By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  For most of the men and women who lived by Boggy Gully, the old settlement had been the only home they had ever known. Year after year, Sharper and Ben, Nelly and Sabrina, Abraham and Matilda—together with husbands and wives, parents and children, cousins and settlement neighbors—had gone out early in the morning from their smoky cabins to plow with mules, to hoe and pick cotton, to wash clothes and cook meals, to sweep and scrub, to butcher hogs and milk cows, and to do all that they were told to do by the white Wilsons. After the work of the day, they had returned to the settlement, to the packed and swept ground before their cabins, where evening after evening they had gathered around communal fires to cook and eat their suppers, to hear old Jacob and others tell their stories, and to say what they could not say before whites. Then, as fires had slowly died, they had gone night after night into dark cabins, where they had stretched out on simple beds and had fallen asleep surrounded by the sounds of Boggy Gully creek flowing toward river swamps where dark waters swirled and emptied into the Black River on its way to the Atlantic and a broader world. Over time, this place, with its sights, sounds, and memories, had insinuated itself into their sense of themselves and of their place in the world. The settlement and their life at Pine Grove had shaped the ways they walked and the ways they told stories and jokes, what they cooked and what they dreamed, how they saw the morning sky and how they imagined what might lie beyond the horizon. But because Boggy Gully had been not only their home, but also a place of exhausting labor and deep oppression, the familiarity of such a home had also evoked resistance and called forth visions of new places—places where a man could keep what he had raised by the sweat of his brow and where a woman could gather eggs, milk a cow, churn butter, and cook for herself and her own family. So when freedom came, some had left to find a new home on some other plantation or in some town or village. They wanted to get as far away from Boggy Gully as possible. They wanted to distance themselves from the Wilsons, those whom they had called master or mistress, and find in a new place some new freedom.

  Among those who left was Jessie, who, along with John, had been freed by Leighton years earlier, and who had known, even as a free person of color, the weight and burden of the place. He headed to the little village of Mayesville, where he lived with his wife, Tisba, and their daughter, Patience, and sought to make a new home and a new life. He did not, of course, find in Mayesville a place free from the racism and oppressions of a defeated white South; nor did he leave behind the dispositions and deep assumptions that had been nurtured in him over his years by Boggy Gully. But the move to Mayesville was nevertheless an act of freedom, an attempt to break some of the constraints he had known and to declare both his ability and his right to make choices within the confines of his world.5

  If some had left the old settlement, others had decided to stay, and some had arrived at Boggy Gully fleeing their own memories of other places, seeking a new place to live and work away from the old authorities who had controlled so much of their lives. So those who stayed and those who were newly arrived lived in the old settlement and worked under contract as hired hands, either around the house or on the remnant of land that had been part of Pine Grove plantation.6

  Among those who stayed was John, who with his wife and children called the Boggy Gully settlement home. No less than Jessie’s decision to leave, John’s decision to stay was a decision he made in freedom within the confines of his world. Yet it was also a decision in deep continuity with his past. Unlike Paul Sansay, who had decided to leave his family in Savannah and go to Cape Palmas and its promised freedom, John had decided twenty-five years earlier to stay with his family at Pine Grove, rather than go north, or to Liberia, as Leighton had urged him. This “liberty of choice” Leighton had called John’s “highest liberty,” the most fundamental freedom John could enjoy. So John now chose to stay in the old settlement, and he kept busy with his carpentry work around the place and on neighboring plantations. As the years passed and his hair grayed, he became known as “Uncle John.” Leighton gave him responsibility for overseeing the place, especially when Leighton was away. And “Uncle John” became for the whites who knew him an example of the good and faithful servant, and he carried as a deep burden of his freedom a powerful image among whites—the black man who stayed in his place.7

  In this way, Pine Grove plantation became for Leighton and Jane “Old Homestead,” as gradually the new name replaced the old. The gangly old house still stood above the settlement cabins as a reminder of old times that were not forgotten. Within its walls and on its piazza Leighton and Jane lived in the presence of earlier times, and they heard voices that still spoke out of deep memories, as the past displayed its vitality and pressed its legacies deep into the present. But Old Homestead was also a reminder of how much had changed. It was no longer the seat of many acres and much cotton and many slaves, but of few acres and a cluster of freed families. So it was from here, from this particular place with its old voices and new circumstances, that Leighton and Jane looked to the future.8

  HANGING OVER OLD Homestead at this intersection of the past and the future was an inescapable and almost unbearable question for many Southern whites: How was it possible that the white South lost the war? White Southerners had thought they were invincible, and yet the Yankees had beaten them. They had believed their cause was just, and yet Union armies had devastated a once rich and prosperous Confederacy. How was it possible to suffer such a crushing defeat in a morally coherent universe? How could such evil come to a people who were so sure they were following God’s way and will? Had God abandoned the Confederacy and all the plantation homes along the Black River, or was God simply asleep and indifferent? Had God acted in infidelity and unrighteousness toward the white South? Or had the South—and the church, in particular—been terribly wrong about slavery? Had a white Southern heart been hardened, like Pharaoh’s toward the Israelite slaves, and had white Southern ears been simply deaf to the cries of black men, women, and children? The Presbytery of South Carolina confessed shortly after the end of the war that “the faith of many a Christian is shaken by the mysterious and unlooked-for course of divine Providence.”9

