Dwelling Place
Page 51
But in the end the offer for the family did not appear as advantageous as hoped, and the transaction was not completed. Then on 10 December, Charles wrote Mary from Savannah that Charlie had completed the sale for $4500 cash. “They have all been sold to one person—not to be separated, but remain on his own farm in the vicinity of Macon.” Charles believed they had been “sold as we de-sired”—that is, as a family—“and of this we should be glad, although more might have been obtained had they been sold separately.” Then he added, “Conscience is better than money.”25
So the deed was done, and Mary wrote: “I am thankful that family is finally disposed of.” The day after the sale, Charles began paying off his debts—his bank account had fallen to almost nothing—and he put $2,337.48 in railroad stock as a change of investment. Even Porter and Sandy Maybank were paid for their work on Saturdays during the previous two years. And Mary, now deprived of Phoebe, began shopping for one of the new sewing machines that had recently appeared on the market.26
The sale of Phoebe, Cassius, and their children was a moment of self-revelation for Charles. Years earlier, when Charles had been a student at Princeton, he had wondered, in midst of a moral crisis, whether he ought to continue “to hold slaves.” He had written Mary “as to the principle of slavery, it is wrong!” and he had asked himself: “In my present circumstances, with evil on my hands entailed from my father, would the general interests of the slaves and community at large, with reference to the slaves, be promoted best, by emancipation? Could I do more for the ultimate good of the slave population by holding or emancipating what I own?”27 His decision to return to Liberty County as a missionary and reformer had seemed to him one way to negotiate between duty and home; it had seemed a bridge between the cultural heritage of a place and people whom he loved and his convictions about the evils of slavery and the freedom of the human will to turn from self-love and self-interest to a concern for the good of others. What was now clear was that his work and his life in Liberty County had not served as a bridge between these competing convictions and impulses but rather as a bridge that had led him away from earlier convictions about the evils of slavery to the unwavering support of a southern home and human bondage.
The sale of the family was a moment of self-revelation because Charles finally knew clearly where he stood. His heart had hardened in regard to slavery. There would be no more clear warnings of the corrupting influences of slavery that had marked so many of his reports during his missionary years. Rather, during the coming years he would take his stand with a southern homeland, where old times would not be forgotten, and where human bondage seemed the only defense against chaos and anarchy and the only promise for a long-sought peace and order.28
Yet the sale of Phoebe and Cassius and the children was not only a moment of self-revelation for Charles; it was also a moment of deep self-deception. When Charles wrote Mary in a self-congratulatory way that “conscience is better than money,” he seemed to think he had freed himself from any charge of self-interest, and he appeared completely oblivious to the ways in which he had acted cruelly in the quest for the high ideals of peace and harmony. Indeed, he seemed unconscious of the ways in which he was confirming Harriett Beecher Stowe’s charge against him. She had written that while he possessed a “sublime spirit” and a “mind capable of the very highest impulses,” if we “look over his whole writings, we shall see painfully how the moral sense of the finest mind may be perverted by constant familiarity with such a system.”29
In late winter 1857, three and a half months after Phoebe and Cassius had been banished and sold, their voices returned as if from the dead to disturb once again the tranquillity of Montevideo and Maybank. On 18 March Charles, having disposed of all of Cassius’s possessions except his buggy and having settled his debts and collected most of what was owed Cassius, wrote to Charlie in Savannah:
Enclosed is Cassius’ account. Have delayed until we could sell his mare. Sold last week. Balance to his credit: $84.75, for which you will find a check within of date, the space left blank for the name to whom the check shall be paid. Insert the name of Cassius’ master, to whom you will please send the account and check. But first write to him to ascertain if Cassius and his family are still with him, so that there may be a certainty of Cassius’ getting his money. Keep copies of your letters, and register the letter enclosing the check when you send it. We must use every precaution to get his money to him.
Charles’s record of Cassius’s account reads as follows:
Account of Property belonging to Cassius left to be given away and to be sold as he desired by his former Master
Articles left to be given to his children Nanny and James
3 small hogs, 3 pots, 1 oven, 1 pail
1 piggin, 3 plates, 1 new bucket
All given by Porter and Cato to Nanny and James a short time after Cassius left.
