Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  The marriage was held in April 1857 at Montevideo. Two hundred invitations were sent, but of course not all those invited could come. Sarah Howe wrote from Columbia: “Few things in this world would give me more pleasure than to witness the union of two young friends whom I not only esteem but love. Mary Sharpe has always seemed very near to me, and I can give her my blessing with all the feelings of a mother’s heart.” But, she added, it was impossible for them to attend. And General Cocke wrote from Virginia that he deeply regretted not being able to attend the wedding of “my dear Mary Sharpe.” But many could attend and many arrived long before the wedding itself.14

  Kitty Stiles arrived in late December and stayed more than three months. Mary Sharpe had spent months with her in Savannah, and they were the closest of friends, so it seemed natural that they should be together as the arrangements were being made for the wedding. But there were others as well. “Cousin” John Dunwody arrived from Roswell in March. His wife, Jane, had died the previous summer, and now his fine mansion in Roswell seemed empty and lonely. Dunwody wanted to visit friends in the low country, and no doubt he went out to see Arcadia, his old plantation home, where he and Jane had lived so many happy years together and where their children had been born. Heintended his visit to be short, but he became seriously ill, and for three weeks Charles and Mary had to give him constant attention. Dunwody’s son, Dr. William Elliot Dunwody, was summoned to help care for his father, and he too stayed for days. In the meantime, John Jones and his wife, Jane, with their son Dunwody and younger children arrived. Jane was the niece of John Dunwody, who had been like a father to her, and she too helped to look after her uncle. And of course William Maxwell was there. The old man was missing Betsy terribly, and he did not want to be alone as the plans went forward for the marriage of his dear Mary Sharpe. Altogether, it was a very full household as the preparations for the wedding intensified. Patience must have been pushed to the limits of her energy and of her cooking and managerial skills to see that meals were prepared and served at the long dining room table and that the duties of the house servants were carried out promptly and correctly. As for Mary, the mother of the bride, she may very well have wished for Phoebe, the “accomplished house servant in any and every line: good cook, washer and ironer, and fine seamstress.”15 But Phoebe was that very spring in the slave market in New Orleans, where she had buried her daughter Jane.

  The guests began arriving in earnest the week before the wedding. While the women visited and worked on the preparations, some of the young men, including Joe, went in the Kings’ little sloop out to St. Catherine’s Island for a maroon at “Mr. Waldburg’s summer place,” a beach cottage owned by Jacob Waldburg, who planted cotton on the large and isolated island.16

  The wedding itself was held at nine o’clock on Wednesday evening, 22 April 1857. Charles performed the ceremony and used as the text for his homily a passage from the Old Testament book of Proverbs: “I Wisdom dwell with Prudence.” It was twilight and the garden at Montevideo was at the peak of its springtime splendor. The white blossoms of the dogwoods reflected the fading light, and the tea olives perfumed the air as the night wind came up from the river, bringing the murmur of dark waters. A few days earlier Charles had noted in his journal that the whippoorwills had begun calling in the evening, and now they added their music to the wedding ceremony. Inside the house a feast had been spread. Wedding cakes had been ordered from Savannah, but most of the food—hams and roasts, quail and turkey, shrimp and crab, pilau and pies, pickled peaches, nuts and fruits, fresh strawberries from the garden, together with various breads, jellies, and syllabubs—represented the exhausting work of Patience and her crew of helpers.17

  As Charles and Mary looked around at family and friends illumined by the flickering lights of candles, they remembered their own wedding now so long ago. Theirs had been in December as a cold mist had swirled outside and frost had decorated the windows. But the Retreat had been beautiful with its garlands and blazing fireplaces, and Joseph had had everything put in perfect order for the wedding of his beloved daughter. So many who had been there were now gone. And surely none were missed on this April evening more than Joseph himself and dear Betsy.

