Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  Thomas Mallard had selected his parlor as the place for the meeting. Over the coming years plantation parlors were common places for Charles to have his evening services, and he found that such a location had both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, meeting in parlors was more comfortable than in the “houses of the people which are generally too small, or in plantation houses [buildings] of one kind and another which are open, cold and uncomfortable.” (Charles particularly disliked meeting in cotton houses because of the danger of fire and because they were dusty and it took time to set up benches and get them ready for a service.) On the other hand, looking around the Mallard parlor, Charles could see that many from the settlement were not at ease in such a setting. “It is rather a strange place to the field hand,” Charles wrote of the Mallard parlor, “and there is no little incongruity between their dress and appearance, and that of the Planter’s family, furniture, etc.”21

  Charles believed that those who lived in the settlement wanted some free space, some place they could claim for their own, for their place of worship. “It appears to me,” he wrote in the Charleston Observer, “exceeding desirable, that on all plantations where the expense can easily be borne, that a convenient house for the worship of the Negroes should be put up. A plain clap board house would answer very well.” Charles acknowledged that on some plantations there were “Praise Houses,” little buildings or bush arbors that the slaves had constructed for their own use, and he occasionally used them, but he thought something more substantial was needed—a regular plantation chapel. He soon put Sandy Jones and Syphax and Porter to work at Montevideo, and they built a neat chapel with a belfry and bell. And later at Maybank, Charles had Sandy Maybank build a school for the white children that was also used as a little chapel. But these were the exceptions in Liberty County, for few planters would be swayed by Charles’s insistence that it was their duty to have their own chapels.22

  When Charles looked around the Mallard parlor, he saw not only Major and Pompey and the others who attended church at nearby Midway, but some who were never there. Among these were “worldly persons” and even church members who were habitually absent from “the house of God,” and some who had been suspended or excommunicated from Midway—there was Joe, who was excommunicated for adultery and had recently been restored to membership; and Hetty and Betty, who had been suspended for fighting with each other.23 But there were others—the aged and the infirm—who were unable to make the short trip from the Mallard plantation to the Midway station. Charles felt a special obligation to all of these who were “strangers to the house of the Lord,” and much of his pastoral visitation was aimed at reaching them.

  The worship service began with singing that drew to the house all who had not already arrived. Charles was a good singer, and he delighted in singing hymns with his plantation congregations. Thomas Mallard prayed and read the Scripture lesson while Bess and Dr. Harry, Maum Willoughby and Daddy Jack, Joe and Hetty, and all the others watched him and listened to his words and interpreted through their own experience what they were seeing their master do and what they were hearing their master say. There was another hymn and then Charles preached a short homily. A closing prayer followed, and another hymn, and the service was over. Bess, together with a few inquirers and those under “serious impressions,” remained behind. Charles spoke to them about their religious experiences, gave them encouragement and counsel, “administered reproofs” to those who had strayed, and sought to settle any disputes that were brought to him.24

  When the last of the congregation had left the parlor, Charles went out into the night to visit in the settlement. The plantation buildings that he passed were laid out so that everything, as far as possible, was under Thomas Mallard’s eye as he looked from his front door. Charles walked by a yellow clay smokehouse across from the plantation kitchen. In the light from the Mallard parlor and front hall, he could see cotton storage houses and other outbuildings just beyond the sandy front yard. A gin, powered by a horse that tread round and round, stood silently waiting another day for its rattling chain to turn hickory rollers and separate the cotton from the seed. Going beyond the stables and carriage house, he came to the settlement. People were sitting around outdoor fires whose flames lit the night, and light flickered from fireplaces through the open doors of cabins. Charles walked down the sandy road that ran through the settlement. On each side of the road were two-room cabins. They were made of sawed lumber loosely covered with cypress clapboards so that “only the thickness of a single board kept out the winter’s air and cold.” Through the darkness he could see behind the cabins small gardens, rice ricks, and little storage houses, and he could smell the chicken coops and pigpens that were nearby. Charles visited in the cabins of the aged and sick. A lone candle and the fire from a clay hearth lit each dwelling. The sick lay on crude beds whose mattresses were made of the gray moss from the surrounding swamps. Standing beside these beds, with the shadows and light dancing around him, Charles reminded the sick of the gracious promises of the Gospel, asked them if they put their trust in Jesus, and offered a prayer for their health and salvation.25

