By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  B. V. R. James had died a few years earlier at his home in Monrovia. Their old friend had not only been an outstanding teacher and leader of the mission in Liberia, but had also been called to fill high stations of trust in the government, and had been greatly respected by all classes of people. His highest honor, said his obituary, “was that of being an exemplary follower of Christ and a devoted laborer in his service.”9

  Margaret and Catherine were still in Monrovia, far from Savannah and the world they had once known. During the years following James’s death, they had been watching as growing numbers of immigrants arrived in Liberia. The old dream of an African Motherland was once again stirring the imagination of some African Americans as they faced the violence of the Klan and the collapse of hopes released by emancipation. Liberia now seemed to be a welcoming place for African Americans, beckoning weary blacks who yearned to be free of US racism. They looked to the young Liberian republic for their deliverance, seeing it as a promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land of new opportunities.10

  A friend and missionary colleague of the James family—the brilliant West Indian Edward Wilmot Blyden—was encouraging this renewed interest in colonization, insisting that African Americans and West Indian blacks were to be the means of civilizing Africans. Leighton, while working at the Presbyterian Foreign Mission Board in New York, had been instrumental in sending Blyden to Liberia as a Presbyterian missionary, and Blyden’s younger brother had stayed with Leighton and Jane before going out to Liberia, so the Wilsons had a personal interest in Blyden and his work. In 1876, Blyden was teaching at James’s old school and was writing influential essays, which in time would be regarded as foundational for African nationalism and a “Pan-Africanism” envisioning the unity of the continent and its scattered children. Africans and blacks of the African diaspora all shared, Blyden wrote, a distinct African culture that drew them together as an authentic people.11

  As in the past, many whites were supporting this “Back to Africa” movement. They pointed to a growing body of “scientific evidence” that encouraged the belief that there was no place in the United States for people of African descent. No one was a more fervent cheerleader for these developments than Benjamin Latrobe, the former leader of the Maryland Colonization Society, who had come to regard Leighton in the late 1830s as a troublemaking missionary at Cape Palmas.

  The year Leighton and Jane moved to Baltimore, Latrobe was invited by King Leopold of Belgium to a conference in Brussels in preparation for what was touted to be a colonization project in the Congo. Latrobe was unable to attend the conference—and of course he did not know that Leopold would soon begin a brutal exploitation of the Congo—but Latrobe wrote the Belgium ambassador of his own enthusiastic support for the king’s project and of his own deep commitment to the colonization of African Americans in Africa. He wrote that, as head of the Maryland Colonization Society, he had superintended vessel after vessel embarking for Cape Palmas believing that “the day would come when two races that will not intermarry must separate, if both are free,” and he proudly noted that he had worked for colonization, seeing it as a refuge for the “weaker race.” He regarded Liberia as an entry point for the continent, and its colonists as the agents for the civilizing mission that the king claimed he envisioned for the Congo. For Latrobe, if a great emigration of the weaker black race took place, “so as to give America a homogenous white population, Liberia will have fulfilled a grand destiny as the noblest missionary enterprise that the world has ever known.”12

  So when Leighton and Jane arrived in Baltimore, they found that the old claims for colonization that they had so vigorously opposed were being strongly advocated in a postemancipation America. Now, colonization was being promoted as a way to remove the very men, women, and children who had been freed by the war. For many whites, North and South, Freedpeople were an alien element on the home ground of whites—the United States of America. Even Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, had entered into secret negotiations with the British—after he had issued the Emancipation Proclamation—to secure a place in the Caribbean for the colonization of the Freedpeople. In this way the new immigrants to Liberia represented not only their own efforts to escape the deep racism of American society by returning to an African Motherland, but also the encouragement and support of that same racism.13

