Dwelling Place

by Erskine Clarke

  All over Liberty County, some of the newly freed African-American men and women would demonstrate loyalty to former owners as Miley demonstrated loyalty to William Maxwell. But more would demonstrate no loyalty and offer no assistance. They would simply standin their new freedom and watch their former owners struggle with the new realities that had broken over the low country. And among those who stood and watched, some would laugh as they saw the strong made weak and the proud brought low.

  Sherman’s raiders did not simply plunder plantation houses; they also ransacked the settlements. They rode into Carlawter, pointed a gun at Cato, and demanded the keys to the corn house, which they promptly emptied of all of the provisions. They searched the cabins “within and without and under;” they took the chickens and pigs, the cows, horses, and wagons that belonged to the people of the settlement. They took “Gilbert’s knife and watch and chain, July’s pants and blankets, George and Porter’s blankets and clothes, the women’s pails, pig-gins, spoons, buckets, pots, kettles, etc. etc.” They found a ham at Sue’s cabin, and when they discovered that it was old, they chopped it up and flung it to the dogs as Sue exclaimed: “Massa! You do poor Niggers so?”38

  As they pillaged, the raiders also mistreated and roughed up the women of the settlement. One attempted to drag Sue into her room, but she escaped when another soldier protested. The “horrible creature” then went after Rosetta, who rebuffed him with courage, declaring with disgust that he had “no manners.” Young Kate, the daughter of Elsey and Syphax, was at Montevideo when Yankees came bursting in, terrifying her. She fled into a downstairs room and locked the door. The men thundered at the door, and when she came out she had transformed herself. “From being a young girl she had assumed the attitude and appearance of a sick old woman, with a blanket thrown over her head and shoulders, and scarcely able to move.”39

  The young men of the settlement were commandeered to drive the carts, wagons, and carriages loaded with the spoils of war. Some went to the Yankee encampments near Midway; others went as far as the Ogeechee, where they saw Robert Mallard being held prisoner there. They came trickling back to Montevideo, reporting what they had seen and heard, and in this way Carlawter became the center of communication with the outside world. “Our servants keep up communication with their neighbors around,” wrote Mary. But it was otherwise for those huddled in the plantation house. “In our captivity,” Mary noted, “we are in utter ignorance of all without.”40

  Among the reports brought back to Carlawter were stories of the way Yankees were treating slaves and robbing them of all their possessions all over the county. At South Hampton one hundred and fifty men swooped down on the settlement. They took three months’ allowance of corn that had been distributed among the families, killed forty or fifty hogs, took seven beef cattle, stole all the syrup and sugar in the settlement, took the people’s clothing, and crawled “under their houses and beds searching for buried articles.” At Abial Winn’s plantation near Dorchester, they took from the driver Davy three horses, two wagons, two cows, three hogs, twenty bushels of rice, and fifteen bushels of corn. They took from the driver at George Howe’s plantation a horse and buggy, twenty cows, thirty hogs, forty beehives, eighteen ducks, and fifty chickens. And so it went at the Mallard Place, at Laurel View and Lambert, at Liberty Hall and the LeConte plantations. Even Toney Stevens, the black preacher, did not escape the pillaging. He had been sick and bedridden for some time when the Yankees arrived. They “robbed him of everything—even his blankets. He pleaded hard for his horse and wagon, but to no avail.”41

  Such pillaging, however, did not stop the Gullah people of Liberty County from taking early steps toward their own freedom. Mary wrote her brother John: “The foundations of society are entirely broken up and although the Negroes have suffered every form of injury from the enemy in their persons and property, they yet regard them as their best friends and under their influence have thrown off all control and now believe themselves perfectly free. The consequence is they are idly wandering about from place to place and must soon come to want.” Old ways and old assumptions would not immediately vanish from Montevideo or Carlawter, but it was becoming increasingly clear that great changes were taking place in the social landscape of the low country. Mary thought the changes meant anarchy. The people in the settlements thought the changes meant freedom. During the days ahead all would have to find their way forward into a new low-country world that was being born in deep anguish for whites and much anticipation for blacks.42

  In early March 1865 John Jones finally made his way to Montevideo. John insisted that all those huddled at Montevideo come to the Refuge, his plantation in Baker County in southwest Georgia, which had escaped the raids of Yankee plunderers. Mary Sharpe left almost immediately with her uncle, taking with her the children, including her newborn babe. With them went Patience and Porter, Lucy and Elsey. Soon after they left, torrential rains began falling, and the little party found itself stuck in the great swamps that surround the Alta-maha. The swamp waters began rising, and the old mules and oxen, already gaunt and now worn out by their efforts, seemed unable to take another step. The exhausted travelers were perplexed about which way to go through the swamp, as dry streambeds became swirling currents that blocked their way, and they wondered where they might find a ferry that could safely carry them across the swollen river. Finally, through great exertion and with the help of some other refugees, they managed to extract themselves and make their way to a ferry that carried them over the muddy waters of the Altamaha to the safety of a train.43

