Dwelling Place Page 5

  During the summer of 1808, as was his practice, Joseph Jones left Sunbury every Monday and made the long ride to the Retreat. There in the evenings he visited with his driver Pulaski, discussed with him the operations of the plantation, and checked on the people in the settlement. In July on visiting the settlement he had found one child sick and noted that “several worms came up her throat.” He gave her a dose of calomel and the next day some castor oil. But what had infuriated him was his discovery that Delia, a woman who had come to the Retreat as a part of his marriage contract with Sarah Anderson, was quite sick. “The cause of her sickness,” her wrote Sarah, “I never could come till this morning when Pulaski informed me that Caesar had just mentioned to him that she had miscarried” in early June, the week after the Jones family had left the Retreat for Sunbury. “The thing made me so mad on account of her concealing it,” Joseph wrote, “that I threatened to give her and her mother both a severe flogging, but they both denied knowing any thing about it and if this be correct she may not as yet have miscarried.” Because Delia complained of fever and pain, Joseph made Phillis, the plantation nurse, “use the bitter herbs and give her nitre, laudanum, etc.” Joseph found it “somewhat perplexing that our young maids lately married should suffer their modesty to get the better of them so far as to never inform us of their unfortunate situation.” According to Caesar, “Delia got scared in the woods which was the cause of her situation, but still there appears to be something novel in their tales. She says she fell over the fence going into the field and all this happened before our leaving home.”14

  Joseph’s frustration with Delia and her mother, whom he evidently regarded as being in collusion with her daughter, pointed to the difficulty of managing a large plantation from a distant summer retreat. But what infuriated him, and led him to the threat of a severe flogging, were the concealment and the possibility of an infanticide. Owners had the absolute right, Joseph was convinced, to know all the details of a slave’s life—even those details that modesty tried to cover. His patriarchalism demanded obedience and threatened a brutal punishment, but Joseph met in Delia and her mother those who knew how to sidestep his flaring anger. They did not directly challenge his authority but turned on Joseph his own patriarchal code—women, after all, were supposed to be modest about such matters. Moreover, they denied knowing anything about the matter and told a story that left Joseph puzzled by its novelty and by their assertion of a simple accident. Joseph’s nephew Charles later wrote that whites “live and die in the midst of Negroes and know comparatively little of their real character. They are one thing before the whites and another before their own color. Deception towards the former is characteristic of them, whether bond or free, throughout the whole U.S.” However deceptive they might have seemed to Joseph, Delia and her mother had successfully avoided a flogging by puzzling him and by utilizing patriarchal expectations in regard to women. In this way they cleverly bought themselves time until he departed for Sunbury.15

  Returning to the coast, Joseph entered into the social life of Sunbury. The Joneses and Robartses, together with the McWhirs and other friends, were spending a happy summer together by the waters of the Medway. In August, Sarah gave birth to a little girl and named her Mary after her two grandmothers. The baby brought delight to the little circle of family and friends in Sunbury and was no doubt the subject of much attention from her brother and cousins. As their parents hoped, the children formed over the coming years deep and affectionate relationships with one another.

  Lizzy and Rosetta lived in simple quarters behind Susannah Jones’s summer home. While their lives continued to be filled with work as they saw after the needs of the white family, Sunbury was nevertheless a welcome change from Liberty Hall. Lizzy had grown up at nearby Cedar Grove plantation, and best of all, her husband, Robinson, was living in Sunbury. A servant of Eliza Robarts, Robinson had made, since his return from Greensboro, long trips from Sunbury to Liberty Hall on Saturday afternoons during the winter and spring to see his wife and son Lymus. He would often take with him a bag of soiled clothes and whatever he could bring for his family—some extra rice or corn, a chicken that had been raised, or a rabbit that had been caught in a snare. On Sunday nights he would return to Sunbury and carry with him his clean clothes and the memory of a night and day with his family.16

