By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  LEIGHTON AND JANE returned to Old Homestead in 1884 to live out their last days together in their Black River home not far from Boggy Gully. Leighton preached regularly at Mt. Sinai Presbyterian Church, where the former black members of Mt. Zion generously welcomed him. And he discovered that the Good Will congregation and school were thriving under the leadership of their pastor, with more than 350 students enrolled in the school. The school had quickly gained a reputation for the discipline it imparted to its students. The teachers insisted that students leave behind their African American dialect and adopt “standard” English. They were to learn through grammatical structure, syntax, and vocabulary new ways of understanding the modern world they were entering as free people. Like the Grebo and other non-Western peoples, they were having to learn the ways and adopt much of the culture of those who were intent on keeping them in their place. If they were to escape their oppression and move toward an improved material well-being, they had to internalize the sources of white power—in particular, literacy, an ascetic self-discipline, and highly developed organizational skills. Yet the Good Will school was also committed to nurturing in its students an African American story, a story of the way things had been in the settlements and at slave sales, a story that challenged and contradicted the story being taught to white children about the way things had been in “the South.” And so the students heard the stories of older people and learned their history as it had been experienced by black men and women who had once sat in the evenings around settlement fires to eat and to talk together beneath a Carolina sky.29

  FRIENDS AND RELATIVES were regular visitors to Old Homestead. Young nieces and nephews especially enjoyed hearing Leighton tell stories about Africa. In the evenings they sat on the piazza—or in the yard, if no breeze was stirring and the air was muggy—while katydids and tree frogs provided the music of the country and sheet lightning occasionally lit the sky. Then Leighton told stories of Fair Hope, where an ocean wind stirred palms on an African cape, and of Baraka and his friend Toko, and of a trip on the Waterwitch far up an African river. The stories had been polished by years of telling, the rough edges of memory smoothed in the mind of an old man.30

  As Leighton looked back over his life, the providence of God became both more real and more mysterious. For years he had confessed, especially in times of perplexity or sorrow, that human history had a purpose and a direction guided by God. But with old age, he seemed to rest more easily in such a confession. Looking back over his own life, he marveled at the deep mystery of what he had experienced and how far it was beyond anything he could have planned or chosen for himself. But it was finally not an idea or a doctrine that he confessed and trusted, but a person. “We are timid and fearful about the approach of death,” he wrote his sister Mary, “but simple trust in Jesus Christ as our savior is all the preparation that any of us needs.”31

  As the shadows of his life lengthened and as he saw death approaching, Leighton began to wonder if he had loved his Black River home too much, if he had made an idol of this Southern landscape, this place where morning had first greeted him and where family and friends had first loved him and where the church had first taught him about God’s grace and providence. He had long believed—this missionary who had so vigorously opposed African fetishes—that the heart of sin was idolatry. Leighton was convinced that all sin and all the deep alienations of the human heart had their ultimate source in worshiping not the Creator but what was created, in making a god out of that which was not God, in the breaking of the First Commandment of the Holy One of Israel—“Thou shall have no other gods before me.” As his life drew toward its close, Leighton came to see that his greatest temptation had been the worshiping, the making of an idol, of that which was good—even a Black River home and landscape. He had every reason to be thankful for those who had loved him as a child and for the particular attachments of a people and the peculiar beauty of a landscape that entwined his heart. Yet he came to see, however partially, that this good, this home ground that had come to him as a gift, had seduced him. This idol had blinded him to the deep oppression and injustice that were bound up with Pine Grove and Mt. Zion and Old Homestead and that seemed an inescapable part of his life. In a moment of feeling broken and wounded, he confessed to a friend that “perhaps God sees that I idolized my country and then my church. Perhaps he means to teach me that I should have no object but him, should trust none but him, have nobody but him to work for, and nothing else to love.”32

