A Turn in the South (14 page)

It is only when you cross over from peninsular Charleston to what were once the slave plantations, the town’s vast hinterland, that the slave past becomes vivid—though there is now just forest for the most part.

The land is flat and marshy, and it goes on for miles. The forest—oak, gum, maple, pine, sycamore, magnolia: tall forest—speaks of the fertility of the soil. The flatness and easiness and the extensiveness of the land make clear the need in the old days for abundant slave labor; and they also make painful the thought of that labor.

Now all is peace. From time to time there is a gateway in the forest, indicating land acquired by a big company; there is an old church; and there are black settlements. These settlements have a history. Most of them are on the site of old plantations that were taken by the federal government after the Civil War and broken up into sixty-acre plots for former slaves. Old property now, historical, some of the houses good, some poor; but after 120 years of land being passed on without wills or deeds, most of the titles are impossible.

I saw this coastal South Carolina forest on a Sunday morning. My guide was Jack Leland. He was a retired Charleston newspaperman, and he was of an old family. All this land and forest—so much the same to the visitor—was known to him in detail. This vegetation was the vegetation he had known as a child; it was still magical to him. Very few of the plantations now grew anything. Cattle were raised on some. Wealthy Yankees had bought others and turned them into hunting preserves.

“This second Yankee invasion, as my father called it, began in the 1880s, and continued to the 1930s. And it was a good thing, because it preserved the old buildings and gave jobs to the local Negroes and added a lot to the economy.”

The land and the black people who worked on it, the memorializing of the past—these were still among Jack Leland’s concerns, though his own family plantation had been alienated more than fifty years before. And our Sunday-morning excursion had a memorializing purpose.

We were going to Middleburg Plantation. A chapel of ease there that was more than two hundred years old, and was in danger of being washed away, had had its foundations consolidated with the help of a federal grant. There was to be a service in the chapel that morning—a special spring service, but also one of thanksgiving. Middleburg Plantation had been in the possession of the Gibbs family until six years before; and old Mr. Gibbs, Jack Leland’s father-in-law, had sent out invitations for the service to people who he thought would want to attend. Afterwards there was to be a picnic in the grounds of the
plantation house. That house had been restored by the estate agent who had bought the property.

The chapel of ease was at the end of a long lane in the forest. The lane was unpaved, soft; there were very bright spots of sunlight on the ground. It was cool in the forest shade; in the open sunlight the heat was immediate. The chapel was called Pompion Hill Chapel; in the flat coastal land of South Carolina a hill was anything a few feet high. The chapel stood beside a marsh where rice had once been cultivated. The surface of the water was in patches bright green. The original rice fields of this part of South Carolina had been created by Dutchmen who had learned about rice and dykes in the East Indies. Now the water level in the marsh had risen, because of some dam or hydraulic works some distance away; and it was this rise in the level of the water that had threatened the 1763 chapel of ease. With the grant from the federal government a rock revetment had been constructed around the “hill” at the water’s edge.

The cars bumped down the soft lane to the chapel. Old Mr. Gibbs, in a jacket with a big check pattern, welcomed each, and directed each to its parking place.

The chapel was a single-chambered red-brick building, entered by the two side doors; whitewashed inside, undecorated; and, except for the baroque dome and pilasters at one end, without architectural flourish. The floor was tiled; paving tiles, Jack Leland said, were especially hard for colonials to make. The only notable furnishing was the pulpit, of local cedar, which was contemporary with the chapel and was the work of a Charleston cabinetmaker whose name was still known. IHS, the piety of the planter and slave-owner; now the sign of another kind of piety. And, indeed, after old Mr. Gibbs had been recognized and had shuffled up along the paving tiles and had spoken his thanks to everyone who had helped with the preservation, the theme of the sermon—a noisy motorboat racing about on the marsh from time to time, but its waves were now striking harmlessly against the gray rock revetment—the theme of the sermon was religion as a binding together of people. Community now with a special meaning, at once diminished and grander.

