Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  At Lodebar, the William Maxwell plantation, the cook Miley was married to Isaac, who lived on the neighboring plantation of Mellon Bluff. Working with Miley was Louisa, a younger woman. The two women had joined the church together in 1839, and Charles had sent word to them: “Tell Louisa and Miley, that the great work of living as Christians has just begun, and I hope they will be faithful, and not draw back, or give occasion to any to find fault.” But within a year the women had a serious falling out. Isaac, on his Saturday visits to Lodebar, had begun an affair with Louisa. The case was reported to the watchmen. Witnesses were called. Testimony was given. And Louisa and Isaac were excommunicated from the church. Such a liaison evidently caused great tension between the two women, who had to live and work together. In time, however, Louisa repented of her relationship with Isaac and through the recommendation of the watchmen was restored to membership in the church. But Isaac was another matter. Charles called him an “unprincipled fellow,” and later in a rage Isaac beat Miley so severely that she lost most of the sight in her one good eye. So bad was the beating, wrote Betsy, that it would have been better for Miley if Isaac had “broken her neck.” Perhaps their shared troubles with Isaac brought the two women closer together, for Louisa was a gentle nurse to Miley following the beating, and later Miley cared for Louisa after she almost died from childbirth.22

  Because he met with Toney and the watchmen, Charles heard all of these reports and the testimonies of the witnesses, and in his visiting in the settlements he was frequently called upon to help settle disputes between husbands and wives, not only of church members, but also of others who wanted an outside arbiter. He consequently decided that a series of sermons on marriage was needed for the instruction and encouragement of the people. Preaching at Midway and at the North Newport Baptist Church, he addressed such crowds that the decision was made that only the married could sit on the lower floors of the churches and the single were assigned the galleries.23

  Marriage, he told the congregations, is an honorable estate, created by God for the “peaceful and successful propagation of the human species on the earth” and for the “happiness and comfort” of the marriage partners. He denounced polygamy and insisted that marriage be between one man and one woman. Those who marry should do so intelligently, with affection for one another “with their own consent” and “with the open and full consent of Parents or Guardians.” A marriage service should be a public ceremony that honors marriage and gives public support to those who are marrying. He denounced fornication as a sin against one’s own body, and he quoted St. Paul: “To avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” As for divorce, only the adultery of a partner provided a lawful reason to leave a spouse and marry another. But he said nothing about when a husband or a wife was sold away.24

  In February 1841 Charles preached on the authority and the duties of husbands, first at North Newport and then at Midway, before packed congregations. God created the husband the head of the family, Charles said. But the husband must exercise his authority over his wife intelligently, knowing the rights of his wife: “His wife has a right to have her own opinion and speak her own mind on all subjects. She has a right to inquire into and to know every thing concerning their character, business, and welfare in life. She has a right to worship God as she pleases, and to maintain her authority over her own children and household and she has a right to see her friends and enjoy their society in reason.” A husband is to exercise his authority “honorably and justly,” “tenderly and rationally,” “benevolently,” “piously,” and “affectionately.”25

  With the authority of husbands, Charles said, come the duties of husbands. And the first duty was that of love, which “lies at the foundation and comprehends and insures all others.” They are to give themselves, and their entire affections, to be the “peculiar possession” of their wives. They are to show their love in their looks and in their words. The husband “will avoid wounding and irritating remarks, bitter and sarcastic reflections. He will not dwell upon faults, nor magnify them, nor delight in scolding and faultfinding.” Husbands are not to say things like “they have a hard lot in married life,” or “they shall never have an opportunity for a second wife,” or “when their wife dies, they intend to form a connection with such and such an one!” “This,” said Charles, “is cruel!” But the love of the husband is to show itself in actions that are kind, in behavior that supports a wife in her work, and in tender care when she is sick. A husband is to protect his wife: her person from danger and violence; her character from any who would assail it; her interests from any waste or injury. He is to provide for his wife and see that she lives in as comfortable a home as he can provide and that she has a full share of all of his possessions. And he is finally to present a pious and holy example for his wife, praying with and for her, for her life in this world and in the world to come.26

