A Turn in the South

  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.

  AN 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.”

  We were sitting out in the small garden, drinking lemonade. The house next door, though of brick, looked extravagantly antique, small and crooked and quaint.

  I said, “The whole island?”

  “The whole island. That is the story. Southern people like to feel that, once upon a time at least, they were rich. But they died, the Burkes, in the Windward passage, when they were going to claim the land.”

  I asked for a date.

  The lady went inside and then came out with a family tree, sketched out literally like a tree. Her moth
er had spent some time on that. And there on a lower left-hand branch was the inscription about the Burkes: “Died May 1795 when going out to claim land in Trinadad.” Trinadad—that was the inaccurate spelling in the family tree, indicating the romantic distance at which, in the family stories, Trinidad lay from Charleston and from Philadelphia.

  The story was interesting to me. Trinidad, for nearly three centuries after its discovery, had been an all but forgotten part of the Spanish Empire. Late in the eighteenth century, out of a wish to protect their South American possessions, the Spaniards had decided to open up the island to immigration, and to convert an island of bush into a slave sugar colony, on the pattern of Santo Domingo and Jamaica and Barbados. But the Spaniards couldn’t provide the immigrants themselves. They didn’t have the people; their empire was too big. To protect themselves as best they could, the Spanish authorities required immigrants to Trinidad to be Roman Catholic; in return they promised free land in proportion to the number of slaves a settler brought in. The people they had in mind, and the people who mainly went, were French, from the French West Indian islands, in turmoil after the French Revolution, and then the black revolution of Toussaint L’Ouverture in Santo Domingo, and all the upheavals and changes of flag that occurred in the Caribbean during the conquests and reconquests of the Napoleonic Wars.

  The story of people going out to Trinidad to “claim land” in 1795 was therefore not fanciful. It even in a way made sense to say that the whole island was to be claimed. What was news to me was that Irish people in Philadelphia—who couldn’t have had many slaves and wouldn’t have qualified for the free land—had thought of going.

  But the Burkes of this story didn’t make it. They were drowned, and Trinidad became a myth of their great fortune. And, in the family chronicle, there was a sequel. The Burke family lawyer, the Charleston lady said, married the family nurse. Between them they did the Burke orphans out of their patrimony. Generations later the wickedness came to light. It happened one day that one of the lawyer’s descendants was entertaining a descendant of one of the orphans. The lawyer’s descendant showed some ancestral china plates. There were only eleven. The descendant of the orphan said, “I have the twelfth. It is one of my greatest treasures. The tradition in my family is that the other eleven were stolen.”

  A Southern story: a story of old family, a dream of wealth in the past. But it interested me for another reason. One of the very first books written about the affairs of Trinidad was by a pamphleteer from Philadelphia. His name was Pierre Franc MacCallum. He was a man of radical, even revolutionary views; a hater of authority, in his own narrative. He went out to Trinidad in 1803, six years after the British conquest. He was hostile to the British governor, and hostile to British authority generally; so hostile, in fact, that he was eventually deported—taken from the very rough jail in Port of Spain to the harbor, and put on a ship for New York.

  MacCallum’s French forenames suggest that he was partly of French origin. This may explain some of his radical or anti-British feeling. But what also comes out in his book is that, in his campaign against the British governor and British authority in Trinidad, he was driven more by rage about the way poor Scottish and Irish people had been dumped in the Carolinas. He had always been a mystery to me, this pamphleteer with the half-French name from Philadelphia. He was less so now. In this Charleston story of a family fortune lost two hundred years ago in Trinidad I thought I could see a story of remigration and fortune sought: some sort of movement of impoverished people from barren Philadelphia to just-opened-up Trinidad.

  There must always be certain things that drop out of history. Only the broadest movements and themes can be recorded. All the multifarious choppings and changings, all the individual hazards and venturesomeness, and failures, cannot be recorded. History is full of mysteries, even as family histories are full of gaps and embellishments. Certain things are lost, the way for me, the grandson of immigrants from India to Trinidad, ancestors as close as grandparents are mysterious, and some unknown, making it impossible to give a good answer, after just a hundred years, to a question like: “Where did your people come from?”

  What is not easily called to mind now is how close, in the slave days, the slave territories of the Caribbean and the South were. When the French planters of the West Indies were negotiating terms with the Spanish authorities for settling in Trinidad, one of the pressures they applied was a threat to take their slaves to the American South. That would be better for them as planters, they said, especially since after the war—the War of Independence—the United States seemed likely to be of some importance in the hemisphere (and therefore better able to protect people). And how rich and tempting the flat, well-watered lowlands of the Carolina coast must have appeared to people who knew only the islands!