  Joe arrived at Montevideo shortly after his uncle and sister had left with those going to the Refuge, and immediately he began to make plans to take his mother there. Arrangements had to be made with a neighboring planter to oversee Montevideo in the midst of all the disorders and dangers of an enemy occupation. And Mary had to decide what to try to take to the Refuge and what to leave. To her great distress, she realized that she would have to leave behind the family letters and Charles’s papers, which she valued “above all things.” “My heart,” she wrote Susan, “is very sad. But God reigns!”44

  Joe planned to take his mother and her little party of servants a less direct but safer route than the one taken by his uncle and sister. They would swing far to the west, going by Taylor’s Creek to Reidsville in Tattnall County before turning south and crossing the Altamaha far upstream at a less dangerous point, then finally reaching the railroad at Blackshear. It would be a long and exhausting trip with a buggy and oxcart and would involve relying on the hospitality of families along the way that were struggling to meet their own needs; when no hospitable home could be found, they would have to camp out in some pasture or grove along the road. At first William Maxwell planned to go with them, but he was feeling his years, and he did not want to risk dying far from home. So the decision was made that he would stay behind and meet on familiar ground whatever might come his way. While these preparations for departure went forward, to their joy Robert Mallard arrived from Savannah. He had been paroled at last, and he was eager to get to his family at the Refuge. They quickly decided that Joe would go with them as far as the train in Blackshear, where he would leave them to return to his family in Augusta, and Robert would escort them the rest of the way to the Refuge.45

  As Mary prepared to leave Montevideo, she sat at her desk one evening while gathered memories slipped out of deep places to speak in the silence of the night. She wrote in her journal:

  What a skeleton world has this now become to me. The bright promises of hope which once encircled every object and gilded every scene have faded tint by tint until dark shadows are resting where sunbeams played. Of earthly possessions and enjoyments, I have seen an end of perfection here below. Riches have taken to themselves wings and flown away. I am a captive in the home I love and soon must wander from it an exile in my native land. Memory’s buried stores lie all exhumed before my eye.

  Images of Charles rose up before her and touched her “wit
hered heart.” She remembered his “precious words of love” and how he had brought her to Montevideo a young and happy wife. Images of the children appeared. She remembered their school and museum, their laughter, songs, and sports. She remembered the garden, how it had once been a wilderness, and how it had grown and flowered and brought delight. And she remembered servants who used to wait faithfully and pleasantly upon her family—how many there had been: Jack and Old Lizzy, Pulaski and Mom Sylvia at the Retreat, Patience and a host of others. And perhaps Mary remembered Phoebe, how she had served her somany years, and how she had looked as she rode off with her family down the avenue. But now, Mary wrote, all things were altered. “The enemy has destroyed every living thing; even the plainest food is made scanty. His robberies and oppressions force me from my beloved home, where it is no longer safe or prudent to remain. And I must leave it in my advancing years, knowing not where the gray hairs which sorrow and time have thickly gathered will find a shelter, or the fainting heart and weary body a resting place, or any spot that I may ever again on earth call home.”46

  33

  THE PROMISED LAND

  While Mary was huddled with other refugees in southwest Georgia, she received a letter from Laura: “You will grieve to hear that all of our Island homes are in ashes.” Maybank, Woodville, and Social Bluff—all had been burned, and all that was now left of these places of deep memory were charred timbers and scorched bricks. Yankee raiders had not set the fires but rather members of a fishing party that had come across the sound from St. Catherine’s Island. A colony of runaways—of freed people—had gathered on St. Catherine’s during the closing days of the war, and the fires they set at Maybank and the other island homes had been kindled by long smoldering rage and apparently by the hope to possess abandoned lands.1

  The burning of their island homes was for their owners but one more bitter experience of loss and humiliation. Such experiences provided moments of vulnerability when disturbing questions could break through Southern defenses and threaten to overwhelm a belief in the justice and righteousness of the Southern cause. When Chattanooga had fallen to the Yankees, Mary had written: “We cannot pretend to fathom the designs of Infinite Wisdom touching our beloved and suffering Confederacy. It may be our sins will be scourged to the severest extremity—and we deserve it all. But I also believe when that wicked people have filled up the cup of their iniquity, God will take them in hand to deal with them for their wickedness and to reward them according to their transgressions.” And when Atlanta was besieged, John Jones had written: “Let us daily and hourly commit our cause, ourselves, our all to Him who doeth all things well. Surely we are not to be overwhelmed in utter ruin, poverty, and disgrace!” And as Yankees had come storming across Georgia toward the low country, Robert Mallard had confided to his journal that one of the distressing effects on him was the temptation “to think hard of Providence.” “I know,” Robert had confessed, that what God “does is and must be right but when I see a cruel and wicked foe prospering and penetrating farther and farther into the very vitals of our country and when the prayers of God’s people seem utterly fruitless in arresting them, I am perplexed and were I to listen to the Tempter, I would be disposed to question the utility of prayer at least for this object.” But now in the summer of 1865, when utter defeat had arrived and their Southern Zion was desolate, John Jones thought hard truth must be faced. He confessed, “However we may be able to prove the wickedness of our enemies, we must acknowledge that the providence of God has decided against us in the tremendous struggle we have just made for property rights and country. The hand of the Lord is upon us!” And he prayed “for grace to be humble and behave aright before Him until these calamities be overpassed!”2