  What did Charles’s congregations think when they heard these sermons? Surely they thought about a husband being sold away, or they wondered how a husband was to protect a wife being whipped or assaulted by an owner. It must have seemed as if a big low-country alligator was right in front of the pulpit, thrashing its tail and showing its teeth, as Charles pretended not to notice it. Yet those who came to hear him preach on marriage did not walk out as they did when he preached on Onesimus. Rather, they packed the two churches and evidently found in what he had to say something they could use in their own struggles as men and women, husbands and wives, who had to face daily the power and appetite of the thrashing gator.

  If, in his sermons to slaves, Charles could not bring himself to mention slave sales in Riceboro or divisions of estates or the power and abuse of owners, he did not fail to address these issues when he made his published reports. The duties of owners, he told Liberty County planters, was “to assist” their servants “in the pursuit of peace, justice and purity.” And to do this, they needed to begin by providing “sufficient and separate accommodations for the families of their servants.” Charles had made the rounds of the settlements in the county, and he knew all too well the wretched conditions in which many families struggled to live. “Every family on a plantation,” he insisted, “whether consisting of only husband and wife, or parents and children, or of one parent and children, should have a house of its own, in undisputed and undisturbed possession.” Bad housing led to bad morals. “The crowding of two or more families, or parts of families into one house, and that perhaps scarcely large enough for one family; the mingling up of husbands and wives, children and youths, banishes the privacy and modesty essential to domestic peace and purity, and opens wide the door to dishonesty, oppression, violence and profligacy.” How, he asked the planters, can “religion or morality thrive” under such circumstances?27

  Nor did he hesitate to insist that planters “should not separate, nor allow the separation of husband and wife, unless for causes lawful before God.” Marriage, he told them, is a divine institution to be held sacred among any people. “Does an owner presume,” he asked, “to contract or annul the marriages of his servants at his pleasure and for his own interest and convenience, or by any of his own arbitrary regulations?” If so, “He shall answer it to Him, who hath said, ‘what therefore God hath joined together let no man put asunder.’ “28

  Charles wanted—at least at one level of his consciousness—slave couples and slave families to enjoy in the settlements a marriage and a family life that reflected from a distance the orderly, comfortable, loving, and mutually supportive family life that he knew at Montevideo and Maybank. Indeed, that was what he saw when he looked at Jack and Marcia, at Andrew and Mary Ann, at young Patience and Porter and young Lucy and Charles. They, and other families like them, Charles believed, were essential for the good ordering of society and for the stability, peace, and happiness of the community. Their success as couples and families he regarded as models for others. To be sure, as he made clear in his reports to planters, he was not
naïve in regard to the forces that worked against slave families. It was just that he hoped that the religious convictions and self-interests of planters were enough to subdue the thrashing gator before his pulpit.

  18

  MAYBANK

  In late spring 1841, a little caravan set out early in the morning from Montevideo for Maybank. The carriage driven by Jack led the way down the avenue, followed by two oxcarts loaded with carefully packed barrels of sugar and flour, with trucks of clothes and with boxes of household items needed for the next five months at the island home. Traveling with the family in the carriage was James Dubuar, a native of Aurora, New York, and recent college graduate. Charles had hired him to be the children’s tutor, and the coming year was to be for Dubuar a kind of sojourn in an exotic land before returning to the North and theological studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York.1

  As they turned out of the avenue and made their way toward Colonel’s Island, Dubuar could look out of the window with the eyes of a newcomer at the passing landscape: the dark waters of cypress swamps reflected the sky and occasionally the white plumage of a snowy egret or a wood ibis wading in the water; live oak forests with thick undergrowths of palmettos, hollies, and yucca threatened any who would try to penetrate their secrets; and in open areas, black men and women could be seen everywhere spread out across cotton fields and along the dams and canals of rice fields.

