Dwelling Place Read online

  Among those who were removed from the Retreat were two slaves of Eliza Robarts’s—Katy and her daughter Lucy—who had been rented for years first to James Newton and then to his widow. In order to accommodate his old aunt, Charles agreed to rent the two women. The mother and daughter were put to work under the supervision of Cato.

  A year after their arrival at Carlawter, Lucy became pregnant—a condition she repeatedly denied even as it became increasingly evident that she was “large with child.” Charles instructed Cato and his old nurse Mom Rosetta—who now served as the midwife at Carlawter—“to tell her to take care of herself and see that nothing happened to the child.” Lucy, however, continued to deny her pregnancy. Finally on a Friday evening, Mom Rosetta was sent to the laboring woman. When later questioned, both Rosetta and Lucy’s mother Katy denied ever seeing a child born and said they had seen Lucy having only “a bad bile.” Both older women, Charles wrote, “endeavored to make the impression that she never had a child, and could not have been in a family way.” On the following Monday, the woman was examined and “clear evidence” was found that she had “been delivered of a mature child.” She denied it vigorously. A physician was called and “pronounced that she had unmistakably been delivered of a mature child.” Charles ordered a search, and eight days later a dead child was found tied up in a piece of cloth and secreted in grass and bushes. Once again a physician was called, and he pronounced “it a child come to its maturity.” The “wretched mother,” confronted with the dead child, confessed. The child, she said, had been born dead when she was alone in her cabin. “She then tied it up in the Cloth,” Charles recorded, “carried it down into the bottom, and hid it. Was afraid to disclose it, as she had all along denied it.”2

  Charles was furious. Years earlier, when life in the settlements had been more stable and he had been in the midst of his missionary labors, he had written that “infanticide” was a “crime restrained in good measure by the provision made for the support of the child on the part of the owner, by the punishment in the case of detection, and by the moral degradation of the people that takes away the disgrace of bastardy.” More recently, however, as the breakup of the settlements intensified, he had heard of more cases throughout the county. “Awful depravity,” he wrote in his Journal, “calling for prompt and efficient correction.”3

  After consultation with Charlie, Charles decided to submit the case to the county court. On Charlie’s advice, the decision was made not to charge Lucy with murder, which could result in not only her execution, and with it a substantial loss to Eliza Robarts, but also the execution of Mom Rosetta and Katy. Rather, Lucy, her mother, and Mom Rosetta were all charged with concealment.4

  With Henry acting as their legal counsel, the three women were brought before a panel of judges in Hinesville. The judges found Lucy guilty but agreed to Charles’s request that charges be dropped against Mom Rosetta and Katy. They reprimanded and warned the older women before dismissing them. Then on Charles’s instructions, “for the sake of impression,” the constable gave Katy and Mom Rosetta “a few stripes over their jackets.” Mom Rosetta no doubt concealed what she thought of such treatment by Charles, whom she had cared for so tenderly when he was a little boy.5

  As for Lucy, she was given ninety lashes on her bare back—thirty on the Monday following her trial, thirty on the following Thursday, and then, as the first wounds were beginning to heal, thirty on the next Monday.6 Charlie wrote his father: “Let me congratulate you upon the correct termination of the legal proceedings against Lucy. The judgment of the court was proper; you have discharged your duty as every good and true citizen is bound to do; and I am happy that your mind is now relieved from the burden of the prosecution.” In regard to Katy and to Mom Rosetta, who had been a nurse not only to his father and but also to him, Charlie thought the effect of judgment “is probably better than it would have been had actual punishment have been inflicted. The power of the law is brought to bear, they made to realize the fact of a misdemeanor committed, and anew element of mercy and forbearance impressed upon them. The recognition of this will be a pledge of future amendment.”7

  Lucy was returned to Carlawter the same day she received the last thirty lashes. There her mother and perhaps Mom Rosetta did what they could to ease her pain and treat her raw and bleeding back. Two days later Lucy and her mother were sent from Carlawter to be rented to the railroad. In the meantime, Charles paid for the expenses of the trial, since he and Mary did not wish “Aunt to bear any part of them.”8