Then we went on to the plantation house. Brick pillars, green gates, a gateway without a wall, led from the road to a very wide avenue of oaks. The oaks were 150 years old; and these oak trees of South Carolina had the shape and spread of the saman trees of Central America,
which had been introduced in the Caribbean islands as a shade tree for certain crops—cacao and coffee—and had been taken on from there to places as far away as Malaysia; so that tropical plantations and colonies of the imperial time acquired a similar look, with the vegetation that had been brought together from different parts of the world. Here, in South Carolina, was something like the saman trees of Trinidad.

And again the bright sunlight, coming through the foliage, fell in dazzling spots on the shaded ground. But then, after this long wide avenue, the restored plantation house was quite modest, a white-painted wooden building with three rooms upstairs and three rooms downstairs. This was upsetting to one’s ideas about the grandeur of plantation life. Jack Leland said the house was small because the builder had been a Huguenot. English planters, when they did well, could become flamboyant; the Huguenots remained economical and austere, investing and reinvesting in land and slaves. (And the very first plantation house, according to the booklet about the restoration, had been even more modest, with a sitting room and a dining room alone on the ground floor, without a veranda or a back porch.)

Separate from the main house was a “dependency,” as an ancillary building was called; and this dependency, more or less in order, was a cookhouse with a brick chimney. Another dependency had burned down, and nothing remained now but its brick chimney. Black servants were careless, Jack Leland said. It was because of this carelessness that in Charleston there had been regulations forbidding the building of wooden dependencies. The main house could be of wood; the dependencies had to be of brick.

There were other dependencies in the grounds of the Middleburg plantation house: stables at the end of an open field, and a commissary. Jack Leland thought I should go and have a look at the commissary. It was a two-floored building, wooden shingles on the upper floor, brick on the lower. Rice would have been stored on the upper floor. On the lower floor there were two cells with bars on the windows. These had been for slaves; not punishment cells, but “holding” cells, where difficult new slaves would have been broken in or reconciled, one at a time, to plantation life.

The difficult slave would have been held in one cell. In the other there would have been an old slave, someone used to the ways of the plantation. The old slave—not locked in his cell, but free to come and go—would have talked to the new man and tried to calm him down;
would have eaten food, shown how good it was, would have offered food; and the new slave’s fears and resentments would have been soothed away.

I walked across the bright field to the commissary. It was hot, stinging; not truly a spring field. On one side of the field were greenish ponds—like marshland breaking through the ground—and they were full of white water lilies. Lotuses, Jack Leland had said. But they were not the delicate red lotuses of India. These white lilies, which had naturalized so easily in South Carolina, had become like things of the marsh, growing thickly together, choking themselves out of the water. And, on the far side of the commissary building, were the two slave cells, separated by no more than a lattice partition, with the earth for floor, and with the small barred windows high up, too high to reach.

They were really small spaces, tall boxes. It was easy to enter into the terror of the new man from Africa, the “new Negro,” as he was called in the West Indies, who might have been snatched weeks or months before in the interior of Africa, marched or taken to the coast, held there in a dealer’s stockade or compound in a place like Gorée Island off Dakar, and finally transferred to a ship for the passage across the Atlantic. Easy to enter into his terror, the terror of the man taken away stage by stage from what had been reality. Easy too to enter into the heart of the other man, the trusty slave on the other side of the partition, who sat with him and talked to him and tried to present the new life to him as one of ease and plenty, the only real life.

Old Mrs. Gibbs wanted to know, at lunch, if I had seen the cells where the new slaves had been “acclimated.” (I hadn’t heard the word before; later I was to understand that the word was in general use in the South.) It was something that should be seen, she said; it showed the trouble planters went to, to make things easier for their slaves; that was a side of plantation life that wasn’t generally known.

The picnic was laid out on folding tables in the shade of trees. And all around, below the great oaks of the plantation avenue, there were picnic parties—the communion of the church service extending to this big picnic lunch, in the grounds of the restored plantation house.

