Erskine Clarke's Dwelling Place

KELLY BAKER

A week ago, I had the privilege of responding to Erskine Clarke's Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (Yale: 2005) at the Southeast Regional meeting of the AAR. Dwelling Place won the Bancroft prize, and it follows the Jones family, plantation owning whites, and the family of Lizzy, black slaves. I cannot clearly state how much I enjoyed this deep social history of several plantations and their inhabitants. Clarke, a masterful historian as well as writer, peels back the layers of facade, animosity, and so-called benevolence to demonstrate the complicated relationships between blacks and whites and the renderings of place by both groups. This book, like many other quality books in American religious history, sucked me into the narrative and made me empathize with the historical actors, slave and free. During our conversations on the panel, one respondent noted her discomfort with central character, Charles Colcock Jones, who despite his best attempts at benevolence and Christian charity eventually surrendered to the peculiar institution. Clarke, in his commentary on our responses, responded that for him, the "horror" of the book was that even those plantation owners with the best intentions were corrupted by this system of physical bondage. By mapping plantation owners at their best, we can easily see the inherent evil of slave holding. For those of you, who have not picked up Dwelling Place, I highly recommend it because it puts a human face of the issue of slavery of both the owners and those who were owned. Here's a sneak peek at my response (the full response is located here, so make sure to scroll down to "responses"):

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, economic gain of the owners. Erskine Clarke delves deeply into the lives of the Jones family and the lives of Lizzy’s family 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, but 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 and, 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 this 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 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, and 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. This 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. This 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 their own. For this 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, like 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, it appears, sometimes 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 are 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, rapes Peggy, an attractive slave, Charles reacts with horror. Outrage overwhelmed Charles because the tutor had not only molested this young woman but also violated his trust. For the plantation owner, this action was criminal, but other whites, most importantly elders of the Columbus church, doubted the veracity of Peggy’s claim. Instead, they defended Lee by noting that slaves were known to be liars. Charles, then, was confronted by a problem. Slaves were disparaged because they were slaves, and white men were somehow above reproach. The institution, which Charles believed brought slaves to God, also guaranteed that slaves were treated as lesser humans and lacked the rights of their white brethren. In his defense of Peggy, he did not criticize the institution that allowed this to happen rather he centered upon the breach of trust he had with another white man. Slavery, like its white enforcers, appeared to be above reproach.

...
Clarke’s Dwelling Place lives up to its subtitle. It is an epic, the story of two families confronted by racial boundaries. It is a story of white privilege and black resistance, but more importantly, it is an in-depth study of the problem of slavery for both parties. This problem of slavery is represented again and again as a fierce bull alligator, or gator, which thrashes and chomps. At each stage in Charles’s journey, Clarke notes the ferocity of the gator because this missionary owner, despite his valiant attempts to benevolent to those he owned, cannot “domesticate” the predator. The gator is a dilemma. Can Charles focus upon the spiritual lives of his slaves while he owns their physical bodies? Can he separate spiritual and religious freedom? How could Charles argue for the morality of an institution of oppression? Instead of domesticating the gator, what becomes clear is that the gator overpowers the “Apostle to the Negro.” The evil of the institution outweighs the benevolence. This metaphor proved particularly striking to me. This gator might appear docile and still, but always, the predatory nature lurks under the surface. In his skillful epic, Clarke wrangles the bull gator with its jaws chomping furiously and its tale thrashing, and I would argue Clarke stands triumphant because he is able to present the complexity of these relationships of families intimately wed together through the bonds of slavery. Where Charles ultimately was beaten by his predatory foe, Clarke, at least in my mind’s eye, not only wrangles but also bests the gator by placing a human face on such a dilemma. With his wrangling skill, there is possibly another career awaiting Clarke in the swamps and marshes of Liberty County, Georgia or my native Florida.

Liberating the Founders

PAUL HARVEY

This week's Speaking of Faith features Krista Tippett's interview with Steven Waldman, who discusses at length Founding Faith.