  The little caravan moved slowly down the sandy road, for the oxen were deliberate and plodded carefully along, pulling their heavy carts. With such a pace they did not approach the causeway leading to the island until late in the day. The marsh, stretching out to the north, had already turned green, and now in the afternoon sun it glowed as shadows were beginning to ease their way across its wide expanse. The hot fragrant breath of marsh mud and grass greeted the travelers and gave Dubuar hints of what might await all who would spend a summer and fall on a Georgia Sea Island.2

  Jack turned the carriage into the avenue at Maybank. An old oak framed the gate and provided a natural entry to the plantation. They went beneath its arching trunk and moved down the sandy avenue past several outbuildings—including the cabin where Patience and Porter lived—and came to a clearing where a new plantation house awaited them. During the preceding year the old Hut had been torn down, and a new house had been erected on an elevated foundation of handmade bricks brought from Montevideo. Sandy Maybank had been in charge of the construction, and working with him had been not only his apprentices Syphax and Porter but also Toby James, the son of driver Plenty James at old Liberty Hall. (Charles had worked out an agreement with Nathaniel Varnedoe so that Toby was apprenticed to Sandy to learn the arts and to develop the habits of a carpenter.) Andrew and his crew from the settlement had helped with the construction during the winter months after their cotton had been picked and sent to market on a river schooner.3

  The new house was a handsome cottage, two stories, built off the ground in low-country style. Situated under the spreading branches of Sea Island oaks, it too, like the old Hut, looked out onto the marsh of the Medway through a line of oaks. A broad piazza stretched across the front of the house, and a hall, almost eight feet wide, ran through the center of the house from front to back. Charlie later described the house as “ample and very comfortably furnished.” It had room not only for the family, for Charles’s study, and for the children’s tutor, but also for the many guests who would spend weeks with them during the summer and fall. As with the Hut, the piazza was to be a favorite gathering place, and on its east end the family and their guests would take their meals in good weather and have their evening prayers. Here they could enjoy the sea breezes that generally rose about ten in the morning and lasted until the evening, when the wind would shift and blow from the land during the night bringing with it all the sounds and fragrances of the nighttime marsh.4

  A short distance from the house, outside its immediate yard, Charles had had a little schoolhouse built for the children that he also used as a chapel for the people in the settlement. Here Dubuar set up his classroom and began the formal education of Charlie, Joe, and Mary Sharpe. They were joined every morning during the week by the older children of Roswell and Julia King, who rode over from their nearby summer home, Woodville. MaryKing, already a lively and fun-loving fourteen-year-old, was the oldest among them and may have felt a little too old for Mr. Dubuar’s lessons. Audley had only recently turned twelve, and he and Charlie, who would turn ten in October, were the closest of friends, although Fred King was closer to Charlie’s age. Willie King was a studious little eight-year-old, the same age as Joe. Mary Sharpe, at six, was the youngest in 1841. Rossie King, who was a year younger than Mary Sharpe, was to join them the next year.5

  Mr. Dubuar began his classes at eight in the morning with an opening prayer and ended them at two in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. (When they retuned to Montevideo in the fall, he began at nine and ended at three.) The only vacations were the Fourth of July, Washington’s birthday, and three days at Christmas. All the children carried their lunches as if they were far from home and ate at the little schoolhouse, a practice that no doubt gave more time to the parents for their own study and activities. Charles and Mary oversaw the curriculum, and during the next seven years a series of young college graduates taught the children English literature and composition, Latin grammar and classics, natural sciences, and mathematics through trigonometry and beginning calculus. On Monday mornings they would read compositions they had written the previous week and recite some famous speech or some excerpt from some important literary or historical works. Memory work was regarded not as wasted time but as a way for the children to internalize the values and style of an upper class, to develop an ear for the beauty of the English language, and to master the rules of rhetoric and the art of persuasion.6

  Such an education was necessary, Charles and Mary were convinced, for Christian gentlemen and Christian ladies. It had as its goal not only the imparting of knowledge but also the shaping of character and the preparation of their children for usefulness in society. For the boys, it meant an education that prepared them for college and professional work. For Mary Sharpe and Mary King, it meant an education that informed their hearts and minds, refined their manners, and prepared them for the responsibilities of home and family.7