  These Saturday-night visits were a prominent part of slave life in the low country, as all over the county little groups of men carrying passes from their owners walked the sandy roads or rode their marsh ponies to visit their “wife house” and families. Like the task system and the slave’s right to some personal possessions, the right to marry someone from a different plantation had been secured only through several generations of struggle between owners and the owned in the low country. Many slaves, of course, like Jupiter and Silvey, married someone from within their own settlement and lived together. But many others, like Lizzy and Robinson, had asserted their right to marry someone “off the place.” Such an assertion was a bold act of personal freedom. Both the freedom and the burden that went with it shaped much of family life in the settlements and had its impact on the manner in which Lizzy and Robinson related to each other and raised their children. However successfully they were able to manage such arrangements, the summer reunions in Sunbury must have been a better time for them as it offered the opportunity to live together and eased the burdens and the tensions of their weeklong separations.17

  During the summer and fall, when they were all together in Sunbury, the domestic servants of Susannah Jones and Eliza Robarts had time together not only while they were busy cooking and cleaning and seeing after the needs of the white families but also after their work was done. With them were the domestic servants of the Joseph Jones family. They too lived in cabins behind the Jones summer home. Most prominent among them were Jack and Sylvia. Both had come with Sarah Anderson as a part of her marriage contract with Joseph Jones, and both were close to her as personal servants. Sylvia was twenty-three in 1808 and the mother of one-year-old Cuffee. When Mary Jones was born in August, Sylvia became her nurse, and over time she became Mary’s Momma and then her genuinely loved Old Momma. Because Sylvia was no doubt still nursing Cuffee, she may have helped to nurse Mary as well. Sylvia apparently developed affection for this little white baby who had been committed to her care, even as she followed the etiquette of slavery and called her “Miss Mary.” Yet however much she might appear as a “Mammy” figure to whites—as a woman who suckled and reared with affection white children—her affection for Mary was set within Sylvia’s larger affections, and as “Miss Mary” later learned to her surprise, within Sylvia’s larger commitments to own children and her own freedom.18

  Jack was eighteen and recently married to Lizett, but already in the summer of 1808 he was showing himself to be a rising leader in the slave community. He was learning to bridge two worlds—the world of white planters and the world of Gullah-speaking slaves. He was still learning how to negotiate between those two worlds, but he had already won the confidence of his white mistress with his faithful work, good manners, and cheerful spirit. Over time he moved deep into the white world and probed the cultural sources of its power—its ways of seeing the world, its understanding of nature, time, and space, and its ideas about human society and the ways human societies should be ordered. By moving deep into this white world—which was in his lifetime demonstrating its power not only in Liberty County but also around the globe—Jack came to understand much about that white world’s style of life, its tone and character, and its moral and aesthetic spirit. He came to believe that in order to resist successfully the power of whites, in order for slaves to make their way toward freedom, they must acquire the cultural sources of white power. Over time Jack came to embody a bitter irony—the belief that black slaves had to become acculturated, that they had to internalize at a deep level the culture of their white oppressors in order to resist successfully that oppression.19

  But Jack was not only lear
ning how to probe and understand the white world; he was also learning the traditions of an African and African-American world. And Liberty County, and perhaps especially Sunbury, with its surrounding Sea Islands, was rich with the traditions of his people. In particular, he was learning folktales that disguised strategies for resistance. In time, Jack himself became a master storyteller, entertaining blacks and whites with the adventures of clever rabbits and foxes, of hungry alligators and buzzards, and of the ways the weak fooled the strong and escaped their powerful clutches.20

  Summertime in Sunbury meant visits for both whites and blacks to nearby Colonel’s Island. Marshes and tidal creeks surrounded its sandy bluffs, and a narrow causeway connected it to the mainland. The causeway, repaired every fall by slaves requisitioned by the county, provided easy access but was also vulnerable to gales and the occasional hurricane that swept over the land. To the north of the island flowed the Medway, and Sunbury could be seen from the northwest end of the island across the intervening marsh and tidal creeks. To the south flowed the North Newport, its waters having cut a crescent into the island at a place settlers named Half Moon. Here the waters ran to forty feet deep and allowed ships of substantial size easy access to the trade of the island.21