In the dining room of the house itself there was a spread for visitors on one table. On another table were photographs of the restoration work; photographs, too, of old black people who had worked in the house. There were no black people at the picnic; but these servants
were remembered. And Mr. Hill—of the family who had bought the plantation from the Gibbses and had gone to so much trouble to restore it, as a gesture to the community and history and the land—Mr. Hill told me that among the house papers were documents that enabled you to trace the ancestors of many black people. He was in a blue-striped seersucker suit, a big, plumpish, friendly man, offering a formal welcome to the house.

Many firms and many individuals had made gifts towards the restoration. The rooms themselves had been done up by different interior-decorating firms. This explained the puzzling description of the house in the advertisements I had seen: “Middleburg Plantation Designer House 1987.” The nineteenth-century “State Room,” for instance, had been done up by Lowcountry Decorators and Lowcountry Antiques. They had gone in for “dramatic upbeat fabrics on traditional upholstered pieces.” As accessories they had chosen, among other things, “a beautiful oil painting of a black servant girl circa 1894,” and “new silk trees and plants, the modern homemaker’s answer to her ‘too little time’ problem.”

The rooms were, in effect, exhibition rooms aiming at a period feel; the restored house was for show. And for the visitors who were expected there had been incorporated, at one end of the back porch, a gift shop, and at the other end a kitchen.

The restoration had been carefully done. No attempt had been made to make the house appear grander than it had been; and it was thought that what had been done would enable the house to live for a while. The magnificent grounds remained. Jack Leland’s old father-in-law, who had lived in the house for some time, was greatly moved that the house would survive. And so was his daughter Anne, Jack Leland’s wife. She had come to the house as a child to spend time “in the country.” There was no electricity in those days, and she had had to go up to bed with an oil lamp.

The land and the past were being honored, the plantation and the river at its back which had made for the rice paddies, as in the East Indies. But what was missing were the slave cabins. The plantation house, even with its surviving dependencies, was without what would have been its most important—and most notable—feature. Jack Leland told me that the slave cabins would have been set beside the oak avenue. The cabins were known as “the quarters” or “the village.”
They would never have been out of sight of the plantation house. And, considering the sanitation of those days, there would almost certainly have been a physically squalid side to the slave plantation.

But now the plantation was cleansed of its cabins. There remained the wonderful oak avenue, ever growing. Hard, mentally, to set the cabins in that grandeur that spoke more of old European country houses. Only the heat of the marsh, and the light, assailing one whenever one moved out of the forest shade, brought to mind the idea of tropical crops growing fast: labor, sweat, people, squalor.

The empty Sunday-afternoon road led through forest again, seen now with a slightly different eye; and led through the scattered black communities descended from the slaves who had, fleetingly, triumphed over their masters a full 120 years ago.

Indigo, rice, cotton—all the big slave crops had collapsed here, just as, in the Caribbean, coconut had suffered from a kind of “rust,” and cacao, which had once in some islands been “king,” in planter language, had been all but wiped out by the blight known as witch broom. So that it appeared that certain crops, when planted beyond a certain human scale, became afflicted in some way, economically, or by some disease that redressed the balance; as plagues reduced human populations, and myxomatosis kept rabbits down when because of their numbers they ceased to be charming.

Not far from where the country road met the highway, a black crowd was coming out of a big church. Suits; dresses; hats; cars. After the Middleburg picnic, an answering idea of community: the vanished slave cabins transformed into something quite different now, not only the old country communities in the forest, but also black settlements in Charleston itself, some middle-class, many more in projects, or in old houses on the east side, avoided by the holiday tourists in the horse carriages and pedal carriages.

A
N ELDERLY
lady living in one of the houses of the historical town, when she heard that I had been born in Trinidad, said, “There is a story in my family that our Burke ancestors from Philadelphia had been left the island of Trinidad.”