  JANE DIED LESS than a year after their return to Old Homestead. Her illness was brief, and Leighton was constantly by her side. She did not blink when she saw death coming toward her, but confessed her faith in Christ and held Leighton’s hand as her breathing slowly came to an end. She was buried beside Margaret in the Mt. Zion cemetery.33

  Leighton knew that he would soon join her in death, and he believed that he would be united in heaven with her, and with all those whom he loved. But he grieved deeply for Jane. Now when he reached for her hand it was not there, and when he turned in bed, her familiar place was empty. His companion, his Jane, was gone. Still, he tried to carry on—writing letters to missionaries and friends and preaching to the black congregation at Mt. Sinai. Their adopted daughter Alice was with him, and Cornelia came as well, and they did all they could to make his last days easy and comfortable. When he was finally confined to his bed, his brother Robert and a male cousin came and cared for him. He lingered for several weeks sleeping or semiconscious. He died in the seventy-eighth year of his life, a year almost to the day after Jane’s death.34

  The funeral was held at Mt. Zion. The congregation was large and flowed out of the sanctuary onto the grounds and beneath the trees Leighton had known as a child. When the service was over, the pallbearers lifted his casket and carried it slowly down the aisle and out into the bright sunlight of a Southern cemetery. They laid him in a grave next to Jane’s, earth to earth, his native home, and then they sang with choked voices the missionary hymn:

  From Greenland’s icy mountains,

  From India’s coral strand;

  Where Afric’s sunny fountains

  Roll down their golden sand:

  From many an ancient river,

  From many a palmy plain,

  They call us to deliver

  Their land from error’s chain.35

  EPILOGUE

  Today not far from Mt. Zion and its cemetery, dark waters stir almost imperceptibly in cypress swamps as they gradually form the headwaters of the Black River. Meandering slowly toward the coast, the river gathers the waters of Boggy Gully and other creeks and flows past white sandbars and forests of tupelo, black gum, and water oaks. A few miles from the coast it joins the waters of the Great Pee Dee River before emptying into Winyah Bay and then the Atlantic.

  If you went about four miles—as the crow flies—southeast from the point where the river waters enter the bay, you would come to Friendfield plantation, one of the great rice plantations of the Lowcountry, where for generations Gullah people lived and labored and produced great wealth for whites. Still standing on the plantation are six whitewashed slave cabins, remnants of what was once a large slave settlement. In about 1850, in one of the cabins of the settlement, a little boy, Jim Robinson, was born into slavery. After the Civil War he was one of those who decided to stay in the old settlement, and with his wife, Louiser, they raised their family, while he sharecropped and no doubt kept his eye out for the Klan and other vigilante groups. In about 1880, they moved to a place close to the slow-moving waters of the Black River. As the old rice culture began to collapse and as other opportunities beckoned, their children and grandchildren began to move away. In 2008, Jim Robinson’s great-great-granddaughter, a Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate, returned and spoke at the African Methodist Episcopal Church, where her ancestors had once worshiped. Her name was Michelle Obama, and she was campaigning for her husband, Barack Obama, who would shortly be elected president of the United States.
“Things get better when regular folks take action to make change happen from the bottom up,” she said. “Every major historical moment in our time, it has been made by folks who said, ‘Enough,’ and they banded together to move this country forward—and now is one of those times.”1

  If the forty-fourth First Lady of the United States represents startling changes in the nation’s life, even more startling changes of global significance can be seen in a nearby white congregation in the resort and retirement community of Pawley Island, where slave owners had once spent the summer away from the miasmas of their rice plantations. All Saints Anglican Church is a congregation of largely affluent whites who have withdrawn from the Episcopal Church and have placed themselves under the ecclesiastical and spiritual authority of the Anglican Province of Rwanda in Central Africa. The African archbishop, Emmanuel Kolini, had launched in 2000 a “Mission in the Americas” as a missionary outreach of the Anglican Church of Rwanda. The mission was designed to reach the “130 million people” in the United States who do not “presently know Jesus Christ.” South Carolina Episcopalians at All Saints wanted to be under what they considered a more conservative and orthodox church leadership—especially in regard to the ordination of women and gay and lesbian persons. Whatever irony may be seen in Lowcountry whites seceding and placing themselves under the authority of Africans, it was clear that some African Christians had identified the United States as a great mission field.2