  The island had been settled before the Revolution by a number of families from Bermuda, and for a while it had been known as Bermuda Island. But powerful fevers had struck them, leaving many dead, and the remainder had returned home, leaving behind a Bermuda grass that grew thick in the sandy soil of the island and on the bluff at Sunbury. Other settlers had followed, and among them was the first John Jones, who had an indigo plantation near Half Moon. Here Eliza Low Robarts had been born the day after her father, Philip Low, died in 1785. Scattered across this old Jones and Low plantation, and throughout the island in 1808, were sunken spaces where the indigo vats had been located. The vats, used to ferment the indigo to produce its blue dye, had sent forth a putrid stench that attracted hordes of flies and had made the island an unpleasant and unhealthy place to live. But by 1808 such conditions were gone. The indigo market had collapsed after the Revolution, with the end of British markets and subsidies, and Sea Island cotton had largely taken its place. Visitors in the summer of 1808 found an island noted for its beauty, its healthy climate, and the comfortable summer cottages of white planters. Because a number of colonels from the Revolution and Indian Wars had homes on the island, it had come to be known by the name of Colonel’s Island.22

  The Jonesand Robartsfamilies had a number of friends who summered on the island, but the plantation of Major Andrew Maybank was the primary place for their visits. His wife, Elizabeth, was the sister of Susannah Girardeau Jones, and the major’s sister Mary had been Joseph’s first wife. (It was she who lay with three of their children in the little cemetery behind the Retreat plantation house.) So it was not surprising that the families from Sunbury would go regularly to the Maybank plantation and bring Andrew’s and Elizabeth’s nephews and nieces to visit them. The Maybanks had no children themselves and regarded young Charles and Susan and their cousins Joseph Maybank Jones and little newborn Mary Jones with special affection.23

  Susannah Jones called the Maybanks’ summer home the Hut, for it was a simple and unpretentious place. Located close to the causeway, the Hut stood on a sandy rise and looked out across the marsh and tidal creeks toward the mainland. In the distance could be seen the McWhirs’ Springfield plantation, and above the marsh grass the masts of sailing ships could be seen moving slowly along as they sailed up the Medway to Sunbury and then returned to St. Catherine’s Sound. Live oaks shaded the house from the summer sun, and while the surf could be heard only in the distance on days when it was up, the sea breezes blew faithfully and made it a delightful spot in the summer.24

  The plantation settlement was located some distance from the Hut. When Lizzy and Rosetta accompanied Susannah Jones and the children to the island, they would meet in the settlement some whom Lizzy had known growing up at Cedar Grove plantation. John Girardeau, in dividing his slaves, had willed Tom, Fanny, Abram, Solomon, Jain, and Old Florah to Elizabeth Maybank at the same time he had willed Lizzy and her brother Cassius to Susannah. And there were others whose connections went back even farther, to John and Hannah Girardeau, the parents of Susannah, John, and Elizabeth. Among these was Clarissa, who was about Lizzy’s age. Because she had grown up on the John Girardeau plantation and because she lived to be a very old woman, she was to become a link with earlier generations and a bearer of genealogical information for slave and free. She was one of the first slaves to have an openly acknowledged surname, Clarissa Girardeau, and by that name, different from that of later owners, she showed that she had a history, a memory, and an identity independent of those owners.25

  Those who lived in the settlement with Clarissa farmed the plantation and raised its Sea Island cotton. During their after-task time, they were able to fish the tidal creeks, cast nets for shrimp, and, when cool weather returned in the fall, gather oysters from the muddy banks of the marsh. By supplementing their diet with these rich sources of protein, they helped make the island a more healthful place, where a Gullah culture could flourish. For summer visitors to the island, white and black, the seafood was a welcome and eagerly anticipated change in menu.26

  The visits to Colonel’s Island, as well as the daily visiting in Sunbury, shaped for slave and free much of the days and nights during the summer and long autumn by the coast. For the slaves, the visits frequently meant more grueling work as additional cooking and cleaning were required for white guests, but it also gave opportunities for being with servants from other households. For whites, the visiting was at the center of a social life that included for the men sailing, fishing, and hunting and for the women sewing and other domestic activities. On Sundays the little Congregational Church in the town drew some of the inhabitants, while some, slave and free, traveled to Midway.27

