Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  In the spring of 1852, Daniel—a brother of Cato, Cassius, and Porter—sold some rice he had raised in his rice patch to some people who lived in the settlement at Oak Hill, the nearby plantation of Solomon Barnard (it bordered White Oak). Daniel’s wife lived at Roswell King’s South Hampton, and it was Daniel’s habit to walk the little road that led from Montevideo and White Oak through Oak Hill to South Hampton. In April, as he walked back to Carlawter, some who owed him for the rice called to him to come to the Oak Hill settlement for a payment on their debt. While he was there, Barnard came up, found him in the settlement, and told him never to come back without his permission. A few weeks later, as Daniel was walking to his wife’s house, those who owed him again called him to come to the settlement to receive the balance of his money. He asked whether Barnard was there, and when told he was not, went to the settlement. He was about to leave when Barnard’s driver found him and ordered him off the plantation. Daniel left immediately. Later in the day, on his way back to Carlawter, he once again encountered the driver, this time on the road. The driver cursed him and “said he had a great mind to tie him & give him a flogging anyhow.” Daniel told him he could do no such thing in a public road. The driver then called some of his men and attempted to capture Daniel, who was able to make his escape by getting across the line into one of the fields of White Oak. Then on a late Thursday afternoon in early June, when Daniel was walking back from his wife’s house at South Hampton, Barnard saw him on the road and ordered him into his backyard, where there was a pillory. When Daniel saw the pillory, he realized Barnard’s intention and tried to make his escape but was overtaken by Barnard and his brother-in-law, Lowndes Walthour. Barnard beat him over the head and arms with a stick and then put him in the pillory, where he flogged him and kept him confined overnight.

  The next day, after Daniel made his way back to Carlawter, he found Thomas Shepard and told him the whole story. Shepard had him strip, and what Shepard found infuriated him. He wrote Barnard immediately, saying, “From all I could judge and as I believe, from the cuts and whales upon his buttock and back, you must have given him at least 70 lashes with all your skill & might.” After reviewing the events as told him by Daniel, Shepard wrote that he would withhold an opinion until he heard from Barnard. But he added that even if Daniel deserved a flogging, Barnard had “grossly violated a rule which always exists among good neighbours.” And he implicitly warned Barnard that if “you don’t see proper to act upon the laws of neighbourship, you will act upon the laws of the Land.”28 Shepard sent a copy of his letter to Charles, who was preparing to leave May-bank after a short visit home. Charles was even more outraged than Shepard. Barnard, he said, “has acted towards me in a very unneighbourly manner and for which he can have no excuse whatever.” If there was a problem with Daniel, then Barnard should have spoken to Shepard, “and he should have had every reasonable satisfaction, and that promptly.” But what particularly astonished Charles was that Barnard gave Daniel “an excessive whipping, and that in a Pillory! I did not know that such an instrument of punishment existed in our neighbourhood!” If, said Charles, “such a practice of the treatment of servants prevails in other neighbourhoods, it certainly does not in ours; & it is one against which I protest, and to which I shall by no means submit.” Charles then used an old ploy that southern whites often used when they wanted to protect a black. “My property,” wrote Charles, “shall be respected and it will be protected.” Ironically, the whole system of slavery was called upon to defend Daniel, who after all was Charles’s chattel.29

  After his strenuous protest, Charles cooled a bit and went on to say: “It is my full conviction that when my neighbour calmly reviews the matter, unless I am mistaken in his character as a man and a gentleman, he will see cause to regret the course he has pursued.” In this way Charles poured oil on these southern waters. He had his letter to Shepard forwarded to Barnard, and it evidently eased the tension between them. Five years later, when Shepard was no longer physically able to manage Montevideo, Charles hired Barnard as the manager for the summer while Charles and Mary traveled in Kentucky and Virginia. Daniel, no doubt, was particularly circumspect that summer.