  For many of the indigenous people of Liberia, however, the colonists did not seem like returning brothers and sisters. For the Mande and the Gola, the Kru and the Grebo, and other indigenous peoples, the colonists were outsiders—outsiders who were advancing a settler intrusion into their home ground. The year before Latrobe wrote his glowing letter to the Belgium ambassador, the Grebo at Cape Palmas and the surrounding countryside had risen in protest of settler expansion and authority. Having acquired Western arms and military strategies, the Grebo had quickly defeated an army of the Liberian republic and had threatened to overrun and destroy Harper. They had found that in order to defend themselves from the power of the Western world represented by the African American colonists, they had to utilize the material resources and military strategies of the West. They showed in other ways as well that Grebo culture was itself in the midst of great changes—changes brought about by their contact with settlers and missionaries from the United States. They had consulted a traditional oracle before the war and had made one of their leaders drink the sassy wood “red water” concoction to prove he had not collaborated with the settlers. Yet, as the Liberian Army had retreated, the Grebo had begun to sing Christian hymns—perhaps some first translated into Grebo and published by Leighton—and had chanted the Gloria in Excelsis. Many young Grebo educated by the Episcopal mission had become Christians, and Grebo Christians, such as William Davis, and Wasa and Maria Baker, had established mission outposts in the interior. So even as the Grebo sought to defend themselves from outside intrusions, and even as they continued to remember and practice many of the ways of their ancestors, they were transforming themselves by their engagement with and appropriation of Western ways and Christian faith.14

  Once again, the arrival of the US Navy with its huge naval guns—a vivid reminder of Western power—was necessary to bring peace between the settlers at Cape Palmas and the Grebo. A US Navy captain came ashore and called the Grebo leaders together and asked them if they wanted peace or war. He showed them the USS Alaska, a well-armed sloop-of-war, anchored not far from Russwurm Island—the Grebo’s island of the dead. The captain said that there were many more ships with such guns, and that they, too, could come to Cape Palmas. He said that the Grebo had been paid more for their land than the American Indians had been paid for theirs, and that if the Grebo did not acknowledge the right of the settlers to the land, he would proceed to destroy their towns. The Grebo could see the Alaska, and they heard the captain’s words, and they said they wanted peace. And so they surrendered more land and agreed to come under the authority of the Liberian government. But the war of 1875 would not be the last war between the Grebo and the Americo-Liberians as they struggled over what each considered their own home ground.15

  LEIGHTON HAD LONG believed that newspapers were critical for the success of the mission movement. So shortly after the end of the Civil War, he established The Missionary as a means of encouraging Southern Presbyterians to support missions. In addition to publishing letters and reports from the church’s missionaries, he published reports from other missionary agencies in order to provide a picture of Christian expansion to the “far corners of the world.” And of all the reports he published, none were more extensive or of more interest to Leighton than the reports from Baraka.16

  William Walker was still at Baraka when Leighton began publishing The Missionary in 1866. Walker’s third wife, Kate Hardcastle, had survived the fevers, and the couple had had a happy life together. He had continued his work translating the Bible into Mpongwe and supervising the boys’ school, while Kate had taken up Jane’s old work of teaching in the girls’ school. Walker had made
several important exploratory trips—especially an early trip far up the Ogowe River south of the estuary—and he had continued to make notes in his journal and write missionary narratives about the life and practices of the Gabonese people he encountered. Most surprising to Leighton, however, were the published letters of Albert Bushnell. When Bushnell had experienced “the extreme derangement” of his nerves after the French bombardment of Baraka in 1845, Leighton had thought that Bushnell would never survive as a missionary. But thirty years later he was still at work preaching, translating, and teaching.17

  The reports coming from Baraka told of the continuing consolidation and extension of French control around the estuary and of the arrival of the Fang as they pushed steadily toward the coast from the interior. All the kings whom Leighton had known had died except for King William on the south shore. A strong supporter of the French and their cultural influence, he had nevertheless kept to the traditions of the Mpongwe. When his chief wife died in 1865, he had had two slave women buried alive with her, as one of the women struggled for her own life. Two years later, when the king discovered that a slave had made a fetish against him, he had had the man chained to a log, where driver ants began to devour him. The French admiral who was visiting the king saw the man and, after hearing him confess, ordered that he be shot. Walker, on being told the story by the admiral, had been completely disgusted. Such confessions could not be trusted, he insisted, especially when the translator was the king’s son. “There is nothing,” Walker wrote, “that so confirms these people in their superstitions and cruelties as the Solmonic judgments. The Admiral’s bowels of compassion yearned over the poor victim, and he took a short method of relieving him. This is French civilization.” As for the cruel treatment of slaves by the Mpongwe, Walker thought, “Slave holding is the same over all the earth.”18