  Charles and Mary were not alone among the planting families of Liberty County in seeking such an education for their children. Indeed, such an education was a part of the ethos of a community long nurtured in the values and pieties of Calvinism. Scattered all around the county were little plantation schools where other children were being prepared for a life of usefulness and distinction. Most notably was the school at the LeConte plantation, where John and Joseph LeConte, under the watchful eye of their brilliant father, had been prepared for their future role as two of the nation’s leading scientists. Charles had been a frequent visitor in the LeConte home, admired greatly the botanical garden of the boys’ father, and may have used their school as a model for the one he established for his children at Maybank and Montevideo.8

  However important the learning that went on in the little plantation school-houses, the learning that took place after school was equally significant. The whole plantation at Maybank—and to a lesser extent at Montevideo—was a schoolhouse for curious and highly disciplined children, especially the boys. The marshes, with their creeks teeming with life; the woods and ridges of the island, with eagles, owls, and migrating warblers; the beaches of nearby St. Catherine’s, with their shells and various pipers, willets, and curlews; the Indian mounds and shell middens that lay waiting with their hidden treasures; the river swamps at Montevideo, with their deer and turkey, alligators and otters, wood ducks and mallards—all invited exploration and increasingly sophisticated analysis that asked what is here, why is it here, and what is its nature?9

  Charles and Mary encouraged such explorations and questions by their children and modeled a love of nature that delighted in the
beauty of the low-country landscape and that found in the world around them the evidences of God’s creative power and goodness. Charles himself taught them astronomy, not only so that they would know the names of the evening stars that shown so brightly and of the constellations that moved across the nighttime sky, but also in order for them to feel the wonder and awe of God’s majesty and of God’s created universe.10

  The boys’ exploration of their environment was encouraged by their hunting and fishing. Both Charlie and Joe soon became avid hunters—and Audley and the other King boys were frequently their companion—advancing from bows and arrows to shotguns and rifles. They learned how to wait for ducks at dawn where oaks dropped their acorns in slow-moving waters and where blinds could be built at the edge of rice fields. They learned how to distinguish the track of a buck from that of a doe and how to sit quietly and call a strutting tom turkey in the spring and how to jump-shoot clapper rails and ricebirds. And in the marsh creeks that flowed in and out with the tide before Maybank and in the river at Half Moon, they caught whiting and flounder, bass, sheephead, and even croakers, and in the winter they went after shad, knowing its roe to be a delicacy, and when the drumming season began in the spring and fall, and they were old enough, they joined others in the rivers and inlets catching the big fish.11

  Joe was as avid an outdoorsman as his brother, but increasingly his attention and efforts were focused on hunting and fishing in order to study what he shot or caught. Robert Mallard later wrote of him: “His gun and fishing-pole, like the net of the entomologist, were to him valuable chiefly as instruments with which to procure specimens for dissection and investigation, in which work he had the zealous aid of every Negro on the plantation.” Many a beautiful specimen fell to his gun. A wood ibis with its white plumage and bald head was carefully embalmed with arsenic and mounted with a wood rat placed in its long bill. Ducks and geese, herons—including the great blue—and a roseate spoonbill were stuffed with cotton as specimens. The same fate awaited curlews, with their sickle-shaped bills, and plovers and orioles and many a migrating songbird. A squirrel was mounted with a peanut in its mouth. Rats from the marsh and barnyard were caught and stuffed, and innumerable bugs that thrived in the low country were gathered and preserved. A large rare kite, with its long, deeply-forked tail, was a prize of one day’s hunting, and a great horned owl that had hooted once too often in the swamp was shot from its perch and mounted with wax eyes and with its wings outstretched. They all went into the museum Charles had Sandy Maybank build for the children at Maybank, where the specimens were carefully examined on worktables and the birds compared to descriptions in Nutall’s Ornithology and labeled in Latin. Joe often dissected what he brought to the museum, and at a very early age he began to make careful sketches of what he saw—a practice that was to be valuable to him later in life.12