  Daniel—like his brother Cassius—had a knack for getting into trouble.30 Neither brother ever seemed to learn the lessons that Jack had taught in his folk stories—especially that whites were dangerous and blacks must be constantly on their guard around them. But even their cautious brother Cato found himself caught up in the public tensions between blacks and whites that were building during the 1850s and that could spill over into tensions between blacks and blacks, or whites and whites.

  Elijah Chapman, a small planter—his plantation Edgely was near Riceboro—let his cattle out in the spring to roam the woods and forage in the new growth of grass that grew wherever sunlight penetrated the canopy of oaks and pines. When he could not find several head, he began searching nearby plantations and was eventually led to Montevideo by one of his slaves. He wrote Charles what he found and what followed:

  In hunting for my cattle in May, there was a large bunch that I could not find. After hunting two or three days I found that they had them in your pasture. In riding over to get the cattle out, I found where they had just killed a black cow of mine and burnt up the hide and offal. And where they had emptied [?] the maw of two more, I took up a part of the hide and showed it to your carpenters that was working on your house. I thought at first that I would not say anything about it knowing what Negroes are. Two or three times one of my boys complained to me about Cato’s abuse to him about his telling me that the cattle was killed in your pasture. I told the boy to take no notice of him. On Saturday 17 of November, I sent the boy to Riceboro. Cato met him there and told him the first time he met him hunting for cattle, he would do him so bad that they would have to turn him out of the church or send him to jail he said. Mr. Stebbins son was present when he told him so. The boy would have fought Cato long ago, but I forbid him doing so. I thought it was best to let you know so as we could put a stop to it.31

  Chapman’s “boy” had evidently found a secret place where those from Carlawter had been enjoying a feast by barbecuing three of Chapman’s cattle. Cato was furious at the man’s betrayal and by his intrusion into the affairs of Carlawter—an intrusion that challenged Cato’s authority and his reputation with whites. In Riceboro, before Stebbins’s general store, a dangerous fight had been narrowly avoided, even though Cato knew that the consequences would have been severe for him. But what had been at stake for Cato was not only his authority and reputation but also a secret world at Carlawter where stray cattle could be butchered and feasts held out of sight of white managers and owners. That secret world lay beneath the relative calm of Carlawter, where most who lived along its sandy street were dutiful and submissive and where the ideology of slavery appeared to have triumphed. Chapman’s letter must have provided Charles a disturbing glimpse into this secret world, where resistance to white authority was not only nurtured but also practiced. Norecord was left of Charles’s response to Chapman or of his questions to Cato. But powerful illusions—rooted in Charles’s labors to create calm, peaceful, and orderly settlements—must have shaped what Charles wanted to see when he glimpsed this secret world. For what he was to see on his return to Liberty County—even as he heard distant train whistles helping to transform the county—were images of home, where blacks and whites dwelled together in substantial harmony under the benevolent rule of whites.

  25

  MAYBANK II

  During one of her bouts of homesickness in Philadelphia, Mary had received a letter from Susan Cumming warning her that the home Mary remembered and longed for was no more. “But my sister,” Susan had written her, “your home whenever you return to it will be changed. Perhaps your children will be separated from you, you will not direct their education and pursuits and many persons and things which formerly gave you pleasure you will cease to feel an interest in.” Home, Susan had reminded Mary, is not som
ething unchangeable, an immutable place, but rather a place in time that is always becoming something other than it had been. Sitting at an old family desk at Social Bluff and looking out on the waters of the North Newport flowing into the sea, Susan had confessed to Mary how “differently everything appears to me now from what it did when this place was first my home.” Then the “future seemed joyous and bright,” but now “a pall has been cast over it.” Still, she said, “how much gratitude do I owe for undeserved mercies … and if not self deceived a hope beyond this life.”1

  Mary and Charles were not naïve about such matters. They knew, Charles had written, that their home was not “an unchanging inheritance” somehow immune to the vicissitudes of life. And they were aware that the passage of time in Liberty County—the flow of the North Newport and the tide’s regular coming in and going out over the Medway marshes—had wrought, while they were away, changes among their family and friends and on the social landscape of their remembered past.2 Such musings, however, did not dampen their joy as they began their preparations to return to their beloved low-country home with its familiar ways. They would miss Charlie, who was staying behind at Harvard Law School, and Joe, who was hard at work at the Medical College of the University of Pennsylvania. But Charles and Mary had pride in the accomplishments of their sons and in their promise for usefulness and distinction in society. So leaving the boys in the North was not so difficult for the parents as they made ready their departure for home. As for the eighteen-year-old Mary Sharpe, she would go home with her parents and prepare to enter a lively social life among the planting families of coastal Georgia.