  On the Monday evening following the wedding, after most of the guests had departed Montevideo, “the people had their wedding feast.” Long tables were set up near the river and loaded down with food—no doubt some of it left over from the wedding—and a beef was killed and barbecued over an open fire. It was a day of celebration for those who lived at Carlawter and in the settlements at Maybank and Arcadia after all the frenzied work required for the wedding. And for Charles and Mary it was an occasion to demonstrate not only their benevolence but also their conviction that slavery was a domestic institution, and that servants were a part of the planter’s family. For those doing the celebrating, however, there must have been deep anxiety, for they knew only too well that the marriage of whites, like the death of whites, often brought painful separations to those who lived in the settlements.18

  Shortly before the wedding ceremony had taken place, a marriage contract had been signed. Robert signed for himself, and Charlie, Joe, and Henry Hart Jones signed as trustees representing the interests of Mary Sharpe. The contract was primarily intended to secure the slave property that Mary Sharpe would bring to her marriage. Charles and Mary had carefully discussed the needs that their daughter would have as she and Robert set up house in Walthourville. She would obviously need, they thought, some domestic help, so the decision was made that Lucy and Charles, with their sixteen-year-old daughter Tenah, would go with Mary Sharpe as her property. Lucy was a skilled cook and housekeeper, and Tenah was bright and was quickly learning the work of a domestic servant. The move would mean that Charles would live at Arcadia, while Lucy and Tenah would live in Walthourville. Charles would thus be a part of the throng of men traveling on Saturday afternoons to a “wife house.” For Charles, however, this did not mark a significant change, since for years he had been shifted about from plantation to plantation, according to the need for his oxcart and his labor.19

  Lucy and Tenah would not be enough help for Mary Sharpe, however, even though she and Robert were just beginning to establish their home. So it was decided that Patience’s sister Elsey—the wife of Syphax the carpenter, who lived at Lambert—would also be given to Mary Sharpe. With her would go her six youngest children and one grandchild. In addition, Elsey and Syphax’s oldest son, Robert, and his wife, Harriett, together with their children Betsy and Matilda, were also given as a wedding gift. Altogether sixteen men, women, and children were given to Mary Sharpe. They included the grandchildren of Andrew and Mary Ann and of Mom Rosetta and Sam. They also included great-grand-children and great-great-grandchildren of Old Jupiter, who had been the driver at Liberty Hall and who had blown the conch-shell horn when the sky in the east began to pale. Robert’s body servant James joined them as one who would help serve the needs of the young minister and his bride. James had grown up in the settlement at the old Mallard Place, where Pompey was the driver and Dr. Harry had long practiced his medical skills.20

  Mary Sharpe’s marriage precipitated not only a wedding gift of slaves but also a general division of property among Charlie, Joe, and Mary Sharpe. Three weeks before the wedding, Charles submitted a tax return for Arcadia. Without formally deeding the property to his children, he listed Arcadia as now belonging to “C. C. Jones, Jun., Joseph Jones, and Mary Sharpe Jones.” With its 1,996½ acres were listed “42 slaves” as now belonging to his children. Charles would continue to give general oversight to the operation of the plantation and Mary would continue to be concerned about the health and living conditions of those who lived in the Arcadia settlement, but the profits that flowed from its rice and cotton fields would now begin to be divided evenly among Charlie, Joe, and Mary Sharpe.21

  A few weeks after Mary Sharpe and Robert’s wedding, Mary’s half-brother Charles Berrien Jones died, leaving a wife, Marion Anderson Jones, and six c
hildren. All of his life he had remained his momma’s boy and had kept the pompous ways of one who was not too sure of himself. He had, however, been reconciled to Mary and Charles after the dispute over Joseph’s will and had looked to them for the support and guidance of an older sister and her husband. As a kind of peace offering, he had sent Charles the old silver mounted shotgun that had belonged to Charles’s father, John Jones. The gun had evidently been kept at the Retreat, and in the division of property following Joseph’s death, Charles Berrien had taken possession of it. For their part, Charles and Mary had welcomed Charles Berrien and his family to Montevideo and Maybank, and Mary had gone to be with Marion when she was in labor and when any of the children were seriously ill.22