From the Speaking of Faith newsletter, with more on the program:

Liberating the Founders

We liberate the founders from conservative and liberal captivity, by revisiting the real, messy history of religious history in early America with journalist Steven Waldman. We explore how this history might shake and reshape Americans' sense of what is at stake in current debates about the relationship between government and religion. Also, how a falsely harmonious sense of the American experience with religious liberty undermines the wisdom American history holds for developing democracies around the world.

Disspelling the Myth of Uninterrupted Triumph and Goodness

. . . Waldman reminds us that the genius of the U.S. founders was not in getting everything right from the outset, but in learning from their mistakes, with an eye out for the missteps of their own time. The first 150 years of colonial history, as he retraces it, involved a cascade of failed experiments with official state religions. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both became champions of the separation of religion and state — albeit with very different emphases — in part through their revulsion at the intolerance and violence that marked these experiments. . . .

[Waldman] dwells with some insistence — for our collective edification — on the dark side of this early history. . . . The facts, as he tells them, are shocking. At the same time, he finds a way to forgive our confusion, and our gloss on history. We come by them honestly — as a direct inheritance from the founders themselves, who were equally confused, and imprecise, and muddied by the politics of their moment in time.

. . . . A self-righteous sense of U.S. history as an unbroken arc of triumph and goodness does not serve us well as citizens and leaders in the 21st-century world. More positively stated: an active, self-aware memory of the difficulty and struggle, the violence and mistakes, that accompanied the birth of American democracy — and that only gradually and fitfully led to the virtue we now prize of separation of church and state — could be a great gift and resource in helping young democracies around the world. Our own history seen in the light of fact, and removed from the distorting divides of our time, could be a source of our greatest wisdom and reason precisely towards what is difficult and dangerous in the contemporary world.

Kerber on Chairing

JOHN FEA

I know we have discussed this on the blog before, but in today's Chronicle of Higher Education on-line Linda Kerber has a nice piece on what to do and what no to do when chairing an academic panel.

Origins of Proslavery Christianity

PAUL HARVEY

My friend Charles Irons of Elon University is about to publish his long-awaited The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia; it's supposed to be out later next month, so get your post-Easter pre-Memorial Day book sale shopping list ready. Here's the description from Amazon:

In the colonial and antebellum South, black and white evangelicals frequently prayed, sang, and worshipped together. Even though white evangelicals claimed spiritual fellowship with those of African descent, they nonetheless emerged as the most effective defenders of race-based slavery.

As Charles Irons persuasively argues, white evangelicals' ideas about slavery grew directly out of their interactions with black evangelicals. Set in Virginia, the largest slaveholding state and the hearth of the southern evangelical movement, this book draws from church records, denominational newspapers, slave narratives, and private letters and diaries to illuminate the dynamic relationship between whites and blacks within the evangelical fold. Irons reveals that when whites theorized about their moral responsibilities toward slaves, they thought first of their relationships with bondmen in their own churches. Thus, African American evangelicals inadvertently shaped the nature of the proslavery argument. When they chose which churches to join, used the procedures set up for church discipline, rejected colonization, or built quasi-independent congregations, for example, black churchgoers spurred their white coreligionists to further develop the religious defense of slavery.

More on Steven Waldman, Founding Faith

PAUL HARVEY

John Fea gave our blog an extensive and thoughtful review of STeven Waldman's Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America here (or just scroll down).

Terry Gross's interview on Fresh Air with Waldman is linked here. An introductory blurb:

Fresh Air from WHYY, March 11, 2008 · Was America meant to be a Christian nation? Author Steven Waldman attempts to answer this and other questions related to America's religious history in his new book, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America.

Waldman is the co-founder of Beliefnet.com, a website devoted to spirituality and faith issues. In tandem with his book, Beliefnet has opened an online archive of historical documents related to the separation of church and state, and religious freedom in America.

There's also a short excerpt from the volume linked to the Fresh Air site.

Omnivorous American Religion

BY JOHN TURNER

I've been reading a book with only a very tangential connection to American Religious History: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, whom the NYT describes as "a professor of journalism at Berkeley, and therefore by definition a liberal foodie intellectual."