  Whatever their sense of alienation from northern society, however irritating and disconcerting they found its growing antislavery sentiment, Charles and Mary did not hesitate to carry home to Liberty County products of northern energy and ingenuity. For weeks they oversaw the crating of furniture and the packing of boxes. A piano bought for Mary Sharpe in Philadelphia and a recently purchased mirror stove from the firm of Hill and Schoch were meticulously prepared for shipment south. Two mahogany and two cherry dining tables—handsomely made by Pennsylvania craftsmen—were carefully crated, as were twenty-six cane-bottom walnut chairs, four rockers, several dresser bureaus, a mahogany study table, two bales of carpeting, a large sofa, and the miscellaneous furnishings of a large and affluent household. With the furniture went boxes of medicines—quinine, alcohol, brandy, camphors of various sorts, cream of tartar, soda, alum, nitrate of potash, calomel, and the ever-present Blue Mass for stomach problems and general ailments. And strange as it may seem, there were also barrels of groceries—a barrel of wheat flour and a barrel of rye flour, a barrel of Irish potatoes and a barrel of green apples, a large can of lard, two bags of buckwheat meal, and a half-barrel of crackers. And there were boxes of currants and citron, almonds and spices of all sorts—including cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, and ginger, the products of exotic lands. And there were boxes of tools and boxes of candles and soap, and most surprising there were eight superior hams, six superior sides, and a half-dozen tongues carefully packed for shipping to a plantation home with its own smokehouses. Finally, there were boxes of books. Some contained histories: Life of Luther, Life of Calvin, Life of Wesley, books on the early and medieval church, and D’Augnige’s history of the Reformation in four volumes. Other boxes were packed with biblical commentaries, classics of Puritan theology, and devotional books intended to expand the libraries at Montevideo and Maybank, where Charles would seek to do scholarly work far from the resources of a college or public library.3

  Furniture, barrels, and boxes were all carried on drays to a Philadelphia wharf and shipped on 25 October 1853 aboard the Keystone State. A week later Charles, Mary, and Mary Sharpe left Philadelphia. They reached Colonel’s Island on the evening of 7 November and hurried across the causeway as the shadows spread and the evening glow of the Medway marsh began to fade. They turned under the arching oak that served as a gate. As they rode down the avenue, with its thick canopy overhead, they finally saw the lights of Maybank reaching out into the engulfing night to welcome them home. Two days later a river schooner arrived at Half Moon wharf. Andrew and his men were waiting with oxcarts for the furniture, barrels, and boxes.4

  Although the November frosts made it safe to return to Montevideo, renovations of the plantation house there inspired Charles and Mary to stay at Maybank for the winter. Charles had already sketched a drawing of a much-enlarged plantation home and had, long before the return from Philadelphia, sent instructions for Sandy Maybank and Porter and their young carpenter apprentice William (a grandson of Hamlet) to begin gathering the building materials. Among other things, they were to take men from Carlawter and Arcadia into the swamps to cut cypress, and from the logs they were to draw twenty thousand shingles. Others had been put to work in the brickyard at Montevideo digging clay, cutting and hauling in wood, forming and firing the bricks to be used in foundations and chimneys. After Charles returned to Liberty County and could supervise their work, the carpenters began the renovations and enlargement of the house, and Daddy Robin and others at Arcadia took over the responsibility of cutting cypress logs and drawing shingles. Lumber for the framing was ordered from sawmills in Savannah, brought through the coastal waters and up the North Newport by a river schooner, and unloaded by Cato and his men at the Montevideo wharf.5