  Beneath these calm family waters, however, trouble had been brewing long before Charles Berrien’s death. Marion—like her alcoholic brother Joseph Anderson, the widower of Evelyn Jones—had an unstable side to her personality. She imagined insults where none were intended and saw schemes where none were being laid. In all this she found encouragement in her sister-in-law Emma Jones Harris, who still seethed over being left out of her father’s will for eloping with Dr. Stephen Harris. And the primary person on whom they focused their anger was Henry Hart Jones. In contrast to an equivocating Charles Berrien, Henry had stood firmly with Joseph in his decision in regard to Emma, whose elopement had been seen as an act of “disobedience, ingratitude, and deception.” And while Charles Berrien had managed his planting interests only moderately well, Henry had followed in his father’s footsteps in successfully enlarging his holdings of land and slaves. Moreover, when their brother James Newton had died, it was not Charles Berrien, the oldest of the brothers, who had been given responsibility for managing the estate but Henry. All of this was resented deeply by Marion, so it was not surprising that she refused Henry’s request to see and pray with Charles Berrien as he lay dying. What would be surprising and shocking to the Jones clan was the “diabolical” plan for revenge that soon began to consume the grieving Marion and that came to fruition in a few years.23

  Charles and Mary left shortly after Charles Berrien’s funeral for a meeting of the Presbyterian General Assembly being held in Lexington, Kentucky. In contrast to the long days of carriage and steamboat travel of a few years earlier, they were able to make the trip by train in only three days, including a stop in Marietta to see Aunt Eliza Robarts and her family and a quick visit with John Jones and his family in Rome, where John was now serving as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church. But the train trip, short as it was in comparison with earlier travel, left Charles exhausted. “Could I have in any degree foreseen how much exhausted he would have been,” Mary wrote, “I would never have consented to his coming on to the assembly.” But after a good night’s rest, Charles was refreshed, and for the next ten days he enjoyed the opportunity of being with many friends from around the country. Thornwell and Adger were there from Columbia, and there were other friends from his Philadelphia days, and from Princeton too. Still, in spite of the pleasure of seeing old friends, his strength was clearly waning. “You have no concept, my dear child,” Mary wrote Mary Sharpe, “how feeble your dear father is. I am convinced if ever he is to be permanently benefited, the effort must now be made.”24

  That effort was a trip to Hot Springs, Virginia, so that Charles might bathe in the healing waters of the springs. The “creeping paralysis” of his disease was slowly spreading, and even his heart appeared to be weakening. When they arrived at the springs, Mary wrote, “My hope and daily prayer is that a special blessing may rest upon his use of these wonderful waters—these fountains which an all-wise and gracious Providence has opened here for the suffering and afflicted.” For the next six weeks they visited various Virginia springs—Hot Springs, White Sulphur Springs, Rockbridge Alum Springs, Rockbridge Baths—trying different treatments and seeing different doctors. But none of them worked. “Your dear father has not derived the advantage we anticipated,” Mary confided to Mary Sharpe. “At times,” she wrote, “he appears very despondent in reference to his future recovery. In all our hours of darkness and sorrow how precious is the truth that if we are indeed the children of God, loving Him, all things shall work together for our good! Here rests our faith and hope.” So they turned their faces toward home, having completed their last long trip together, and arrived at May-bank in late August 1857.25

  While Charles and Mary had been away, Joe and Charlie had spent a profitable summer. Joe had been unanimously elected to a professorship at the University of Georgia, thanks not only to his growing reputation as a scientist but also to the political savvy and hard work of his uncles John Jones and Henry Hart Jones. The position—professor of natural philosophy and natural theology—did not, however, really fit Joe’s interests. So after a year in Athens, he accepted an invitation to become professor of chemistry at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta. He had, however, one momentous event occur while in Athens—he finally had a conversion experience and joined the church, to the enormous relief of his parents and friends. Joseph Lumpkin, chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court and an elder in the Presbyterian Church in Athens, wrote Charles of Joe’s conversion. Among those “rejoicing in the light and liberty of God’s children,” wrote Lumpkin, was Little Titus, the oldest child of Patience and Porter, who had been selected to be Joe’s personal servant. “It was a beautiful incident,” Lump-kin said, to see Joe’s “boy marching up with his young master to join the church, and commemorating together with him for the first time the New Testament Passover.” Little Titus said his “old master’s religion was good enough for him.”26

  For his part, Charlie had been busy with his professional duties. He had become a junior partner in the law firm headed by John Elliot Ward, who only the year before had served as the president of the Democratic National Convention. Charlie had also begun courting Ruth Berrien Whitehead, the daughter of an “extensive landowner and a large slaveholder” in Burke County and the niece of John Berrien, the attorney general who had been so impolite to Charles in Washington in 1830 after they had disagreed over the recently passed bill for the removal of the Cherokees. Now in the late summer and fall of 1857, Charlie and Ruth found themselves falling in love. In January, Charlie announced to his parents that they were engaged.27