  What seemed the most pressing calamity to Mary in the summer of 1865, as she made her way slowly back toward Montevideo, was the emancipation of her slaves. As she returned to the ruins of Atlanta with the Mallards and pressed on alone to Augusta, she was beginning an intense struggle to understand at some deep level that she could no longer control as she once had controlled Cato or Patience or Porter or Stepney or Charles or Lucy or Mom Rosetta or any of the others who had lived at Carlawter or at the old settlement by the Medway marshes or at Arcadia. When she would say, “Come, serve tea on the piazza,” they would not have to come; and when she would say, “Go, work the rice in the fields,” they would not have to go. Word had already gone out from Federal authorities that white planters would have to negotiate contracts with the freed people. The contracts would mean an end to the old arrangements of slavery and would call into question the assumptions and practices of the old paternalism that had justified holding in bondage the men and women of the settlements. But Mary had already begun, with other white southerners, the process of reworking an old ideology that had once undergirded slavery. This reworked ideology was intended to meet the dangers brought to a “southern way of life” by emancipation. Yankee military power may have abolished slavery, but a powerful racism would serve to keep freed people in their place under the control of whites. While Yankee raiders were ransacking Montevideo, Mary had written in her journal:

  The workings of Providence in reference to the African race are truly wonderful. The scourge falls with peculiar weight upon them: with their emancipation must come their extermination. All history, from their first existence, proves them incapable of self-government; they perish when brought in conflict with the intellectual superiority of the Caucasian race. Northern philanthropy and cant may rave as much as they please; but facts prove that in a state of slavery such as exists in the Southern states have the Negro race increased and thriven most.3

  Under the threatening new reality of emancipation, Mary abandoned the class analysis that Charles had used when discussing African Americans—that they were to be understood as one laboring class among the many of the earth. In its place she lodged a racial argument that had long been used by the most radical proslavery people who had most vigorously opposed Charles’s missionary labors.4

  When Mary returned to Montevideo in the fall of 1865, she found that the freed people in the county were also struggling to understand the radical changes that had swept over their world. They were in the midst of the momentous experience of moving from slavery to freedom. Cato and those who lived at Carlawter could remember only a time of slavery and how they had struggled within its bondage and against its oppression. Suddenly they were learning that they were no longer slaves, that they could now say openly what they had dared to say only secretly, that they could leave their former owners if they wished, that they could send their children to one of the freedmen’s schools that was opening around the county, and that they could call upon the federal government for help in enforcing the new order of things. But they were also learning that the Yankees could turn against them and act like their old owners in order to maintain order and stability.5

  Cato had quickly grasped that old ways had died and that new ways were being born. When Mary had departed Montevideo in spring of 1865, she had secured as the overseer John Fennell, a small farmer in poor health who was also serving as the county sheriff. Cato had long dealt with weak and largely absent overseers. He knew how to act in a submissive manner before them and create an atmosphere of trust that left him free to manage the plantation according to his own judgments. Now, however, such rituals of subordination could be cast aside, the mask of the faithful servant that he had worn so well and so long could be torn off, and the things that had been said only quietly around settlement fires could now be said publicly to the white overseer. When Fennell gave instructions about how the plantation was to be run, Cato apparently told him that the people of the settlement no longer had to follow the instructions of former owners or of their overseers. Fennell had been so frustrated that he had called in the Yankees stationed at Riceboro to quell the disorder. They had threatened Cato and the others with swift punishment if they did not obey the overseer, and for a while there was calm at Montevideo. But Mary
, when hearing from Fennell, was outraged by Cato’s behavior. “Cato,” she wrote Charlie, “has been to me a most insolent, indolent, and dishonest man; I have not a shadow of confidence in him, and will not wish to retain him on the place.”6

  Carlawter settlement, 1891 (Charles Colcock Jones Papers, Tulane University Manuscript Department)

  So when Mary finally arrived back at Montevideo in November 1865, Cato departed. He left behind him Carlawter and all the familiar places he and Cassius had first explored when they were boys too young to be put to work in the fields. He left the dikes, dams, and canals that had been built under his supervision and that he had thought of as in some way his own. He left the plantation where for twenty-five years he had been the driver, the boss, who had walked a fine line as a buffer between those who sat around the fires of Carlawter and those who had tea on the piazza at Montevideo. And he left the cemetery where ancestors rested, where his mother, old Lizzy, lay in the dark ground with so many others who had come to call Carlawter home. So Cato, who had so often expressed his loyalty, love, and gratitude to his old master, left in November 1865 the place so closely and intimately associated with his life of slavery. And the reason he left was to claim a new life of freedom.7