  And how strange to reflect that the black people of Trinidad I grew up among might, with another twist, have been born in the Carolinas and might have had an entirely different history. The chief difference lies in the distance of the two societies from slavery. Slavery was abolished in the British colonies in 1834; and the Caribbean colonies were thereafter neglected. So 150 years separate the black people of the British Caribbean from slavery. American slavery ended with the Civil War. But it might be said that freedom came to the black man only in 1954; so American blacks have reached where they have reached in just thirty years. In those thirty years American blacks have grown to see opportunity; while the larger independent territories of the British Caribbean—Trinidad, Jamaica, Guyana—have in their various ways been plundered and undone.

  IT MIGHT have been that I was getting used to the Southern accent. But I felt from time to time that I was picking up something of the distinctive Barbadian enunciation—known to me from my childhood—in the speech of black people in Charleston. Strange—tiny Barbados finding an echo in grand South Carolina! But in the eighteenth century Barbados, sugar-rich and slave-rich, was the colonial land of opportunity. In Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography it is the place to which people ran away to try their fortune as clerks or lawyers, Philadelphia itself being so poor that sometimes there wasn’t even coin. And Barbados was the model for the South Carolina plantation colony. And Barbados was an element in the aristocracy of Jack Leland as an old Charlestonian.

  Two of his most valued possessions came from Barbados. They were sea chests, and they had been brought by an ancestor from Barbados in 1685, fifteen years after the founding of the South Carolina colony. The chests had been in Jack Leland’s possession for forty years; they had been passed on to him by an aunt. He had talked to a historian about the chests, and he had been told that chests like those would have been made to measure for a voyage, to fit between the beams of a ship. They were carpenter’s work or joiner’s, not cabinetmaker’s. They were high and undecorated, mortised at the corners, without extrusions, altogether plain; and they were prominent in his dining room.

  He lived in an old, very narrow “single house” in the center of old Charleston. The house was about fifteen feet wide; the plot was small; it was a house one would have passed by. To that extent, then, living in a very simple house in a narrow street, he was representative, almost emblematic, of the old Charlestonians, proud of family rather than money, proud of the land and his old connection with it.

  He carried its history with him. And one of the first things he did when I went to call on him after the Sunday at Middleburg was to show me a map of the district, made some years ago, with all the old plantations. There were many. The road along which we had traveled, though very much longer and straighter than any in Barbados, had shown only a fraction of what had existed. Each plantation had been an entity, each a little kingdom ruled by the planter; each had had a house, and quarters; and in each, according to Jack Leland, the quarters had been in the middle, to prevent communication between the slaves on different plantations.

  The map was on the landing of the staircase of his house. The staircase was in the center of the narrow house, separat
ing the front room from the back room. The entrance to the house was on the side. That central side entrance and staircase was fundamental to the idea of a “single” Charleston house, a single house here not being, as I had thought, a small detached wooden house; but a house in which, for the sake of privacy, the entrance was not at the front but at the side, and in which there was a single room on either side of the entrance and staircase. A double house had two rooms on either side of the staircase.

  It was said that the idea of the single house had been imported, with the idea of the plantation slave colony, from Barbados and the West Indies generally. I hadn’t seen anything like the Charleston houses in Trinidad. But Trinidad was a late West Indian foundation; and its origins were Spanish and French. The West Indian colonies to which Charleston looked were the older, British ones.

  It was always strange to me in Charleston, this harking back to the colonial British West Indies as to a mark of blood and ancestry. That idea, of a colonial aristocracy going back to the foundations, never really existed in Trinidad in my time; and doesn’t exist in the former British West Indies now. The reason is simple: the British West Indian colonies more or less closed down in the 1830s, with the abolition of slavery, and became stagnant. The British Empire moved east; then moved into Africa. And there is no point in the former British West Indies now in claiming to have been among the first there. Perhaps there cannot truly be said to be an aristocracy in a place that came to nothing—they are just people (like Robinson Crusoe) who went to the wrong place. Whereas Charleston was claimed by the large events of a continental history, and its small-time beginnings are now indescribably romantic, when it was on a par with slave colonies like Antigua or Barbados or Jamaica, and looked to them for trade and support.