The saddle and bridle was taken by Dan [Cassius’s brother]. He said Cassius gave them to him.
Property left to be sold:
This amount now due Cassius and sent to his
present master in a check through C. C. Jones, Jr.
Esquire in the Bank of the State of Georgia dated March 18, 185730
Charles, having thus carefully accounted for Cassius’s possessions, was ready to bring the whole business to a conclusion. He apparently thought that Phoebe and Cassius and the children were with a planter near Macon in the center of the state. But knowing the ways of slave selling and slave trading, he wanted to make sure that those so recently bought were still with the purchaser. Charles did not know it when he wrote Charlie, but two letters were already on the way to him from distant New Orleans.
The first letter to arrive was from a man named Lilly. Once again Charles wrote Charlie in Savannah:
Enclosed you will find a letter received today which will be as great a surprise to you and Joe as it has been to us. The man Lilly who writes the letter is evidently a Negro trader, and not the permanent owner of the Negroes! The internal evidence of the letter proves it. In addition, I have learned that Lyons at the Boro received a friendly letter from Old Cassius this evening in which he speaks of not yet being at home—dated in New Orleans. My opinion is that they are there on sale! Lilly says he bought them in Savannah. This was not the name of the man who appeared in the purchase, nor was New Orleans his home. Was it not a planter near Macon who bought for his own use and not to sell again? Here seems to be deceptions wheel within a wheel!
Since Charlie had already written to the ostensible purchaser about the money owed Cassius, Charles thought that they might learn more about what had happened to the family if there was a reply from the one who had signed the papers for the family. In any case, he told Charlie:
Do not let him know of Lilly’s letter. He may request you to send him the money for the people. Do not do so. It will be a roundabout way, and they may never get it. All we wish to learn of him is to know how the game has been played. If we have been deceived by Wright and the purchaser, we have been deceived. We were endeavoring to do the best we could.
Charles then instructed Charlie to send Cassius’s money—together with the account of Cassius’s possessions that had been sold—to Benjamin Morgan Palmer, Charles’s former colleague in Columbia, who was now serving as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans. He was, said Charles, “the only friend I have in New Orleans upon whom I could confidently call in the matter.” Palmer was to be told the whole story and of Charles’s fear “that the people have fallen into the hands of a trader.” Palmer, wrote Charles, could pay the money “over to Cassius and Phoebe himself and then inform us of the fact.”31
More information was soon to arrive. Charles secured the letter that had been sent to Frederick Lyons in Riceboro. The letter had been dictated by Phoebe and Cassius and written down by someone in New Orleans who apparently did not understand clearly their Gullah accents. The letter was sent to Lyons—Mr. Delions, he was called in the letter—as o
ne white man Phoebe and Cassius trusted and apparently knew well. They probably had over the years taken secret paths at night from Carlawter to the boro, where Lyons had welcomed those who had come under cover of darkness to his store and had sold rum to those from the settlements who had a little money. He had been, the planters believed, all too familiar with their slaves.32
New Orleans March 17th 1857
Pleas tell my daugher Clairissa and Nancy a heap how a doo for me Pheaby and Cash and Cashes son James we left Savanah the first of Jany we are now in New Orleans. Please tell them that their sister Jane died the first of Feby we did not know what was the matter with her some of the doctors said that she had Plurisly and some thought that she had Consumption. Although we were sold for spite I hope that it is for our own good but we cannot be doing any better than were are doing very well. Mr Delions will please tell Cato that what [food] we have got to t[throw] away now it would be anough to furnish you Plantation for one season Mr Delions will please answer this Letter for Clairssa and Let me know all that has happened since I left. Please tell them that the Children were all sick with the measles but they are well now. Clairssa your affectionate mother and Father sends a heap of Love to you and your Husband and my Grand Children Phebea. Mag & Cloe. John. Judy. Sue. My Aunt Aufy sinena and Minton and Little Plaska. Charles Nega. Fillis and all of their Childdren. Cash. Prime. Laffatte. Rick Tonia [Victoria] [send their love] to you all. Give our Love to Cashes Brother Porter and his wife Patience. Victoria gives her Love to cousin Beck and Miley.
