Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  For Rosetta, the move to Carlawter meant an end to her work as a domestic servant and the beginning of her work as a field hand. But it also meant more opportunities to see young Sam, whom she had gotten to know in Greensboro. Because he was a domestic servant of Eliza Robarts’s, quickly establishing himself in a position similar to Jack’s at the Retreat, he lived not at Carlawter but in Sunbury during the summer and fall and at the Retreat during the winter and spring. Nevertheless, there were opportunities for them to see each other as he came to visit among the Robarts slaves, and in a short time they were married. Their first child, Lucy, was born in 1820. She was to grow up watching her parents interact with whites and to learn from them ways to move between two worlds.8

  If the move to Carlawter meant reunions and closer contacts for some, it meant separations for others. The move was, after all, part of an ongoing process of shifting black men, women, and children around as white owners sought to utilize in the most efficient manner their labor force and to accommodate their own particular circumstances. African Americans utilized their own strategies to resist the moves that separated them from family and friends and from familiar places that they called home, but their strategies, however skillfully wrought, were the strategies of the oppressed and not of the powerful. Separations were consequently a bitter part of their lives, and however stable a plantation or a region, the possibilities and all too frequently the realities of separations loomed ever before them.9

  Among those separated at the time of the removal from the Retreat to Carlawter were Willoughby and Tony. Willoughby, who was Lizzy’s sister, went with their children Annette, Cate, and Tom to Carlawter and Tony remained at the Retreat. To be sure, the Retreat was not far from Carlawter, but the separation was real and Saturday nights were short. Fanny, who had been born in Africa, also stayed at the Retreat when her children and grandchildren went off to Carlawter. Because Elvira and her brother Marcus were probably the only ones on the plantation who could speak with their mother in her native tongue, her loneliness must have increased when they went to Carlawter and she was left to struggle with the strange language of the settlement.10

  These reunions and divisions occasioned by the removal to Carlawter created additional networks of families and friends that transcended plantation boundaries and extended out in many directions. Such networks were common in the low country and grew broader and thicker as the years passed. The African-American population in Liberty County, in contrast to the rising cotton belt in the interior, had a certain stability that was rooted in the geography of the region and in the social character and arrangements of the whites. Most of the buying and selling and moving of slaves, such as the removal from the Retreat to Carlawter, took place within a relatively small area. The distances made it possible for those moved about to remain in relationships with one another. The distances also made it possible for the African Americans of Liberty County to develop a sense of locality, of being attached to a specific place that was larger than the boundaries of one plantation. Kinship and place thus became deeply associated, with one reinforcing the identity of the other. So in an ironic way, planters’ arbitrary shuffling and moving around of their slaves within a limited geographical area helped over time to broaden and strengthen an identifiable slave community with its own history and its own traditions. Through their commitments to one another, African Americans were able, as they were moved about, to extend and maintain ties of kinship. The trauma and pain of separations remained, and some separations were distant and permanent, but African Americans were able to create in Liberty County a community of remarkable cohesion as kinship lines, running from plantation to plantation, overlapped in dense networks of relationships.11

  When Lizzy and Robinson were united at Carlawter, its settlement became their family’s home. Here they raised their children, and the children came to associate the settlement with their parents and with those who lived around them and who helped to shape their earlier years. In many ways Carlawter became in time a little village with its own social structure. It had its own leaders and followers, its own manners and habits, and its growing traditions and lengthening memories. The settlement’s life, of course, was set within wider worlds and its ways were influenced by other neighboring settlements and the developing Gullah culture of the low country. But Carlawter came to have its own distinct character shaped by the personalities and histories of those who lived there and by its relationship to the powerful world of whites which surrounded the settlement and was a constant threat to it.12

  Cato was seven and Cassius not yet five when they moved with their parents, older brother Lymus, and little sister Sina into their cabin at Carlawter. The new settlement was much smaller than the one they had grown to know at the Retreat, and it was even more isolated from the world of whites. They would see Joseph Jones on his regular visits during the winter and spring, and in the summers when he came up from Sunbury to visit with Pulaski at the Retreat. But when he was at Carlawter, Joseph mainly conferred with Jupiter, reviewed the work of the plantation, and checked on the health of the people in the settlement. On occasion the brothers saw young Charles, who would come with his uncle for a visit. But because there was no plantation house at Carlawter, and because Jupiter did most of the managing of the plantation, Cato and Cassius were free from the constant watch and influence of whites. This isolation was perhaps more influential in shaping the character of Cassius, for Cato could remember time spent with whites in Greensboro, as well as at the Retreat, and he became more skilled than his younger brother in negotiating the dangers of a white world.