  Charles did not want to neglect any who lived in the settlement. He wanted somehow to cross the deep divide that separated him from Daddy Jack and Maum Willoughby and all the others who lived in the two-room, smoky cabins. “People,” he wrote Mary, “cannot bear to see themselves, or friends or anything with which they are connected treated with neglect or contempt. Itis all the same whether they be rich or poor, for you know that the poor have feelings and can be pleased and offended as well as the rich. We must therefore remember this, and treat all with politeness and attention.” Charles wanted to exhibit in the settlements a politeness that came from the heart and that was “dictated by Christian benevolence.” Such benevolence, Charles hoped, would be a bridge across the divide between a white preacher and black slaves. Of course Charles thought it would be, at least for the present, a bridge only the white preacher could cross as he sought to enter empathetically into the world of the settlement. Those who lived in the cabins were to stay in their place and learn the ways of the visiting white preacher until he recrossed the bridge to his own place of privilege. And even when Charles thought himself on the slave side of the bridge, he remembered that his civil relationship with his parishioners was “peculiar” and that he consequently had to maintain in all his relationships with them “the dignity and respect of his civil station.” He could not, even as he sought to enter empathetically into their world, “forget that they are servants,” or that he could not “elevate them to his standing.” So he visited among them for a while as a person of privilege, and then he returned to his accustomed surroundings, where he hoped and prayed for the time when blacks would be ready to cross the bridge and assume the responsibilities of freedom. And in his accustomed surroundings he also hoped and prayed for a time when whites would be ready to allow them the journey. In the meantime, he wondered, “Who can estimate the calm, sanctifying, and saving influences of such visits both upon the pastor and the people?”26

  After visiting in the cabins Charles returned to the Mallard parlor to sit before the fire and talk with Thomas Mallard and his wife, Eliza. Charles understood such conversations, which he made a regular part of his plantation visits, to be an important part of his pastoral efforts. If the spiritual welfare of slaves was linked, as Thomas Clay had emphasized, with their physical welfare and comfort, then Charles must arouse the conscience of slaveholders, he must persuade them to realize that the way slaves were housed, fed, clothed, and disciplined all had an impact on their spiritual lives and on the ways they heard the preaching and admonitions of whites. Slaves, he said over and over again, “have eyes and feelings and a natural discernment of consistency of character.” And, he noted, slaves watch their masters carefully: they are “keen observers of the character of their masters, and their testimony to the rectitude of that character is as good as any that can be obtained, for their conditio
n not only prompts them to observe it narrowly, but furnishes them with the best opportunities of doing so.”27

  If a master does not render his slaves “that which is just and equal,” if he does not take an interest in them “body and soul,” then they will quickly see through his professed piety and interest in their spiritual welfare:

  If the planter grinds his people—endeavouring to get as much out of them, and give as little in return to them as he possibly can; if he pays little or no regard to the quality and quantity of their food, any further than interest dictates; if he does not respect and cherish their efforts to assist themselves; if he permits them to live immorally; if he makes the neglect or omission of his work the greatest crime which they can commit, and calling for the severest punishment; and if he inflicts that punishment without reproof or gentleness; if he gives religious instruction with the evident design of promoting his worldly interest by making them more obedient to his commands; if he is one way in the “Praise House,” and another in the Field; God in the House and mammon out of it, the sooner he resigns his office of religious instructor, the better for himself and his people.28

  Charles wanted to convince the planters that religious instruction “requires religious treatment.” And, he wrote in the Charleston Observer, “religious treatment must be universal; it must have respect to the Negro himself, his family, his house, his food, his clothing, his labour, his correction, his every interest, soul and body, for time and eternity.” Only in this way would masters follow the biblical injunction: “Masters render to your servants that which is just and equal.”29

  When Charles returned to the Mallard parlor after visiting in the settlements, he spoke not simply in these broad categories about what was “just and equal” but in specific terms—using, of course, his good manners and his sensitivity about what could be said and what couldn’t. And what was most immediately obvious from a visit to the settlements of Liberty County was the need for better housing. Charles told Mallard and the other members of the association that the settlement houses were frequently “small, low to the ground, blackened with smoke, often with dirt floors, and the furniture of the plainest kind.” Privacy was impossible under such conditions. Charles insisted that planters had not simply self-interest but a religious duty to improve the housing conditions of their slaves. He asked Mallard and the other members of the association how they expected religion or morality to thrive in squalid settlements. Poor housing, he insisted, resulted in poor morals—crowding two or more families in one house “scarcely large enough for one family,” mingling up “husbands and wives, children and youth,” banished the “privacy and modesty essential to domestic peace and purity” and opened wide the door “to dishonesty, oppression, violence and profligacy.” Every slave family on a plantation, “whether consisting of only husband and wife, or parents and children, or one parent and children, should have a house of its own, in undisputed and undisturbed possession.” The houses should be “convenient and comfortable” and “properly partitioned off, and well ventilated, and neatly whitewashed, and sufficiently large to accommodate the families resident in them; and furnished with necessary articles for household use.” Special attention needed to be paid to the welfare of the slave children and different sleeping apartments provided “for boys and girls as they become more advanced.” Thomas Mallard agreed with Charles on this point, and he would arrange, when slave children were “half grown,” to have one or two “shed-rooms” or “leantos” built on the back of the family’s cabin in order to provide some privacy.30