I have no more to say untill i get a home. I remain your affectionate Mother and Father.
Pheobia and Cash
P. S. Please give my love to Judys Husband Plaska and also Cashs love. Phoebe and Cash send a great deal of Howdie for Mr Adam Dunumn and Mr Samuel Braton.33
The letter with its greetings to many family members and friends was a reminder that the sale of Phoebe and Cassius and their children had violently torn them away from many whom they loved. Among those to whom greetings and love were sent were Phoebe’s daughter Clarissa and her children; Cash’s daughter Nancy (or Nanny) and son James; Porter and Patience and their children; and various other relatives at the Retreat and at Carlawter, plus two more shopkeepers in Riceboro.34 Phoebe believed—the tone of the letter was more hers than Cassius’s—that they had been sold “for spite,” that there had been ill will and malice on Charles and Mary’s part in the sale. Nevertheless, she evoked an ancient piety in interpreting what had happened to them and declared that she hoped “it is for our own good.”35 And that good, she said, could already be seen in the abundance of food available to them in the New Orleans slave market: “please tell Cato that what [food] we have got to t[hrow] away now it would be anough to furnish you Plantation for one season.” So even from a distance, Phoebe was challenging the benevolence of Charles and Mary—and the leadership of Cato—by declaring that even in the notorious slave market in New Orleans there was more food available than at Carlawter.36
As for Jane, the report of her death seemed matter-of-fact. Perhaps for her parents, who had already lost so many children—including John—and who had been so suddenly carried away from the home they had known all their lives, Jane’s death seemed simply one more loss among so many. Charles was more expansive as he thought about Jane and her death in a distant place:
Am truly sorry to learn the death of poor Jane! How soon and unexpectedly has she been cut off—the cause of all that has been done! Would that she had lived and died at home in peace with God and with the world! I have prayed for those people many, many, very many times. I wish them well.37
So with Charles’s prayers and well wishes, Phoebe and Cassius—together with Little Cash, Prime, Victoria, and LaFayette—disappeared into the massive slave markets of New Orleans. At the time, no one who knew their story could have imagined that in a few tumultuous years there would be a strange reversal. One who had been served most of her life by Phoebe would find herself an exile in New Orleans, and one of those who had disappeared in the New Orleans slave market would reappear in a very different Liberty County.
27
PATIENCE’S KITCHEN
Of all those who lived in the settlements, no one had been closer to Phoebe than her cousin Patience. In many ways Phoebe—who was eight years older—had been like a big sister to Patience, only a big sister whose restless ways Patience would not follow. The cousins had married brothers and had worked closely together for years, cooking, sewing, and serving tea on the piazzas at Maybank and Montevideo. Both cousins had been devoted to Daddy Jack. He had been a kind and loving father to Phoebe, and he was said to love Patience “as his own child.” Patience and Porter had named a son after him. Mary Jones had regarded the two women as her indispensable personal servants, and when Mary had been seriously ill in Marietta, she had written, “The greatest personal privation I have had to endure has been the want of either Patience or Phoebe.”1
But for all of their closeness, Phoebe and Patience had developed over the years personalities as different as their husbands were different. Both of them felt at some deep level a pressing anger—but Phoebe’s anger had eaten away at her, while Patience’s anger had energized her. Phoebe’s anger had made her reckless and had left her vulnerable. Patience’s anger had made her wise as a serpent while appearing harmless as a dove. And their anger, while largely turned toward white oppressors, could also be turned toward each other precisely because their lives were so closely intertwined, because the actions of one affected the life of the other, and because they could see in each other hated stereotypes whites used for slave women—the Surly Troublemaker and the Contented Mammy.2