  These questions, so pressing for so many Southern whites, did not seem to preoccupy Leighton and Jane. Perhaps they had experienced too many sorrows at Fair Hope and Baraka, had seen too many hopes dashed, and had struggled too often with the mysterious providence of the Lord as they had watched one young missionary after another die a painful death. And perhaps they thought themselves somehow innocent, freed from the burden of slavery because they had freed their slaves, had fought the international slave trade, and had in earlier years denounced Southern slavery. But whatever their reasons for not being preoccupied with these questions of slavery and defeat, the questions were in the air they breathed, and the answers given to these questions by white Southerners were to shape Leighton’s and Jane’s world for the rest of their lives.10

  Of all Leighton’s close associates, John Adger responded most vigorously to this crisis of faith. Writing in the Southern Presbyterian Review in early 1866, Adger confessed that God was at work in the victory of Union armies and in the defeat of the Southern nation. The South’s cause was just, Adger declared, but it had nevertheless lost the war. The Yankees had larger armies and much greater material resources, but these were only the instruments of the Almighty. The deeper meaning of the South’s defeat could only be found in the gracious providence of God, who chastened those whom He loved. Because God loved the South, God was disciplining the South for God’s own good and gracious purposes. But Adger warned the North that it should tremble if all the slaughter and destruction “has taught her only pride and self-confidence, censoriousness and severity towards brethren.” He insisted that even if the South’s defeat was the work of God, the South was not ashamed of the war, or penitent for her noble, but unavailing, defense of constitutional liberty. And he refused to acknowledge that white Christians in the South had been wrong in regard to slavery
. “We retain,” Adger wrote, “all of our former opinions respecting slavery,” as he defiantly asserted slavery “was a kindly relation on both sides.” Nevertheless, emancipation had come and was an accomplished fact. Southern Christians, he said, had been preoccupied with the slavery question for decades, and had conscientiously studied its duties and had sought to solve the problem of its future. But “our Northern brethren” claimed “a commission from the Almighty to solve the great problem, and they accordingly have abolished the institution. We cannot dispute their claim, nor are we so disposed.” Now, said Adger, the burden of the emancipated slaves fell upon those who had freed them. The North had assumed a great new responsibility for the Freedpeople. On its part, the white South could pray for the success of the emancipators—if the North worked for what was in the true interest of the former slaves and not some Northern agenda. And, Adger added, white Southerners “still love the negro.”11

  Building on reflections such as these, the little world that Leighton and Jane now inhabited committed itself to a new world not so very different from the old one—except in its bitter defeat and poverty, its growing provincialism, and its haunting awareness that others regarded their Southern Zion as backward and unrepentant. Here, in this new but old world, a familiar creed was adopted and once again asserted—the best way for the North to fulfill its obligations to the black men, women, and children of the South was to leave them in the kindly care of Southern whites. Southern whites, it would be said with little sense of irony, knew and understood Southern blacks much better than distant Yankees did.12

  AS MIGHT BE expected, when Leighton and Jane looked at the desolation that surrounded them, they saw a need for a school, especially one for the daughters of planters. The schools that had previously existed for them had been broken up by the war, and with the poverty that now pervaded the Black River communities, it appeared the girls would be left with only the most meager education. Jane was also restless after her years of domestic life in New York and on a rented farm during war, and she was eager to take up her old vocation again, to teach as she once had taught at Fair Hope on an African cape and at Baraka, where the sounds of Mpongwe life had drifted up from Glass’s Town.

  Jane still owned some property in Georgia—it had belonged to her grandfather General Lachlan McIntosh—and it was not far from General’s Island, where Paul Sansay and other Bayard slaves had once lived and worked among the Gullah people of the area. This land she now sold, and with the proceeds, she and Leighton had a small, neat school built at Old Homestead—not unlike the school that had been built at Fair Hope for Grebo children.13

  The school was associated with Leighton’s name, but it was in fact Jane’s school, built with her money and directed by her. At first there was enough room in the old house for all the girls to live there with Leighton and Jane and Cornelia. But as the reputation of the school grew, rooms were found for more students at neighboring homes—with the family of Leighton’s brother Robert, with brother Sam’s family, with the Andersons and Scotts and Bradleys. Soon there were too many students for Jane to teach by herself, and so teachers were hired, eventually five in all, and girls began to arrive from other states to study under Jane’s direction. One was a recently orphaned child—Alice Johnson—whom Leighton and Jane adopted as their own, and from whom they received much love and affection for the rest of their lives.14

  The curriculum at Old Homestead must have included much that Jane had once taught to Grebo students at Fair Hope and to Mpongwe students at Baraka—perhaps especially geography, to show Lowcountry girls a broader world than what they knew. And no doubt the pedagogy used by the Black River was not so distant from the one Jane had used above the pounding surf at Cape Palmas and by the broad waters of the Gabon estuary.