  Then there was the question of clothes for slaves. How easy it was for planters to let their slaves go about in rags, a bit of this and a bit of that, an occasional old coat or dress discarded as useless by a white family. It could all be so easily justified by saying they were Africans and accustomed to going about half-naked. Charles himself believed that the slaves were “exceedingly inattentive to the preservation of their clothing” because of their African traditions. He insisted, nevertheless, that masters had a duty of both providing clothing and requiring slaves to care for them. On the Mallard plantation, as was the general custom in the county, slave seamstresses made most of the clothes. At Montevideo and May-bank, Phoebe was given increasing responsibility for the daunting task of cutting out and sewing the clothes for a rapidly growing population at Carlawter and the Maybank settlement.31

  And there were other duties Charles discussed with his fellow planters. “Servants should be provided,” he insisted, “with abundant food, and that wholesome and good, and as diversified as it can conveniently be made.”32 And they should have their own ground to till: “as much ground to plant for themselves during the year as they can profitably attend; and also the privilege of raising poultry and hogs; indeed every privilege and opportunity allowed them to make themselves comfortable and to accumulate money.”33 And slaves ought to be provided with good medical care that went beyond a prudential concern for the health of one’s laborers and valuable property. The “old and infirmed and crippled and useless,” all those who no longer had economic value to planters, were not to be put away and ignored in some little cabin in the woods where they would have to care for themselves in their weakness. They were rather to be treated with dignity and provided with proper medical attention.34 Nor were planters to overwork their slaves. Masters, said Charles, had a duty “to lay upon their servants that labour only which is just; allow time to enjoy the comforts of life and to do something for themselves, and preserve to them sacredly the rest of the Sabbath.” 35 And Charles also began to speak to masters about their duty not to separate families and about how the planters could encourage family life in the settlements. This was a subject he returned to over and over again, and in a few years he gave special attention to marriage and family life in the settlements. In time, however, he was to learn through the bitter experience of a family in Carlawter how deeply he himself was implicated in the practices of human bondage, even as he sought to work within the system of slavery to make it more humane.

  All of these matters Charles discussed with Thomas Mallard and other planters. Sitting together in comfortable parlors or on cool piazzas, they would review their responsibilities as Christian masters. Agricultural journals in the South had been advocating many of the same reforms that Charles called for, though the journals generally spoke of how such reforms would improve the life and productivity of a plantation.36 Christian masters, however, had more than self-interest to consider. They had to start thinking of their slaves as a part of their households for whom they had responsibilities as they had responsibilities for their wives and children. Like the ancient Hebrews and Greeks and early Christians, paternalistic masters needed household codes of conduct that regulated the relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and slaves. For Christian masters, there were the straightforward words of St. Paul to guide them in their relationship with their slaves: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal; knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven.”37

  While Charles and Thomas Mallard were having their conversation before the parlor fire, another conversation was no doubt going on in the Mallard settlement. Pompey and Bess and Dr. Harry and Maum Willoughby must have stirred and poked the evening fires that burned before the settlement cabins and talked about what they had just seen and heard. This conversation, beyond the ears of the missionary and the master, no doubt involved some evaluation of Charles. What was this young white man about coming to the plantation and visiting in the settlement? Was he a friend to the slave or simply another white man doing his part to keep blacks in the settlements and whites in plantation parlors? Whatever the conversation that followed Charles’s visit, there was no single and unified response to him. Some evidently came to regard him as their most important friend in the white community, a person to whom they would turn in times of need. Others evidently wanted nothing to do with him and looked on his work with great suspicion. One
thing, however, must have been clear to them all—Charles was not introducing religion to the settlements. When Charles walked into the settlements, he was not walking into a kind of religious vacuum. On the contrary, he was walking into a world filled with a rich diversity of religious life and practices, some of it open and some of it secret. He was walking into a place that had its own sacred cosmos that had existed long before Charles returned from Princeton to begin his missionary labors. In 1833 Charles was only beginning to catch a glimpse of the strength and diversity of this sacred world, and he was only beginning to realize that he would never fully penetrate its mysteries or understand its power.

  13

  THE ARBORS

  By 1833 Sharper had traveled around the county for twenty years with a freedom known by few other slaves. As the black preacher hired by the white Midway congregation, not only was he widely known and respected, but he also carried with him the authority and sanction of the most important institution in the county. Such freedom allowed him to know the settlements as did perhaps no other person. “The ground is all familiar to him,” Charles wrote, as over the years Sharper had ridden “from three to eight miles in the evenings” to visit and preach in different settlements. During such visits and around nighttime fires after worship services, the black preacher had opportunities to talk with those who had been born in Africa and to see the ways traditional African beliefs and practices were a part of life in the settlements.1

  When Sharper visited Sunbury he could talk with Ben and Sally, who were from Africa and would say when it thundered, “maulin a bumba,” and who, no doubt, could remember how marriages were performed, children were named, sacred meals were eaten, and the dead were buried. And Sharper could hear stories in Sunbury of a slave ship coming into the little harbor; and when the slaves saw they were not in Africa, the stories said, they had taken wing and flown home.2 At the nearby Seabrook plantation of Benjamin Scriven, Sharper could talk with a parishioner, a member of Midway, Dublin Scribben. He was from Africa and would teach his black neighbors an African dance song, “Rockah mh moomba,” that would be remembered years later.3