  In spite of Henry’s skill as a planter, the old lands of the Retreat did not yield what he had hoped. To be sure, the inland rice lands, with their rich “blue clay” of Bulltown and Rice Hope swamps, still produced abundant crops. But the cotton land had become increasingly worn in spite of frequent manuring of fields and rotating of crops. And what made the yields seem more meager than ever were the reports from southwest Georgia, where new cotton lands were producing huge crops. Henry, with a businessman’s eye for a good investment, began to explore the possibility of purchasing a plantation in this developing part of the state. In early December 1858 he left the Retreat to find a plantation he could purchase in Baker County. When he returned in a few weeks, he had purchased a large plantation he named Malvern. Within a few weeks of his return, he sent a number of the people from the settlement at the Retreat to Baker, near the southwestern corner of the state. His wife, Abby, wrote from the Retreat that Henry had “carried so many of the Negroes from here, that it makes the plantation look quite deserted. They all went off in fine spirits. It made me feel quite sad parting with them. I am glad they have had such pleasant weather for their journey.”9 Henry was obviously enthusiastic about the possibilities of Malvern, and he convinced his brother John Jones to join him in investing in the rich new lands of southwest Georgia. They soon purchased together another plantation in Baker, this one containing 1,750 acres, and John began to make arrangements for the removal of some of “his people” from Bonaventure.10

  In this way Henry and John, together with other friends and relatives in Liberty County, participated in the breakup of old slave communities and in the massive movement of African Americans from the settled regions of the South to the new frontiers of an expanding slave society.11

  Shortly after the purchase of Malvern, Henry put the Retreat up for sale. His aunt Eliza Robarts wrote Charles: “I think Henry is right to move his Negroes to Baker; the Retreat lands are much worn. But it makes my heart sad to think of it: the old homestead of my mother and my brother, with other associations, endears it to me; and I would hate to see it pass into strange hands.” The Retreat had finally become a place largely of memories for the Jones family—a place associated with the past and not the future, with Joseph’s life and labors and not the hopes and dreams of his descendants.12

  Henry’s plan in regard to his Baker County plantations was to be an absentee owner. And so he began to have built a fine new home in Walthourville not far from where his mother lived, and close to the home of Marion Anderson Jones, the widow of his brother Charles Berrien. Here he intended to have his permanent residence once he had sold the Retreat. Henry also began in the spring of 1859 a strange ritual of gathering the bodies of his dead children into one place. He and his wife, Abby, had lost a beautiful little girl, Ella, in 1853. The child, almost four years old, had died of the croup and had been buried under the oaks in the Midway cemetery. Another child, a little boy, had died shortly before the purchase of Malvern, and he too had been buried at Midway.13 But a son, Joseph Henry, had died years earlier when he and his mother were visiting near Augusta. Henry now went to the little cemetery where the child lay, had the coffin exhumed, and brought it back to Midway. In late March 1859 Charles wrote in his journal:

  M. and myself went to Midway, met Henry and Brother Buttolph with the body of his little son Joseph Henry, removed from Bath, Richmond County. Dead six years. H. raised the lid and look so as to see the white hair of his little head, smoothe
d and brushed back! He never saw him in his illness and death. A father’s anxious affection! Said it was a great satisfaction to have seen so much. Would look no further! The case was lowered into the grave by the side of his brother recently buried. M. held the umbrella over my head—we prayed and closed the grave!