This is the tangential connection: Pollan introduces us to Joel Salatin, a Bob Jones University graduate and alternative farmer in Virginia who describes himself as a "Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer." Salatin has opted out of "industrial agriculture" and instead practices intensive-grazing grass management, enabling him to grow chickens that taste like Chicken. Salatin turns off some liberal reporters with a Jesus fish on his door, but Pollan admirably perseveres. He even survives a "strikingly non-generic version of grace, [in which Salatin] offer[ed] a fairly detailed summary of the day's doings to a lord who ... was present and keenly interested."

The Omnivore's Dilemma made me feel intensely guilty about eating blueberries from Chile and suspicious that everything I eat might really be corn.

Pollan reaches this conclusion about American styles of eating:

Consuming these neo-pseudo-foods alone in our cars, we have become a nation of antinomian eaters, each of us struggling to work out our dietary salvation on our own.

The American diet sounds strikingly like American religion. We eat like we worship!

Visions of Progress

PAUL HARVEY

I recently returned from a Humanities Symposium in Boulder, where (among others), Wendy Brown, the Berkeley political theorist and contributor to the blog Immanent Frame, gave a brilliant analysis of Marx and religion, and the profaning nature of market culture, which is still buzzing in my head. Along the way, she discussed the religious iconography of the "Obama phenomenon." The gist of her paper can be found in her blog entry on Charles Taylor's new book on secularism, here (as she puts the discussion with Taylor there: He [Taylor] wants to think about who a secularist is and what secularism achieves and sacrifices in relation to belief, and I want to think about the subtle violences of the forces that we might call secularizing.

We've entertained considerable speculation on the blog about the fate of the so-called religious center/left, its possible (or mythical) resurgence, where Catholics fit in, etc.

Now for some excellent historical grounding for these speculations: The historian Doug Rossinow, author of The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (Columbia, 1998), which we've blogged about here before in our conversations with John Wilson about the historiography of the 1960s, is featured on HNN's "Outstanding Young Historians" page.

His new book may not get noticed by religious historians, but should be: Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America. He writes the following, of this new work:

I'm an historian of American politics. I never expected to be an historian of religion.

Actually, I never really did become an historian of religion, in any conventional sense. But I did acquire a lasting interest in the intersection of religion and political dissent-a connection I might have expected to encounter if I had undertaken a study of political radicalism in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century America, but one I did not anticipate exploring so deeply while investigating the political left in post-1945 America. Eventually I managed to compress about one-hundred pages on Christian existentialism down to a single chapter. I decided that was about what the topic deserved in the context of a study of white youth radicalism in Austin, Texas, which eventually took the form of a book, The Politics of Authenticity.

However, religion is something that pops up in unexpected places when studying American history. I have continued to explore what I call the prophetic dimension of American political radicalism in twentieth-century America-radical politics typically directed toward very nonreligious ends. And I still teach a course on religion and politics in American history.
In my new book, Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America, I've moved (for now) away from monographic research and toward a synthetic perspective. One of the things I learned in researching my first book is that radical and reform politics in U.S. history have sometimes had more in common than is usually recalled. The left and liberalism are neither mutually exclusive categories nor (as a Fox News viewer might think) identical categories; they are overlapping categories.

I emphasize that American radicals, between 1880 and the present, frequently have done the work of liberalism, trying to realize the liberal ideals of constitutional government, natural rights, and other things, while, during at least some of that period, plenty of liberal reformers took a more critical stance toward American capitalism than recent history would lead us to believe. The prophetic stance is visible, too, but in ironic fashion: consciously religious social criticism was pervasive within American reform as well as among radicals in the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, and even later; but it became the more exclusive province of radicals during the cold war and after, even though recent American radicals have usually been ardently secular people. Go figure.

I recently got a message from a student at a seminary in Austin, saying that some folks there are interested in establishing an intentional religious study community. He had read about another such community in the 1950s in The Politics of Authenticity, and wondered if I could send him some documents I had cited in my book. Now I'm glad I held onto those dissertation research files.