  For years the French had done little to interfere with the domestic slavery of the Mpongwe, but by the 1870s they were trying to end the killing of slaves by masters. In 1875, the French banned capital punishment of slaves, and the Mpongwe system of slavery began to crumble. As Mpongwe men began to lose control over their slaves and former slaves, they began to try to control them through a series of brutal murders. Slave men and women were found beheaded, their bodies split open, their internal organs removed, and their corpses mutilated with what appeared to be the claw marks of leopards. Men, it was said, were turning themselves into leopards, and these leopard men were spreading their terror throughout Mpongwe society, especially among slaves. Although there were disagreements among the French authorities and missionaries about the perpetrators and their purposes, the secret societies of the leopard men and their bloody rituals functioned to intimidate slaves and the newly freed and to support the weakening authority and wealth of Mpongwe men. If Walker knew of the brutal activities of the Klan in the United States, perhaps he would have also written that the struggle of masters to intimidate slaves and former slaves was “the same over all the earth.”19

  The missionaries at Baraka were distressed by the decline of the Mpongwe and their lack of strong leadership. No less than the Mpongwe, the missionaries missed Toko—his humor, friendship, and wisdom. “The successors of Toko have become very small,” Walker noted as he looked at Mpongwe leaders in the 1860s. Nevertheless, new leaders were emerging, but none of them were more important to the mission than Toko’s son, Ntâkâ Truman. He had repented of the 1857 murder of his slave Awĕmĕ—in fact, when Walker had told him he would be haunted by Awĕmĕ and would meet him before the judgment seat of God, Truman had been badly shaken. Turning to Christ for forgiveness, Truman had confessed that Christ was his only savior from his sins. In 1863, after more than a year of observation by the church at Baraka, he had been baptized.20

  Truman’s conversion—his passage from being a Mpongwe to being a Mpongwe Christian—had been, however, a long time coming. Toko had sent him to the school at Baraka when he was a young boy, and he had spent eleven years there under the tutelage first of Jane and Leighton and then of the other missionaries and teachers. He had followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a trader, but after his conversion he began to study theology and church history with Walker. In 1870 he was ordained as the first Mpongwe Protestant pastor. His wife, Emma, was also a graduate of the school at Baraka, and she, too, was a Christian. They settled at a mission station at the upper end of the estuary, where they worked among the Bakèlè and the Fang. But just as his father, Toko, had had to face the imperialism of the French, Truman had to face a growing paternalism among the missionaries. He was not treated as an equal partner in the mission, and his salary was never the equivalent of what the white missionaries received. He protested vigorously and wrote the Mission Board in the United States. When he didn’t receive a prompt reply, he wrote again, saying, “If I was a white man, you would answer my letters.” What Truman was experiencing was the weakening in the mission movement of an earlier hope that indigenous people would quickly assume leadership of newly established Christian churches. Some missionaries and mission boards were beginning to view Western imperialism as an asset for the mission movement, believing that a continuing paternalism in mission stations was but a part of the “white man’s burden.”21

  Still, Truman persisted in his work, and in 1878, and again in 1883, he spent time in the United States to help with the publication of a Mpongwe Bible. He and Emma spent years among the Fang, whose language they had mastered, as the Fang continued their expansion around the estuary. In this way Toko’s son and daughter-in-law struggled against the growing paternalism of the white missionaries. Truman continued to write letters to the Mission Board in New York saying he was not being treated fairly; he insisted that as an ordained minister he had an equal voice with the missionaries in the life of the church, and he refused to follow instructions from white missionaries about what he should wear and how he should spend his salary. In all of this, he helped to lay the foundation for what became the Église évangélique du Gabon.22