  Dawn over the Medway marshes, looking toward Colonel’s Island (photograph by Van Martin)

  The summer of 1809 followed much this same pattern. Of special note that summer was the birth of Cato, the second son of Lizzy and Robinson. A strong and healthy child, he was named for the Roman statesman who had taught a love of courage, honesty, and simple living. The Liberty County Cato and the four-year-old Charles Colcock Jones were destined to have their lives closely intertwined in a complex relationship of mutual dependence between a master and a slave whose life would reflect many of the virtues of his ancient namesake.28

  During that same summer, Jack and Lizett had a little girl. They named her Phoebe. Her name, like Cato’s, reached back to Rome, to a classical world in which Phoebe was goddess of the moon. But Phoebe’s name also had roots in Africa, where Phiba or Phibbi meant Friday. Like Cudjo, which meant Monday, and Cuffee, which was an African male name for Friday, Phoebe’s name pointed to the African practice of day-naming. As such it indicated her father’s ability to move between two worlds and two traditions that were converging in the African Americans of the low country. Over the coming years those two traditions warred with each other deep within Phoebe, making her both a valuable and a troublesome slave for her owners. She was to become the personal servant of Mary Jones, the daughter of Joseph and Sarah, and enter a relationship with her even more complex than the one between Cato and Charles. For as the two women grew up—Phoebe a slave, Mary her mistress—their lives were bound together not only in mutual dependence but also in the fierce struggle of two strong-willed women as they encountered one another around questions of power, affection, and independence.29

  In late spring of 1810, Susannah Jones became ill, and she and her young children moved in May to their Sunbury home. Medical attention was more readily available in the town, and friends were near at hand to offer help. Susannah, however, grew steadily worse, apparently from some debilitating fever. On 10 May she made her will, “being weak of body, but of perfect mind.” “I give and bequeath,” she wrote, “unto my dearly beloved Son Charle
s Colcock Jones the following Negroes with their future issue (to wit) Rosetta and Lymus to him and to his heirs forever.” Since her daughter Susan had received two slaves from her father, John Jones, Susannah was being sure that the division of her property was fair. “The remainder of my Negroes,” she wrote, “I give and bequeath to my two children Charles Colcock Jones and Susanna Mary Jones share and share alike each to receive their respective proportion at the age of twenty one years or day of marriage, which may first happen.”30

  All during June, Susannah grew weaker. The doctor cut her arm with a lancet and bled her, and the children coming into the room to kiss their mother could see the bowl of blood on the nearby dresser. She died the first day of July 1810, and “this first sight of death” for her young son Charles made a deep and lasting impression upon him. Susannah was buried at Midway beside her husband, and her marble tombstone became another reflector of the sunlight amid the shadows of the cemetery’s oaks. She had made Joseph Jones the executor of her estate, and on her deathbed she committed Charles and Susan to the care of their aunt Eliza Low Robarts.31

  Elizabeth Maybank took Susan and Charles to the island, where they stayed for a few months at the Hut. In November 1810 Joseph Jones came for them and carried the newly orphaned children to their Aunt Eliza’s plantation outside of Greensboro. Betsy and John stayed in Sunbury with Dr. McWhir at his academy.32

  In the 1790s a road had been built from Sunbury to the interior of the state with the village of Greensboro in Greene County as it terminus. The rich farmland of middle Georgia was being settled, and merchants from Sunbury were eager to establish posts along the road in order to channel trade through Sunbury. Among those who had business connections in Greensboro was Eliza Robarts’s second husband, James Robarts. He had purchased a plantation near the village, and it was to this plantation that Joseph Jones took Charles and Susan. With them went Lizzy and Rosetta. Here they all lived for the next three years. The twenty-five-year-old Eliza Robarts, ever cheerful and attractive, married for a third time shortly after their arrival. Her new husband, David Robarts, a cousin of her second husband, was a cotton factor and commission merchant in Greensboro. He added another strand to the bewildering web of relationships that was being woven among all the Jones aunts and uncles, cousins, and half brothers and sisters.33