If Phoebe and Cassius had seemed troublesome and rebellious to Charles and Mary, Patience and Porter appeared honest and reliable. While Phoebe and Cassius had chafed under the burdens of slavery and Phoebe had been inclined to cross her arms and express open defiance, Patience and Porter had sought through their good manners and efficient work to oil the system of slavery and to make life easier for their family and for those in the settlement. Phoebe and Cassius’s road had led them to open resistance and to the slave market in Savannah. Patience and Porter’s road led them to veiled resistance and to a capacity to endure the humiliations of slavery without succumbing to its power or internalizing its ideology. Each road was hard and was marked by its own sorrows. Neither road—as roads traveled by slaves—had been freely chosen, yet each couple had decided on which road to walk as they responded to their bondage and to its deep oppression.3
Patience had listened more carefully than Phoebe to Jack’s stories. She knew that the fowl-hawk—even one with a benevolent look in his eye—could come sweeping down at any moment and snatch its victims away. To meet the challenge of the fowl-hawk, she had mastered the rituals of subordination. To Charles and Mary, Patience’s pleasant ways and good manners—her “yes ma’ams” and “yes sirs”—her unfailing attention to her work, and what Mary called “Patience’s fidelity of character” had made her a model servant. But for Patience, such deference and fidelity were ways to achieve her own ends—in particular, the protection of her family, her “chicks,” from the dangers of the fowl-hawk. Over the years of practicing such art, Patience had taken on the character of her name. She appeared to whites as a Mammy figure—a stout, happy, subservient woman who loved her white family. But beneath such an exterior she was patiently waiting for the time when she could reveal, without danger to her own family, what was hidden beneath her pleasant and deferential ways. In the meantime, this large, strong woman was energized by her anger to become the undisputed master of the kitchen as Charles and Mary sought to make Maybank and Montevideo places of beauty, warmth, and generous hospitality.4
Patience stood in a long line of low-country cooks who combined African, European, and Native American traditions into a distinct low-country cuisine. Her mother-in-law, Old Lizzie, had been her primary teacher, but there had been others as well, especially Mom Sylvia at the Ret
reat. They had shown her remembered dishes fixed in traditional African ways, and how to cook over open fires and in fireplaces. They had taught her how to prepare the foods that came from the gardens and fields, from the woods, rivers, and marshes of the low country, and how to season the foods with herbs from the plantation gardens and with spices brought in Savannah. Mary and Sister Susan and other plantation mistresses also had had their say over the years about how meals were to be prepared in Patience’s kitchen. They had provided menus that made the rounds between plantation kitchens, and they had given special instructions about the selection of menus and precise directions about when and how the food was to be presented at the table. Patience had learned from all these diverse sources and had added her own particular touch to her cooking—a touch that had grown out of her own experience in the kitchen and that provided a distinctive character to the food she prepared. In this way she had become, long before the renovations had begun at Montevideo, an African-American Gullah cook of remarkable skill. A frequent visitor at Montevideo and Maybank later wrote of Gullah cooks generally that they “completely distanced” French cooks “in the production of wholesome, dainty and appetizing food,” and he remembered with particular pleasure “‘Maum’ Patience,” who “was adept in her art, reliable, and refined in manner and conduct.”5
Before Patience could begin to work her magic in the kitchen at Maybank or Montevideo, hard and sustained work was required to get food to the kitchen. Rice and corn grown on the plantations provided the basic staples. They demanded the unremitting labors of Cato, Andrew, and Stepney and their crews. For the rice, in addition to the work of building the fields, dams, and canals, sweating men and women had to reap, thrash, and pound the golden grain. As for the corn, after it had been harvested, it still had to be shucked and milled before it could be prepared for bread or grits. The field or red peas, planted along the rows of corn, had to be harvested and thrashed. Vegetables from the gardens—sweet potatoes and collard greens, okra and arrowroot, red potatoes and turnips, eggplant and butter beans, squash, tomatoes, and onions—all had to be carefully tended before being gathered and brought to the kitchen. Strawberries and melons—the Maybank melons were famous around the county for their sweetness—together with fruit from the orchards, had to be gathered at the right moment before being eaten fresh or made into jam or jelly, or before the rinds of the melons could be pickled.6