Wrangling the Bull
Gator: A Response to
Kelly J. Baker
Dwelling Place is a masterful, perhaps magisterial, narrative of the intimate relationships between white plantation owners and the black slaves, who were necessary for the success of plantations, the running of homes, and crucially, the economic gain of the owners. Erskine Clarke delves deeply into the lives of the Jones family, the plantation owners, and the lives of Lizzy’s family, the enslaved, as they live side-by-side separated by the bounds of race. Clarke traces tragedy and the keen difference of loss for both families. The Jones family was marred by the loss of many relatives. The death of a plantation owner did not just impact his relatives but also the slave families, who were separated and shuffled as property that was divided among the whites. This epic presents the Jones family who sought to be benevolent owners and how the burden of the peculiar institution pressed heavy upon their shoulders. What this white family considered benevolent did not ring true with the slaves, who lost spouses, children, mothers, and fathers as plantations grew and declined. Benevolence contained a harshness, which the Jones family could not realize or possibly even admit to themselves.
Clarke, thus, takes us on a journey through the marshes, swamps, rice and cotton fields into the houses and churches of the “masters” to provide a much-needed in-depth study of lives of plantation owners and slaves. These two worlds, Clarke demonstrates, rested side-by-side, but one was a world of façade that hid the emotions and stark realities of the slave life. The other was the world of access to education, wealth, and cohesiveness built upon the backs of other humans. For Clarke, what becomes clear is that the slaves had a better vision of the incompatibility of these worlds, and the whites did not realize that truth until the death knell of the peculiar institution had sounded. At that moment, slaves did not necessarily have to follow the whims of “benevolent” masters and mistresses, and the members of the Jones family expressed frustration and confusion that these black men and women did not continue their loyalty. Clarke’s epic traces the history of the Jones family and their slaves from 1805 to 1869. Using one narrative, he presents the stories of each to not only demonstrate the insidious nature of slavery, but also to show a three-dimensional portrait of a slave owner, Charles Colcock Jones, as he struggled with this institution in religious terms. Jones was not a Simon Legree, a violent, harmful master, but he was also not a proverbial saint. Charles proves to be a historical actor, who, despite his best intentions and his moral quandaries, eventually bows to the centrality of a place in his life. A Southerner by birth, Charles could never escape the bounds of his home, his aptly titled dwelling place. The place shaped him and molded his religious vision of the world. The region, it might seem, had power over the hearts and minds of the Jones family, and ultimately, their attachment was to region above all else.
In Clarke’s description of Charles Colcock Jones, he presented a man “deeply conflicted by the contradictions of this white ideology” (p. 52). On the one hand, Charles wanted to bring God to the slave settlements, so the inhabitants could experience divinity personally and understand the sacred nature of the cosmos similarly to their owner. On the other, Charles did not want the slaves to have access to one thing that he was granted by birth: freedom. They could worship the same God, but freedom was a guaranteed right of whites only. That contradiction manifested throughout Charles’s life and ministry. He preached to the slaves on plantations as well as settlements and in schoolhouses converted a few evenings a week to small churches. He even created a catechism especially for the “Negro,” which clearly demarcated the boundaries between his world and the world of the slaves. For the supposedly benevolent slave master, preaching Christianity to the slaves would make them more obedient to their masters. His argument for spreading the Gospel, which garnered white support, again harkened back to peculiar institution. He wanted slaves to know God as long as they knew their subservient place in God’s world. His wife, Mary, supported his ministry, and she also involved in teaching Sunday school to the inhabitants of her plantation. They were both committed to the religious education of slaves in general, but I could not help but wonder if their commitment was somehow unique among their Southern neighbors. Their effort appeared extraordinary. Were Charles and Mary different from their Southern brethren? Were other plantation owners as adamant and dedicated to the religious education of slaves? Or are they a unique case study of one family’s attempt to modify the peculiar institution? My main question is: How indicative are they of plantation owners in the South? Can their case study be generalized? If not, Charles and Mary might prove to be more “benevolent” than their friends and neighbors and their struggle with their place in the slave holding system might provide a “kinder, gentler” portrait of owners. Though Clarke also alludes to the other owners, who were quick to rely upon brutality rather than Christian charity. The attempts of Charles and Mary to keep families together based of Christian principles might prove rare. However, this obligation did not guarantee stability because they also separated families including the family of Phoebe and Cassius. Ultimately, they valued peace in the settlements over Christian virtue. How might we interpret these actions? Religion had value for crowd control, but not when slaves threatened the status quo? Their impulse as master and mistress outweighed their Christian sensibility. How are we to understand this complexity? As slaveholders, Charles and Mary faced contradictions between their religious understandings of the world and the fact that they owned and controlled other humans for their economic livelihood. In spite of Charles’s early radical interpretations of slavery as a system, the more entrenched he became, the harder it was to maintain those early principles. His Christianity bowed to his plantation role.
Yet to be fair to
Charles, there were moments in the epic when his religious sensibility was so
incensed that he bristled at the bounds of slavery. When the tutor for his
children, William States Lee, raped Peggy, an attractive slave, Charles reacted
with horror. Outrage overwhelmed Charles because the tutor had not only
molested the young woman but also violated Charles’s trust. For the plantation
owner, the action was criminal, but other whites, most importantly elders of
the
Despite his acceptance of
the peculiar institution, Charles did strive to better the lives of his slaves
through Christian ministry. What Clarke makes apparent is that Charles “was not
introducing religion to the settlements” (p. 151). Rather the settlements
already contained a “sacred cosmos,” the religious world of slaves was not open
to the white minister who, over the course of his life, would catch glimpses of
the sacred world but could never be a participant. The introduction of
Christianity allowed for a construction of a religious hybrid, based in the
indigenous traditions of
In public critique and in distant arbors, Clarke highlights the presence of a distinctly African American Christianity. Conjuring was employed for vengeance, Sharper, an African American minister and mentor to Charles, led religious services free of white preferences for worship, and songs functioned as catechism. Clarke provides a persuasive case for the deployment of Christianity, but I wanted to know more about what religious practice entailed. In hushed arbors and in the schoolroom churches, slaves participated in two visions of the faith. How did those in the settlements practice this hybrid faith of conjurers, magic, Jesus and scripture? How did they reconcile the two into a unified sacred cosmos? Throughout the plantation epic, we get glimpses of the fear of slave magic by owners, the significance of conjurers and their competition with preachers, and the faithful attendance to Charles’s sermons. What was the religious worldview of Lizzy’s family as well as the other families? In the case of the white family, we have access to Charles’s writings and sermons, but what about the other inhabitants of the plantation? Did they see their religious practices as dramatically different from the exercises of whites even when black and white attended the same services? Perhaps, a complete rendering of that worldview is impossible because of our lack of historical sources, but I wished that Clarke spurred by the imagination had given us a larger glimpse. Imagination, as the author notes early on, is a key piece of historical endeavor, and it is likely the tool we need to present this cosmos. I guess I was seeking a tangible look at the hybrid. In addition, why were Charles and other owners so willing to overlook, or deny, the centrality of this other sacred cosmos? What was at stake for white owners in this possible ignorance? Charles disdained those practices, but he did not comprehend that his teachings were being combined with African remnants. Black and white lived side-by-side, and Clarke shows that each group inhabited such disparate spiritual as well as physical worlds.
The physical world also plays a
larger part in the epic. The surroundings include marshes, swamps, fields and
forests, and much of action, black and white, revolves around the physical
space. Slaves make their way to (temporary) freedom because of their intimate
knowledge of each plantation, but place also dwells on the hearts and minds of
the white inhabitants. Throughout
In closing, Clarke’s