  Another child, an infant daughter, lay in the little cemetery behind the Retreat not far from Joseph’s obelisk and among the roses and jasmine that rambled over the tombs of many children and Joseph’s first two wives. In late April 1859 Henry wrote his brother John from the Retreat:

  I rose soon after dawn this morning and proceeded to search for and exhume the remains of our little daughter Evelyn, who died Oct. 5th, 1849. The coffin was perfectly rotten and the little bones disconnected, but I was able to gather them all, even the little ribs and joints of the arm being perfect and nearly sound. After breakfast I will take them to Midway and lay them in the bosom of dear little Joseph Henry my first born and tenderly beloved son. Strange that the Infant of hours even speaking through its feeble dust after the lapse of many years can arouse so deeply the feelings, regrets and love of the parent’s heart. I was surprised at my own emotion; the mother and others of the family still repose in their beds and know not what I was doing at that early hour. Thus am I preparing step by step to depart from scenes hallowed by the memories and events of the past, yet wearing an aspect funereal and gloomy. Still my heart clings to them, and this in after life, will be my Mecca, to which sad, yet pleasing pilgrimages shall be made.14

  In such a way, Henry prepared to leave the Retreat with its Rice Hope lands where his grandfather, the first John Jones, had laid the foundation for the family’s fortune in the years before the American Revolution.

  While the preparations for the move were going forward, Henry’s new home in Walthourville was nearing completion. Then suddenly word came to the Retreat that the house had burned down, a complete loss. The cause of the fire was unknown, but its origins were suspicious. Some months later, Henry received from his brother-in-law Joseph Anderson, the alcoholic widower of his sister Evelyn, an urgent request to meet him in Riceboro. Putting aside other business, Henry rushed to the little boro, where he learned the astonishing news that his young nephew, Charles Berrien, Jr., had been the arsonist who set the Walthourville house ablaze. Charles Berrien’s fifteen-year-old cousin, Bessie Anderson, while not actually setting the blaze, had been an accomplice. Overwhelmed by remorse, she had confessed to her father. More details soon emerged. The instigator had been none other than Marion Anderson Jones, the mother of young Charles Berrien. She had, Henry later wrote John Jones in a confidential letter, “invented falsehoods of the most malignant and ingenious character to induce the children to hate me their uncle and true friend.” Henry prevailed upon Bessie to go with him to Montevideo and make a full confession before Charles and Mary. They were horrified.

  As Bessie talked, she made an additional confession. Her Aunt Marion had attempted, after the Walthourville fire, to get Bessie and a slave to go to the Retreat at night and burn it down while Henry and his family slept. This Bessie had refused to do, although her aunt threatened her with dire consequences. “Is it not enough,” Henry wrote John, “to freeze the blood with horror?” Bessie also reported that for some years her Aunt Emma Jones Harris had been “incessant in her endeavors to poison her mind” against her Uncle Henry. And Emma had told Bessie that Charles and Mary had prevented Emma from receiving Joseph’s blessing “on his death bed when he was constantly calling for her by name.” Moreover, Emma insisted that Henry, Charles, and Mary were “the means of her disinheritance.” All of this was soon confessed as well by young Charles Ber-rien. Later Charles and Mary talked “much and seriously” with their niece and nephew, prayed with them, and read Psalm 51: “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy lovingkindness: according unto the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my transgressions.”15

  Joseph Anderson and Charles Berrien’s new stepfather, Dr. Benjamin King, offered to pay Henry for the loss of his house, but Henry refused. Henry wrote John: “I do forgive and endeavor to pray for those who have so cruelly wronged me, and in this matter will seek to heap coals of fire upon their heads.” Henry and Mary agreed that “the first cause of hate grew out of the events following Emma’s elopement.” But they also agreed that the “matter must be kept a profound secret to shield from utter ruin the young, unfortunate victims of an unnatural relative.” Henry believed, however, that the immediate family must be told in order “that they may no longer be deceived or influenced by the really guilty party.”16 So the young people and the reputation of the Jones family were protected as the secret was kept, and the bitter memory was suppressed, and the details were not mentioned in any correspondence except Henry’s letter to his brother John. But beneath this public appearance, Joseph’s family continued to break apart and fall away from one another into a deepening alienation.