  As for Mary Sharpe, she told her parents not long after their return that she was in a “special way.” The following April, a few days before the Mallards’ first anniversary, a little girl was born to the young couple. They named her Mary Jones, after her grandmother. John Jones wrote the new grandfather Charles and sent his blessings: “May mother and babe be blessed and strengthened day by day, and may the little creature live to be a wellspring of joy to its parents and grandparents! There’s nothing like a baby—nothing so humanizing, so concentrating, so softening, so peacemaking. My dear Jane and myself long to see the little wonder.” As could be expected, Charles and Mary immediately became doting grandparents. “She is not large,” Mary wrote to Joe, “but well formed (particularly her head), and fat as a ricebird, is strong and healthy, has never had a colic, and has the best appetite you can imagine.” Mary Sharpe, for her part, had “such an abundance of nourishment that she has to nurse one of the little Negroes.” So Robin, the youngest child of Patience and Porter—he was named after his maternal grandfather—was brought to Mary Sharpe. She took him in her arms, held him at her breast, and gazed upon him, this little black slave child. Perhaps Mary Sharpe remembered, as Robin eagerly sucked a mother’s milk from her, her Uncle John’s words: “There’s nothing like a baby—nothing so humanizing, so concentrating, so softening, so peacemaking.” But perhaps she had other thoughts.28

  With the birth of their first grandchild, Charles and Mary began to see the growth once again of their family circle after the loss of so many they loved. Charles’s illness, however, began to make their own future appear as a “lengthening shadow,” and their memories turned increasingly to the days when their own children were about t
hem. For the aging parents, home without the children and a much-loved grandchild was not their longed-for home, no matter how comfortable Maybank might be or how handsome Montevideo might appear as one walked in its gardens. Mary wrote Charlie in early summer 1858:

  You cannot think how much your father and mother miss their dear children. They are the sources of our greatest earthly comfort and happiness; and although we rejoice that they are filling stations of usefulness in the spheres allotted them by our Father in Heaven, still home is scarcely home without them. I keep some little memento of each daily in sight. Whilst writing I can look up and see the three little chairs you occupied in childhood, and to my eye they are almost fashioned into images of yourselves.29

  For Charles and Mary, the members of the older generation were no longer the ones who were missed so intensely; even the memory of Joseph and Betsy was gradually slipping from their minds to emerge only from time to time with special poignancy.30 Rather, it was the children who had grown up and left home who now left an emptiness at Maybank and Montevideo. The children’s presence was needed for home to be home. In this way, time for Charles and Mary, even in the midst of their disciplined activities, was beginning to be measured by the visits of their children and their newly arrived grandchild.

  29

  THE RETREAT III

  Two years after the death of James Newton Jones from yellow fever, his brother Henry Hart Jones purchased the Retreat from Jimma’s widow and from the other members of the family who had some interest in the old home place. All the slaves who had remained in the Retreat settlement were sold to neighboring planters, and Henry brought back to the Retreat those he had inherited from his father, Joseph, together with their descendents. Among those sold was Venus, the wife of Prince, the driver at White Oak. He was the son of the driver Hamlet and the grandson of Old Jupiter and Blind Silvey of Liberty Hall. Venus had been living for years at White Oak—rented out to Susan Jones Cumming in order to be with her husband. While she was the wife of one of the leading drivers in the county, such a position did not protect her. She was soon taken away from her husband to the up-country, to old Cherokee Georgia, where she was to be sold again with others from the Retreat settlement. Eliza Robarts wrote Susan from Marietta, “Tell your servant Prince his wife Venus is dead. The Negroes were all sold at Holly Springs except [Young] Pulaski and his wife.” Perhaps her sorrow over the separation from her husband of many years killed Venus. Eliza Robarts did not say anything else about her death—apparently no details were given for a grieving Prince. In any case, the settlement at the Retreat was once again shuffled around and those Retreat families that had been a part of the Gullah community of Liberty County for generations—including Old Pulaski’s son and his wife—were being scattered far and wide. The bitter process of breaking apart the Retreat settlement that had begun with Joseph’s death was fast coming to its conclusion.1