  Leighton had John build a study in the yard, where Leighton could write his letters, reports, and articles for missions, foreign and domestic, and where he could have his private devotions and get away from the noise of many young voices. But he joined students and teachers for their main meal. They all ate their dinner together at the old house—vegetables from the garden, meat from the smokehouse, eggs from the henhouse, milk and butter and clabber from the milk house—all prepared in the kitchen house by black women who lived by Boggy Gully. And before those boarding in nearby homes left for the evening, Leighton had devotions with them, and often they sang together hymns of the mission movement. Years later, former students remembered Jane and Leighton fondly. They had been, it was said, kind and thoughtful and warmhearted. And it was remembered that Leighton had frequently said that the “great want of the world was grace and common sense.”15

  The daughters of planters were not, however, the only ones who needed an education. Those who lived in the surrounding settlements needed to learn to read and write, and they needed to receive an education that would help to prepare them for the responsibilities of their new freedom. So a night school was opened for the Freedpeople, who came after the labors of the day to learn the mysteries of reading and writing. And Leighton wrote, only a few months after Lee’s surrender, to his local representative, urging that in a new state constitution black men who could read and had a little property be given the right to vote. Nothing, he wrote, “would exert a more salutary influence upon their general character than the prospect and possibility of their being raised to the privilege of the elective franchise.” White South Carolinians, of course, rejected such a proposal. Yankee power and the Fifteenth Amendment were necessary to secure the franchise for black men across the South—a right that even then lasted for only a few years before being crushed by a resurgent white South determined to keep blacks in their place.16

  ALMOST AS SOON as the war ended, Leighton turned his attention to the devastated and struggling churches of the South. Church buildings had been destroyed, congregations had scattered, and many pastors had been left with the most meager resources to maintain themselves in their ministries. As the secretary for domestic missions for the Southern Presbyterian Church, Leighton used his considerable administrative skills to organize the church to respond to the crisis. With the General Assembly’s approval, he established a sustentation fund. Churches with some resources contributed to the fund, and Leighton traveled monthly to Columbia to meet with the committee charged with allocating funds to those churches and pastors most in need. To encourage support of the fund, Leighton began to travel widely—especially to Baltimore, Louisville, St. Louis, and New Orleans, where the devastations of the war had not been as severe, and where there were large and affluent Southern Presbyterian congregations. Through the careful management of the collected funds, churches began to be rebuilt, pastors were sustained in their ministries, and new churches were established. But the work was slow, and the demands were great.17

  Part of the work of domestic missions was to encourage what whites still referred to as “the religious instruction for colored people.” The General Assembly insisted in December 1865 that the abolition of slavery had not altered the relation in which “our Church stands to the colored people nor in any degree lessened the debt of love and service which we owe them.” The assembly insisted that long experience had invariably proved the advantage of blacks and whites worshiping together in one church. There was no reason, the assembly declared, for anything to be otherwise, now that blacks were free and not slaves.18

  Although Leighton began receiving some reports that Freedpeople were leaving churches where they had worshiped with whites, he was at first encouraged by the number who remained. This was perhaps especially true at Mt. Zion and at the Salem Black River Church, where his uncle Robert James had once worked as a pastor among the growing number of slaves who lived nearby. Many of the six hundred blacks who had been members at Salem were still worshiping there with whites in 1866—and at Mt. Zion, not only were many black members continuing to be a part of the congregation, but other Freedpeople had begun to join. But all of this was soon to change. White church leaders were determined to
remain in control, insisting that the congregations were white congregations no matter how many blacks attended. And blacks, seeing that little had changed, were increasingly unwilling to sit in balconies, sing hymns selected by whites, and remain under the authority of white elders. By 1868, most blacks had gone out from the white-controlled churches to establish their own. They generally did not go out one by one, but together as coherent black congregations that had existed for years within the confines of white-controlled congregations. And as they went, they took with them a sense of being a part of these particular black congregations—a church within a church. They had sat together in the balconies, had often worshiped together outside before they went into the white-dominated service, and had their own informal leaders. So they went out together from the white churches and took with them a history and a memory of walking together as a black church during the hard days of slavery.19

  For Leighton, the most distressing departure of Freedpeople was from the Salem congregation, where as a young man he had worked for a season with his uncle Robert James. Leighton was convinced that the Freedpeople had left because they had been enticed away from their old church by Northern Presbyterians with promises of financial support. The black congregation had gone a mile down the road from Salem to establish their new church, which they named “Good Will Presbyterian.” For Leighton, the establishment of this congregation and its call of a pastor supported by the Northern Presbyterian “Committee on Freedmen” was nothing less than an outrageous intrusion into his own home ground, another example of Northern aggression. Northern Presbyterians, it appeared to Leighton, were following Sherman’s army with their own ecclesiastical imperialism.20