  The growth of Christianity in Africa throughout the twentieth century—with the continent’s terrible wars, natural disasters, and pandemics—had been nothing less than phenomenal, with the number of Christian Africans increasing from fewer than 9 million in 1910 to more than 516 million in 2010. A multiyear study by the Pew Foundation released in December 2011 found that the number of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa had grown exponentially, from 9 percent of the population in 1910 to 63 percent in 2010. “If that is not, quantitatively, the largest religious change in human history in such a short period,” wrote the distinguished historian Philip Jenkins, “I am at a loss to think of a rival.” While missionaries such as Leighton and Jane, B. V. R. James, and William Walker helped to lay the foundation for this great transformation—especially through schools, translations, presses, and, later, hospitals—the growth of Christianity in Africa had been primarily through the preaching and teaching of African Christians themselves. And the first of the great African itinerant preachers was a Grebo—William Wadé Harris.3

  Harris was born at Graway, at the eastern end of Lake Shepard, where in 1836 Leighton had established a school at the request of King Yellow Will. The young African American John Banks had been the teacher of the school until it was turned over to the Episcopal mission. As a young boy, Harris had gone to live and study with an uncle, a Methodist minister at Sinoe between Cape Palmas and Monrovia. The uncle had apparently been educated at the local Presbyterian mission school, for he bore the name of Leighton’s old colleague in New York, John C. Lowrie.

  A year before Leighton died, Harris joined the Episcopal Church at Graway, and he soon became a teacher and catechist for its mission. He began to be influenced, however, by the writing of Edward Blyden, who had followed B. V. R. James as a teacher in Monrovia, and by the apocalypticism of the new movement of Jehovah’s Witnesses. In 1910, when the Grebo once again went to war against the Americo-Liberians, Harris had been deeply sympathetic to the Grebo and had been arrested and imprisoned. There he had a powerful religious experience—the angel Gabriel, he said, had visited him and had anointed him a prophet, a Black Elijah. Released from jail, Harris put on a white robe and turban and took up a staff in the shape of a cross. Living simply, he began walking and preaching and drawing great crowds. He denounced witchcraft and the fetishes of the people, and he began baptizing great numbers of people. When he went to the Ivory Coast, multitudes were converted; more than 100,000 people were said to have destroyed their fetishes, and in Ghana many followed suit. Although Harris preached against many traditional beliefs and practices, he was himself an exorcist and faith healer, and he accepted polygamy as compatible with Christian faith and life. Many of his converts joined Methodist and Catholic churches, but many others began to form their own indigenous Christian communities. In this way he helped to lay the foundation for the rapid growth of independent African churches, which brought together Christian and traditional African practices, and which helped to fuel the astonishing growth of Christianity in Africa during the twentieth century.4

  WHEN LEIGHTON was commissioned as a missionary for the American Board in 1834, Rufus Anderson stressed that the objective for the mission was to raise up African leaders for an African church. Such a church would be self-supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. And Leighton had later written, after reflecting on the diverse peoples and cultures of Africa, that a mysterious providence seemed to be guiding a people who had experienced so much suffering toward “some important future destiny.” Anderson caught a glimpse of the great transformations that were to come to Africa in the twentieth century. Leighton could not have imagined, however, that African church leaders would one day regard his own beloved Lowcountry—and, in particular, affluent whites in the Lowcountry—as a part of a great mission field, and that the demographic center of Christianity would shift from Europe and North America to the “Global South”—to Africa and South America, to the Pacific Rim, and even to China, which seemed poised in 2013 to become, in a few decades, the nation with the largest Christian population in the world. Perhaps Leighton would have wondered if these new Christians were being called, in the words of the old missionary hymn, to deliver his beloved homeland and his long-reunited country “from error’s chain.”5