  Whatever their future relationship with the white world, Cato and Cassius were a good age at the time of their move to Carlawter to begin learning its landscape and that of its neighboring tracts. They found that the main road to the settlement was little more than an extended avenue that ran east from Riceboro to Colonel Law’s plantation. Across the road from Carlawter was the backside, the northernmost section, of Liberty Hall, where Cato had been born. Nathaniel Varnedoe, a young and prudent man of Huguenot descent, was in the process of turning the old plantation once again into a prosperous one. Cato and Cassius could not wander freely over to Liberty Hall, since whites had strict rules about slaves—even young ones—leaving and visiting plantations. But at their age, with their isolation and the light work that was expected of them for a few short years, they had opportunity to explore the Carlawter, Cooper, and Lambright tracts.13

  The riverbank must have held special attraction for them, with its swamps offering tempting places to explore. Here there were places to fish and to hide and to look for the alligators that liked to lie in the sun on a warm winter’s day or that could be heard in early spring roaring their challenges and invitations. The broad slough that separated Carlawter from Montevideo was a particularly good place to spot the gators, and generations of young slaves living at Carlawter were warned not to get caught by those that lay concealed along a muddy bank.14

  The dark, cypress-stained water of the North Newport also must have held its own fascination for the young slaves as it flowed freely toward the coast and unknown places. Both Cato and Cassius came to know the river well—its moods and character and even its taste as it changed with the seasons and fluctuated with the tides and the phases of the moon.15 By the time it reached Carlawter, the North Newport had left behind its narrow banks and was spreading out, providing for the brothers a broad horizon and a sense of change and movement that stood in contrast to the scenes of the settlement and its encompassing fields. From the edge of the swamp they could watch ships from far-off places sail slowly up the river to Riceboro, and they could see them sail back down with the tide and disappear beyond a distant bend. And they could watch black fishermen going up and down the river in their canoes and hear stories of those who used little riverboats to slip away to some other plantation or some secret meeting or even some hiding place for runaways. With such scenes and stories, the river and all that floated upo
n it must have played a role in forming the imagination of the brothers and in shaping the ways they saw and understood the world and their possibilities in it.16

  Away from the river, Cato and Cassius could discover a network of trails that crisscrossed the land and plantation boundaries. The previous occupants of the settlement (who had been moved or sold away) had created some of the trails that traversed Carlawter, and the new occupants were creating others. Often only hard-to-find paths, they formed an alternative system to the straight roads and plantation gates laid out by whites. Just as the avenue leading to the Retreat revealed Joseph Jones’s ideas of order and a world governed by a patriarch, so the trails at Carlawter and neighboring plantations pointed toward the ways slaves saw the world and were shaping it for their own ends. What they wanted were not straight roads, easy for horsemen to patrol or for wagons to traverse, but shortcuts and winding paths that followed the terrain. Some trails led to the river or to distant fields; others crossed fences and provided back ways to neighboring plantations or to the grog shops in Riceboro. Some must have led to secret meeting places in the woods or to a gathering spot in a swamp where a stolen pig could be roasted or a religious service held. Planters knew some of the trails—they, after all, were frequently walking and riding the land checking on crops or hunting. But they knew that there were other trails, largely hidden from them, that provided escape routes for runaways and the means for dangerous communications from one plantation to the next. And so in times of unrest, when runaways were more numerous or cases of arson were reported, whites worried about these trails and the secret world of the slaves they represented, and sought to control their use with stringent laws and patrols of night-riding horsemen.17

  If these winding trails through the woods and swamps of Liberty County were primary arteries for the life of its Gullah community, nearby Lambert plantation functioned for decades as its heart. Of all the neighboring plantations that played a role in shapingthe character of Carlawter, none was more important than Lambert. By the time Cato and Cassius moved with their parents to Carlawter in 1817, Lambert had established itself as a remarkable center of African-American life. Lambert was located only a few miles from Riceboro off the Savannah-Darien road, and its influence extended throughout the county and in time reached deep into the life of those who lived at Carlawter.

  John Lambert, a South Carolinian who had been deeply touched by the fires of the First Great Awakening and the preaching of the Anglican itinerate George Whitefield, had established the plantation in 1784.18 A benevolent impulse had been nurtured by Lambert’s religious experience, and on his death in 1786 he left his plantation in trust for philanthropic purposes. “My will and desire,” he wrote,

  is that my estate be kept together and the yearly income applied to any religious or good purpose at the discretion of my executors and trustees, for the relief of the poor and distressed, or wherever any good or pious purpose may be answered in the church of Midway, or any other that may be erected, for the carrying on and assisting the intended academy in Sunbury, or promoting of any public schools or Seminary of learning; the bringing up of orphans, and the like.19

  Thirty-one slaves were included in his estate, and over the coming years their labors and the labors of their children and grandchildren provided funds for the education of poor white children at the Sunbury Academy, for support of white widows and orphans, and for other benevolent purposes selected by the trustees. The growing settlement at Lambert (its population more than doubled between 1787 and 1837) was marked by its independence and isolation from white control. An overseer was responsible to the trustees, and on occasion lived on the plantation, but most years the overseer would visit only two or three times a week during the winter and spring and less frequently during the summer and fall. In spite of this isolation, the trustees kept careful financial records that served as windows for them into the life of the settlement at Lambert and, one might add, into many other settlements, including the one at Carlawter.20

