by the slave trade, the young missionaries found to be cruel and treacherous—even intrepid Kru and Grebo sailors sought to avoid them.28
At Cape Lahu on the Ivory Coast, the Wilsons found a large population and an inviting opportunity for a mission. But it was Cape Coast and its surrounding region that captured their imaginations the most. Here the coast was lined with old forts where slaves brought from the interior were once held in dark and stinking dungeons before being led out into the light and to a rolling surf and waiting slave ships. Now some of the old forts were crumbling, as if the weight of their history was bearing down on them in revenge. But others—Dixcove, Cape Coast, Elmina, Accra—were now committed to what was called “legitimate trade,” trade that was not involved in the buying and selling of slaves or the supplying of provisions for slave ships.29
At Cape Coast Castle, with its dungeons and bitter memories of slaves waiting for they knew not what, the English governor, George MacLean, gave Leighton and Jane a warm welcome. He urged them to consider establishing a mission in nearby Accra. Already there were British missionaries along the coast, and the Americans could work in cooperation with them. The governor told them of the Ashanti and Dahomey kingdoms, of their wealth and military prowess and also of their cruelty—a number of slaves, he said, in a nearby town had recently been buried alive following an eclipse of the sun.30
With such reports ringing in their ears, the missionaries went back aboard the Emperor, and in eight days of clear sailing far out to sea, they were back at Cape Palmas and Fair Hope. Their visit had been too brief to make any decision about an alternative to Fair Hope, but Leighton sent his journal to Anderson and urged that missionaries be sent to take advantage of the opportunities he and Jane had seen all along the coast.31
IRONICALLY, THE QUEST for a new location came at a time when the mission at Fair Hope was prospering. The little congregation was slowly growing as more students began to join and an occasional adult like William Davis was converted. The press, with its two Grebo printers, was humming under B. V. R. James’s direction. A school at Rock Town was doing well, as were two in the interior with young Grebo teachers. At Sarekeh, a town about twelve miles from the Cape, Wasa Baker and his wife, Maria, had recently established a school. Maria, whom Wasa had brought naked to Leighton three years earlier, had finished her studies with Jane and had become a Christian, and she and Wasa had been married by Leighton. In addition to their school for the children at Sarekeh, Wasa and Maria opened their home morning and evening for prayer and scripture reading. Growing crowds joined them as they heard the young couple sitting at their door singing hymns. The people loved the singing and also the Bible stories they heard—the story of the Old Testament patriarch Joseph was a great favorite, perhaps because he had once been a slave in Egypt and had, by interpreting the Pharaoh’s dreams, been set over all the land of Egypt—and so the biblical stories began to be a part of the storytelling tradition in the village. In this way, and with a number of night schools in Big Town, the work of the mission at Fair Hope was expanding.32
The mission was expanding in other ways as well. From the beginning of their time at Fair Hope, Leighton and Jane had been pleading for more missionaries. The arrival and then the tragic deaths of David and Helen White had been a heavy blow to the mission, but in early 1839 word arrived that Dr. and Mrs. Alex Wilson were being sent to the Fair Hope mission. Leighton and Jane were elated. Dr. Wilson, who was from South Carolina, was no relation to the Wilsons of Pine Grove, but he and Leighton’s father were close friends. He had already spent some years as a missionary doctor in South Africa and had finally left because of the wars between the white settlers and the native peoples. He and his new wife (his first wife had died of fever in South Africa) began a mission at Fish Town, a large and prosperous town beautifully located about twenty miles north of the Cape. He liked the Grebo and soon found them to be largely a peaceful people. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “there is no heathen nation less blood thirsty than the Grebo. They are palaverous and noisy enough, but they shirk from the shedding of blood. They have wars it is true, but sometimes they continue from 5 to 10 years, and there will not be 20 lives lost.” He noted that they used guns, but not very effectively, and he compared them to the “brave Zulu who assegai in hand, rushes down on his adversary; and fights hand to hand, until the death of one party puts an end to the combat.”33
The arrival of these new missionaries was a great encouragement to Leighton and Jane. Although the doctor and his wife lived some distance from Fair Hope, there were regular opportunities for them to visit the Cape and for Leighton and Jane to enjoy their company. They called him Dr. Wilson, and his young wife they called Mrs. Dr. Wilson. The Dr. Wilsons also became friends with James, Margaret, and Catherine and, like most others, they quickly grew to admire James and his work as a printer and teacher. At mealtimes at Fair Hope, they were frequently joined by William Davis, Freeman, and Ballah. While Fish Town was well beyond the bounds of any colonial claims to authority, the Dr. Wilsons must have heard of the Grebo and missionary concerns about the settlers, who seemed to want more and more land. The doctor had watched the Boers in South Africa intrude on the lands of indigenous people, and he had arrived with little sympathy for settlers of any complexion. So it was not surprising that he soon joined Leighton in warning the American Board about the colony and about Russwurm’s attitude toward the mission.34
WHILE THE MISSION was thus prospering in a variety of ways, Leighton was also encouraged by what he perceived to be important changes among the Grebo. In December 1839, an extended palaver debated the continued use of the sassy wood ordeal. Encouraged by Freeman and Davis, the Big Town Grebo decided to abolish the ordeal. In celebration of the decision, Leighton prepared a great feast, inviting Freeman and all of the leading men of Big Town. The meal, L
eighton thought, was a way of confirming the decision and sealing it for the future. He wrote Anderson that the ordeal had been one of atrocious cruelty. Although its chief victims had been the elderly, all the people had begun to realize that it was an extremely cruel and oppressive practice, a practice from which no one had been exempt. But Leighton had been at the Cape long enough to know that deeply held practices were not easily discarded. He consequently wrote Anderson that he wanted to be guarded and not encourage exaggerated expectations. Still, he thought the decision indicated a “desire on the part of the people to extricate themselves from the cruelties of heathenism.” He was wise to be guarded.35
A number of the younger men were in fact resistant to the decision and insisted that the ordeal was the only way to discover and punish those who caused harm. Not long after the palaver, a great thunderstorm swept across the Cape and lightning struck a house in Big Town, killing three young boys. Some said it was because of the abandonment of the ordeal; others said it was the work of a witch. Messengers were sent to an oracle at Grand Sesters north of the Cape. The oracle, located at a large and imposing tree, apparently sent word back that the ordeal must be continued.36
A month after the palaver, a woman was accused of witchcraft in the death of her stepson, and the ordeal was demanded. Her accusers sought to keep Leighton ignorant of what was happening, but someone—most likely William Davis—told him. Leighton went early in the morning to Freeman and had a palaver called with the headmen. He insisted that they release her, saying the ordeal had been abolished and its end sealed with a feast. But his arguments were to no avail. After various evasions, Freeman finally told Leighton to go back to Fair Hope and not to interfere. The woman, he said, had already been taken to the woods and given the red water concoction. It was a bitter and distressing moment for the missionary.37
By the Rivers of Water Page 26