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  By the Rivers of Water was long in the making and thanks are owed to many people and several foundations who helped along the way. In 2005 a sabbatical spent as a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge, provided not only rich library resources on West Africa but also opportunities to be in conversation with Visiting Fellows in a variety of disciplines. Among those who discussed in helpful ways my work on the Wilsons were Judith and David Kohn, Robert Ackerman, Daksh Lohiya, Alisa and Howie Shvrin, and Jim and Peg Utterbeck. Liz Ramsden and Ann and Nichol Thompson were generous in the hospitality shown to my wife Nancy and me during our time in Cambridge.

  Ron Hoffman of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, College of William and Mary, made possible my participation in the 2007 conference at Elmina, Ghana, on the first governmental efforts to abolish the Atlantic slave trade. The conference allowed me to hear many voices speaking on the slave trade—especially the voices of African scholars—and introduced me to the social and physical landscape of Elmina and Cape Coast. I was able to discuss my research project over meals with US scholars Ira Berlin, Philip Morgan, David Blight, Daina Berry, Lonnie Bunch, and Oliver Patterson. Beatriz Mamigonian from Brazil, Walter Gam from Cameroun, Zagba Oyortey of the British Museum, and Akeem Akinwale from Nigeria were all very helpful in providing interpretations and observations related to my study. Walking through the slave castles at Cape Coast and Elmina—both places visited by Leighton Wilson—was important and deeply moving, as were visits to markets and fishing villages.

  The Lilly Foundation, through a grant administered by the Association of Theological Schools, provided an opportunity for me to spend time in Gabon. Ted Maris-Wolf of the Omohundro Institute gave good advice and made helpful contacts for my visit to Gabon. In Libreville, Kathleen Dahir of the Université Omar Bongo graciously organized my visit and made many contacts for me. Thierry Alan Frejus was translator, guide, and storyteller for me. Mary Cloutier, unofficial historian of the early Protestant missionaries in Gabon, was my chauffeur and source of much information about the Baraka mission. She was, and continues to be, an indispensable interpreter of early mission history in Gabon. Professor Atoz Ratanga, Department of History, and Professor Bridget Bikah, Department of Psychology, at the Un
iversité Omar Bongo, kindly spent time with me discussing the history and culture of the Mpongwe. Dr. Emile Mbot, anthropologist, and former Director, Ministry of Culture, invited me to spend a day with him at his beautiful plantation outside Libreville. He discussed with me traditions of the Mpongwe and issues of interpretation. Dr. Fuka Bananga Jomain and Dr. Wayne Fricke of the Bongolo Evangelical Hospital, Bongolo, reviewed diseases and health problems that have traditionally afflicted the people of Gabon. Madame Pauline Nabang spoke with me about the history of the Baraka congregation and about the present life of the Protestant church in Gabon. When I found myself in need of a room in Libreville, Cheryl and Arnie Solvig welcomed me to the Guest House of the Christian and Missionary Alliance. Steve Straw, a pilot with Aviation Médicale de Bongolo, went out of his way—after I had left Gabon—to secure pictures for me.

  The Griffith Foundation provided a grant that greatly assisted my research in Atlanta and Savannah. Joe Evans, Buz Wilcoxon, Katelyn Gordon, Nancy Yao, Adam Copeland, and Andrew Whaley copied from microfilm several thousand letters, personal papers, and newspapers. Sara Myers, Richard Blake, Griselda Lartey, Erica Durham, Mary Martha Rivere, Chris Paton, and Jeff Vaughn of the John Bulow Campbell Library, Columbia Theological Seminary, all provided help in securing books, papers, and photographs. President Laura Mendenhall and Dean Cameron Murchison of Columbia gave much encouragement during the early stages of my research.