  While the work on the house proceeded, Charles and Mary turned their attention to the interests of a retired couple. Most pressing were the gardens at Maybank and Montevideo. They had been carefully laid out years earlier. At Montevideo oaks and magnolias had been brought from the woods and carefully planted to enhance the approach to the house, and a double row of cedars had been planted along the road that ran past a little pond to the river and the wharf. Jasmine now grew around the piazza and would in early spring mingle yellow blooms with the white blossoms of climbing lady banksias roses. Camellias, azaleas, and tea olives were scattered in places of filtered sun, while in the open were beds of roses, perennials, vegetables, herbs, and Mary’s prized bed of strawberries. Trees, shrubs, and perennials had been collected over the years from various places. Some native wildflowers had been gathered on the plantation. Some plants had been purchased in Savannah or ordered by mail. And Charles had brought back from Columbia dahlias, chrysanthemums, Persian honeysuckle, lilies, and roses. But most of their garden had come from cuttings and gifts from other low-country plantations—from the Retreat, from South Hampton and Richmond-on-the-Ogeechee. And from the LeConte plantation had come cuttings of “choice roses,” tea olives, purple and scarlet azaleas, and roots of amaryllis.6 At Maybank there were vegetable and flower gardens and a fine grape arbor, but special attention had been devoted to an orchard so that during the family’s stay on the island fresh fruit—oranges, figs, pomegranates, pears, peaches, plums, and apples—would be readily available.7

  These gardens and orchards had not been neglected during the family’s stay in Columbia and Philadelphia—indeed, they had largely come to maturity during those years—but there was much work waiting to be done on Charles and Mary’s return. Mary took primary responsibility for the garden renovations. In a long letter to Charlie in the spring of 1854, Charles described Mary’s day and work in the garden at Maybank:

  She rises about six in the morning, or now half-past five; takes her bath, reads, and is ready for family worship about seven; then breakfasts with a moderate appetite and enjoys a cup of good tea. Breakfast concluded and the cups, etc., washed up and dinner ordered, Little Jack gathers up his “weepons,” as he calls them—the flower trowel, the trimming saw, the nippers and pruning shears and two garden hoes—and follows his mistress, with her sunbonnet on and her large India-rubber-cloth working gloves, into the flower and vegetable gardens. In these places she spends sometimes near two hours hoeing, planting, pruning, etc., Little Jack and frequently Beck and several other little fellows and Gilbert in the bargain all kept as busy as bees about her—one sweeping, another watering, a
nother weeding, another planting and trimming, and another carrying off the limbs and trash. Then she dismisses the forces, and they go off in separate detachments to their respective duties about the house and premises, and she takes a walk of observation and superintendence about the kitchen yard and through the orchard and lawn, accompanied by any friends she may have with her and who may be disposed to take a walk of a quiet domestic nature.

  About ten her outdoor exercise is over, and she comes in, sets aside her bonnet, draws off her gloves, and refreshes herself with a basin of cool water, after which she disposes of her seamstresses and looks that the house has been well put to rights and in point and in perfect order—flowerpots dressed, etc. She now devotes herself to cutting out, planning, fitting, or sewing, giving attention to the clothing department and to the condition of the furniture of chambers, curtains, towels, linens, etc. The wants of the servants’ wardrobe are inquired into, and all the thousand and one cares of the family attended to.

  Meanwhile the yards have been swept, the walk sanded, and Patience has her culinary world all in neat order. The two milk-white cats have had their breakfast, and are lying in each other’s paws in the shade on the green grass in the flower garden; and the young dog Rex, having enjoyed his repast, has stretched himself at full length in the sun, and ever and anon rolls over and wallows and kicks his feet into the air. The old turkey hen has spread her young ones like scouts around her, and is slowly picking along the green, and the gobbler is strutting with two or three idle dames in another direction. The fowls have scattered themselves everywhere in the lot, crowing and cackling and scratching; the sheep have finished their early browse, and are lying down beneath the great hickory tree; and overhead and all around is one general concert of birds.