Dwelling Place: A
By Erskine Clarke. Yale, 624 pp., $35.
Cornel West and Eddie Glaude Jr., scholars of the African-American religious experience, have written, “Historical work is, in a significant way, ethical work,” accomplished by telling “thick stories” that provoke re-examination of one’s way in the world. In his new book, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic, Erskine Clarke accomplishes such ethical work, at least for this white reader. He not only walks his audience through a story of epic depth, but also engages its capacity for empathy across lines of race and class, and stirs its sense of justice.
Thirty years ago, Robert Manson
Myers sifted through the letters of
Charles Colcock Jones’s substantial
holdings of land and slaves supported his work as a Presbyterian minister, denominational
official, theologian, church historian, and occasional professor at Columbia
(S.C.) Theological Seminary, the institutional forerunner of the now
Georgia-based seminary at which Clarke teaches American religious history. The
Rev. Jones led the way in promoting religious education for slaves, and in 1831
organized the
As the book’s title indicates, the places defined by the Rev. Jones’s plantation and ministerial enterprises stand central to the story (and name each chapter). These places grounded and nourished the identities of their various inhabitants. That land — owned by the whites, worked by the blacks — represented for all of Clarke’s subjects different kinds of constraint and conflict. Clarke particularly wants to show that blacks as well as whites found in these locales the constancy and belonging that all human beings attach to a home place. Clarke tells how blacks shaped the lowcountry landscape and so became in turn connected to and shaped by it. In his telling, Clarke does not present a simple vision of happy slaves at home down on the plantation. Rather, he gives Jupiter, Robinson, Sandy Jones, Cato, Cassius, and their families their due as fully human agents negotiating a dehumanizing system in and through the land they tamed.
Clarke places his accounts of white
plantation and black settlement life in counterpoint to one another, in order to
show the similarities and vast differences between free white and enslaved
black experience of the land. He details the sights, sounds, and conversations
of both the plantation piazza and the settlement stoop. He juxtaposes the
education of planter children in their grand house — the classical training
overseen by a paid tutor — against that of slave children in their cabins — the
wisdom of folktales passed through generations around the communal fire. He describes
the celebrations enjoyed by whites at weddings and holidays, and then devotes a
chapter to the arduous, ingenious work required of the slave cook, Patience, to
prepare for such gatherings. In spite of these composite views, however, the
Jones family still dominates the volume, much as they dominated their region of
antebellum
Yet the ethical edge of Clarke’s
historical work does emerge as he gazes beyond the plantation house into the
settlements. The convicting force of Clarke’s reconstruction gathers almost
imperceptibly as the story unfolds at an unhurried lowcountry pace. The length
and density of this epic may deter some readers; it covers more than sixty
years peopled by more than one hundred characters. Clarke does not intend,
however, for his readers to churn quickly through the book. He wants us instead
to dwell for a time in this world of white privilege and black servitude, of
veiled white anxiety and covert black resistance, where whites sometimes felt
the constraints of the morally incongruous slave system they had engineered,
and where blacks carved out — from the considerable physical and ideological constraints
slavery placed on them — opportunities for resistance. As I read, I found
myself in a vividly drawn
Of course, slaves’ physical and emotional terror far outstripped the whites’ bind of prevarication. That is where I catch myself, where my sympathy with the Joneses gives the lie to my self-image as enlightened on matters of race. This is where I find that I have assumed my place in the story not in the settlement cabins or in the kitchen toiling with Patience, but on the plantation piazza, having tea with the Joneses. Waxing sympathetic for Charles and Mary, I hear myself sounding callow at best, racist at worst. Yet here, too, is where the ethical force of Clarke’s historical work lands. He challenges me to contemplate the slaves’ unaccountable perseverance and the whites’ blind persistence, to credit the distance between, and to name, finally, the former as rooted in truth and the latter in a nightmarish deception.
Whatever sadness I may feel for the Jones family’s epic wrongheadedness, then, stands paired with and outshone by a sense of triumph at the renewed possibilities for Patience and her husband Porter, Syphax and his wife Elsey, and the other freed slaves. Perhaps Clarke has succeeded most powerfully at producing in a twenty-first–century white reader an understanding of emancipatory joy, which begins with the tiniest inkling that something tectonic gave way 140 years ago, something that continues to fracture as the book tremors through my view of race, self, and world. “Our years come to an end like a sigh,” says the 90th Psalm, from which Clarke takes his title. The book ends in very much the same way, quietly, like a breath, and my melancholy gives way, like a breath, to rejoicing.
Anne Blue Wills
teaches the history and culture of