  The final scattering of the settlement at the Retreat was only one of many scatterings that broke over Liberty County’s Gullah community during the closing years of the 1850s. And many were the husbands and wives—like Prince and Venus—who found themselves being forcefully torn apart. Plenty James, who lived at old Liberty Hall, was a leader in the church and had been for years the driver for Nathaniel Varnedoe. When Varnedoe died in 1856, his will declared: “I will and bequeath to my true and faithful servant driver Plenty one hundred dollars in money.” Plenty had taken half the money and gone to Charles with a request. Charles wrote Charlie about it: “I have $50 for one of my Black friends to invest for him. Can you see if I can invest it in the Savings Bank in my own name in trust for him? And what is the interest allowed? And how can the principal be withdrawn if required?” Charles invested the money for Plenty, as he did for Cato, old Niger, and a few others with substantial cash, and paid them interest on the savings before Mary finally settled the accounts and closed the books on “Negro Money.”17

  But even Plenty, as one who was relatively privileged, was not protected from a bitter sale. When the Varnedoe estate was settled, Plenty’s wife, Flora, was sold to southwest Georgia. The old man tried to keep in touch with her by going to Savannah and getting his former pastor at Midway, I. S. K. Axson, to write to her for him. And he took some of his money and made the dangerous trip during the Christmas holidays to the little village of Albany, where his wife now lived. On the trip he met John Jones, who was taking eight slaves from Bonaventure to his new plantation in Baker County. John took Plenty in his care to protect the old man from the troubles that might come from a slave traveling alone. “Old Plenty,” John wrote Mary, “is to be pitied. He utters not a word of reproach against his master who certainly was wrong in reducing the old man to his widowed condition in his old age.”18

  Plenty’s efforts to overcome the separation from Flora were part of a pattern of husbands and wives trying desperately to stay together in spite of the power of whites to divide them. The same was true of unmarried young adults who had fallen in love. Ben Lowe, a slave of Joseph Anderson’s in Sunbury, was courting Porter and Patience’s daughter Beck when he was rented out to the railroad and sent to the village of Quitman in South Georgia. Evidently with the help of a white friend, he wrote Beck:

  Dear Rebecca

  The conversation that took place Between us the Sunday night I seen you last I have not forgot. I intend Doing what I promised and I hope you will as you promised. Rebecca I love you as I Ever loved you and Intend doing so until life leaves. Rebecca I Expect seeing you at Christmas and Then I intend asking your masters consent—give my Respects to your Father and Mother

  I Remain your Lover

  Ben Lowe servant

  The next Christmas, when Ben was back in Sunbury, Anderson wrote Charles saying that he had given permission to Ben to marry Beck if it “is not contrary to your rule.” Anderson added: “He is honest and industrious in past and I can safely and do cheerfully vouch for his good character.” Charles noted on the letter: �
��Request granted.” So in spite of the distance, and the likelihood that they would see each other only once a year at Christmas, Ben and Beck married.19

  Others, however, felt the full power, anguish, and finality of family separations. Andrew and Mary Ann’s daughter Dinah had grown up in the settlement at May-bank overlooking the Medway marshes and had become a lively and attractive young woman. She was, Charles said, “the life of the place.” In 1850, when she was twenty-two, she married Abram, who lived at nearby Woodville. He too had grown up on the island—he had belonged to Julia King’s father, Audley Max-well—and like Dinah he knew the smell of the marsh in summer and the sound of the surf on a stormy day. Together they had four children—Harry, Silvia, Little Abram, and Dublin. A few months after their son Dublin was born, the Roswell King estate put up some eighty slaves for sale. King, in spite of his practical ways, had left a cranky and much dated will that had finally been invalidated by the court. The family had agreed that in order to settle the estate among the heirs, some slaves must be sold, and Abram was among those chosen. He was taken from the island; from his old parents at Woodville; from his wife, Dinah, and from his children at Maybank; and, with others from South Hampton, he was carried to Savannah. There he was held in Wright’s slave jail, the same bitter place that Phoebe and Cassius and their children had been held, awaiting a buyer.20