Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (review)

When Erskine Clarke, professor of American religious history at Columbia Theological Seminary, came to ponder possible titles for the book taking form in his hands, he was mindful of the many biblical and hymnological references applied to works on antebellum plantation slavery. His plantation narrative, situated in the landscape of the Georgia coast—the low country—drew creatively upon the much referenced The Children of Pride (Yale University Press, 1972), a massive volume of letters of the family of the Rev. Dr. Charles Colcock Jones of Liberty County. Jones (1804–1863) was a Presbyterian minister, missionary to slaves and, briefly, professor at Columbia, as well as a slaveholder. The editor of the family letters, Robert Manson Myers, had taken his title from the book of Job. Clarke turned the pages of his Bible beyond the harshness of Job's world, finding in the next book, Psalms, a notion nearer to his reading of the conjoined yet segmented world of master and slave. David's familiar psalm, which saw the Lord as shepherd and concluded with the hope of the righteous that they would "dwell in the house of the Lord forever" (Ps. 23:6), led directly to the hymnal and the faith that "in God's house for evermore my dwelling-place shall be." The concept of inhabiting a landscape—more particularly house and home—pulled together theology and historiography. It also referenced Heidegger's idea that the world is the house within which we dwell and Bachelard's understanding that house as home is our primary universe. Clarke must also have had in mind Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (Pantheon, 1974), that drew its title from a "slave song" rather than hymns ancient and modern, but similarly turned to Psalms for its epigram: "The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein" (Ps. 24:1).

Whereas Myers took as subtitle for his collection of letters A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, Clarke chose the epic as his model. The result, he said, was "a composite biography: the lives of owners and owned are seen overlapping one another and being layered together in complex and interdependent ways, even as they are located within larger social and cultural contexts" (x). To construct his fugal version of the story, he needed to follow both the history of the writers of the letters, the slaveowning Jones family, with their view from the top, and, from below, the history of the extended, enslaved family of Lizzy Jones. Clarke knew he could not find everything he wanted in the seemingly ample evidence of the Jones family letters because of their one-sidedness. Besides, the letters commenced in 1854, while he started his story in 1805. Clarke went to the archives, and searched through the results of archaeological, linguistic, architectural, and geographical studies and much more. Here it was sometimes necessary to argue from the general to the particular and perhaps atypical; to assume, for example, that if kitchens were typically located outside big houses in separate structures this must have been the case at Liberty Hall; or to assume that the questions typically asked at slave auctions were put directly to the slaves of Liberty Hall when they were auctioned in 1808. Even all of this was not enough. To understand why people had faith in what they believed and to account for their actions, Clarke knew he had to take a series of imaginative leaps. All historians do this, he believed.

Imagination, speculation, and conjecture are crucial to the successful negotiation of life, not just writing history, and Clarke admitted this to himself. The issue, he knew, was how to communicate to his reader the points where he had knowledge from the sources (with their own acts of imagination), where he applied knowledge specific to places other than his own particular place of investigation, and where he...