  The leading figures at Lambert were not the drivers but a succession of black preachers who were intermediaries between the settlement and the trustees. The first had been Mingo, a free man who lived on the nearby Peter Winn plantation. When John Lambert had first come to Liberty County, he had employed Mingo to visit his plantation and preach for his people. Mingo had come every week, and after Lambert’s death, the trustees had continued to provide Mingo a small stipend for “coming to the estate and giving the Negroes religious instruction.” The plantation in this way became “a regular place of meeting for the Negroes of the neighborhood who were allowed the privilege of attending.” Mingo had received the endorsement of Midway Church, and he had begun to hold meetings across the road from the church near a spring at the edge of a swamp. “Booths of bushes and wide seats, and a raised platform” were built, and here Mingo preached on Sundays between the morning and afternoon services at the church.21

  Associated with Mingo was Jack Salturs. He had belonged to a series of owners, but had lived for a number of years at Lambert. When Mingo died in 1810, the Lambert trustees purchased Jack for $153, stipulating that the “said Jack have his freedom as soon as his labors together with any monies he may advance, shall amount to that sum with interest.” He died in 1813, never having gained his freedom, and the trustees paid his wife the money owed for Jack’s work among the people. During Jack’s time, a building had been constructed on the plantation for religious service. For a few years after Jack’s death, the overseer taught Brown’s Catechism to the gathered slaves on Sunday afternoons. But the real successor to Jack was Sharper. During the years that Cato and Cassius were growing up at Carlawter, Sharper became the undisputed leader of the African-American community in Liberty County. For two critical decades, he was the primary interpreter of Christian faith and life to the slaves of the county as he labored “with apostolic zeal” in the settlements of the county. Through his work he became a key player in building a black church and African-American Christianity in Liberty County.22

  Among those who lived at Lambert were midwives and healers. In the early years of the plantation, Maria attended women in labor and was paid by the trustees for her work. By 1815 Old Lydia had become not only the plantation’s midwife but also the nurse for many who were sick in the neighborhood. She was joined by Pluto, who could heal snakebite, and by Scipio, who could cut infected gums with a lancet and pull aching teeth with pliers. They were all practicing a medicine that was a mixture of traditions brought from Africa and skills learned in the low country. Local barks and herbs were used and mixtures of various roots and berries concocted to make syrups and tonics. Those treatments that showed some signs of success were remembered and handed on to become a part of a folk pharmacology respected by blacks and whites alike.23

  At the edges of this practice of healing and beneath its observations and empiricism lay traditions of magic and a belief in the supernatural. Alongside and sometimes in competition with Mingo, Jack, and Sharper were secret practices and a world of spirits. Root doctors and sorcerers, wizardsand witches were looked upon with respect and fear throughout the settlements of the low country. Witches could change their shape at night, slip into cabins, and ride on people’s chests so that the victims awoke feeling not only terrified but as if they were smothering. “Plat-eye” ghosts and headless spirits came up from the swamps and marshes on moonless nights to roam the countryside and hide in the dark corners of the settlements. Black cat ashes and bones, graveyard dirt and hair, nail clippings and bloodroots provided ingredients for powerful powders and potions that could be used to harm an enemy. Protection from such forces came from conjure bags worn around the neck and from frizzled chickens kept in the yard to dig up dangerous charms planted by those who held a grudge against you. These beliefs and their accompanying practices were part of a secret world at Lambert and the other isolated settlements of the low country. And they were also part of an arsenal of strategies to be used against whites when black rage
boiled and the desire for revenge or justice could no longer be suppressed but came rushing to the surface. As such, this secret world was a part of a sacred cosmos, of an interior landscape of the mind and imagination, which Cato and Cassius were discovering during their early years at Carlawter.24

  Whites knew of this secret world of root doctors and charms as they knew of the existence of the trails that crisscrossed the county. But they knew of this world largely from a distance, as one would view a faraway cosmos, and they regarded the distance as a part of a cultural divide that separated them from their slaves.25 Over and over whites would use this perceived distance between their world and the world of the settlements as an ideological tool, as a way to justify keeping blacks in their place. Slaves, it was insisted, were an uncivilized, unenlightened, superstitious people incapable of governing themselves and living as a free people. But whites were also fearful that if African Americans crossed the cultural divide, that if they entered deeply into the world of whites, they would gain access to the power of whites that was rooted in European culture. Consequently, when an open attempt was made in Sunbury in 1816 to teach slaves to read, it had been quickly suppressed by the state. Reading and writing, after all, not only provided a dangerous means of communication for slaves but also opened the way to another culture, to the interior landscape of the mind and imagination of whites, and provided some access to important sources of white power. So whites wanted it both ways in regard to what they perceived as this cultural distance—they were dismissive of the secret world of blacks as primitive and uncivilized, and they were also fierce in their opposition to blacks’ entering too deeply into the world of whites. In a peculiar way, Charles Jones was to find himself in the years ahead deeply conflicted by the contradictions of this white ideology. He would want to transform the world of the settlements with its sacred cosmos; he would want Cato and Cassius and all the others in the settlements to be converted at a deep inner level to his way of understanding God, the world, and human life. But he would also want them to remain in their place in the settlements so that they would be like him in every way except for freedom.26