  The children of Josiah and Mary Clealand Dorsey also played an important role in the establishment of the church in Gabon. Josiah, who had been born a slave in Maryland, and who had taught at Cape Palmas and then at various places around the estuary, had died in 1860. He and Mary had had three children. Their son, William Leighton Dorsey, had become a Roman Catholic and was the first Mpongwe to study for the priesthood. He died in Senegal in 1869 before being ordained. One daughter, Sarah, married the Mpongwe pastor at Baraka, Owondo Lewis, and became affectionately known as Ma Sarah—or Masera—as a teacher in the girls’ school and a leader in the church at Baraka. Another daughter, Celia, married an African American from New England—a trader at Glass’s Town, now part of Libreville—and together they were also influential members of the Baraka congregation.23

  A few years after Josiah’s death, Mary married—in the church at Baraka—a wealthy Scotsman, a trader in Libreville, and then accompanied him on some of his extensive travels along the West Coast of Africa and to Britain. She had been a bright and beautiful little girl when her Grebo father, William Davis, had brought her to the mission station at Fair Hope, committing her to the care of Jane and Leighton. They had surrounded her with much affection, and she had returned the affection and had followed them to Baraka. There she lived out her remarkable life as a teacher, a Grebo Christian in Gabon who had been loved and nurtured as a child and young woman by a couple from Savannah and Pine Grove.24

  So the hopes for an indigenous leadership—hopes that had arrived with the early missionaries to Gabon—were not empty hopes, but hopes that began to be slowly fulfilled in spite of the failures, idiosyncrasies, and paternalism of the missionaries who came to Baraka with its waiting cemetery. The missionaries brought with them to the estuary the deep assumptions and dispositions of another world with its seemingly inescapable racism. They made their way up rivers and through rainforests, often traveling at night and enduring the pain of fevers, dysentery, and parasites. Often living among the peopl
e for years—the Mpongwe, the Bakèlè, the Shékiani, and the Fang—they tried to understand their ways, even those that they found abhorrent, and they sought to catch glimpses of their worlds even as they were trying to transform those worlds. In these efforts of transformation they were most successful with the young who came to the schools they established. But it was, above all, the missionaries’ translations of the Bible that had the most profound effect. These translations broke the missionaries’ control of the Christian message and laid the foundations for an indigenous expression of the faith—a Gabonese Protestant Christianity.25

  LEIGHTON AND JANE remained in Baltimore until the fall of 1884. During these Baltimore years, Leighton was busy with many things, especially traveling and raising funds for foreign missions. He had an able assistant to help

  with the correspondence and finances, but gradually his strength began to ebb and he felt more and more the burden of his work. Jane, having given up her much-loved school in order to move to Baltimore, was busy hosting visitors and working with women’s groups in local congregations. But she was also troubled by recurrent bouts of malaria that seemed to flare up suddenly for no apparent reason. Her sister, Margaret, had died in 1872 during a visit to Old Homestead. She had been buried at Mt. Zion, far from her home in Pennsylvania, next to the plot set aside for Jane and Leighton in the soil of South Carolina. Her death was a deep grief for Jane, who loved her dearly.26

  Leighton and Jane spent several winters at Old Homestead—they hated the cold of Baltimore—and some summers they spent a few weeks in the Virginia mountains to try and recover their strength. Their adopted daughter Cornelia had married a prominent planter who lived not far from Mt. Zion, and they would see her on their visits home. And they would see as well Alice Johnson, whom they had also adopted, and who was now living with Leighton’s sister Sarah near Old Homestead. But old friends and family members were dying. Charles Hodge died in Princeton in 1878. When his son sent Leighton a copy of his Life of Charles Hodge, Leighton wrote back that when he had read it he had felt that he “had lived over again” all the pleasant friendship they had once enjoyed.27 Nicholas Bayard died in 1879 and was buried in Upper Mill Cemetery, McIntosh County, not far from Fair Hope plantation, where Jane, surrounded by McIntosh relatives, had once learned to love the sights and sounds of a Lowcountry home, and where Charlotte Sansay had once been kept busy as Jane’s “personal servant,” seeing after the needs of an earnest young white woman.28