In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic
  • Peggy G. Hargis
Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. By Erskine Clarke. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. 601. Cloth, $35.00.)

Clarke successfully combines three ingredients—the obsessive spirit of a genealogist, the interpretive mind of a historian, and the expressive grace of a novelist—to weave a seamless narrative about the families of Charles Colcock Jones and his slaves. By zeroing in on both the Joneses and their slaves, Clarke exposes the subtleties of motives, behaviors, and relations between master and enslaved that are absent in more sweeping accounts of planter ideology or slave resistance.

The sixty-year epic begins in 1805 with the morning routines of two slaves, Old Jupiter and Lizzy Jones, and ends with Robert Q. Mallard (Jones's son-in-law) returning to Liberty County, Georgia, after the death of his wife in 1869. What lies between is a riveting account of life in the big house and in the slaves' quarters. The book reads more like a novel than the usual academic account; and herein lies the book's greatest strength and potentially its sole weakness. Clarke has written a "composite biography" where the experiences of whites and blacks overlap and intertwine (x). Yet the sources clearly favor revealing the lives of whites over that of blacks. To strike a balance between the two stories, he knits together facts from slave narratives, archaeological findings, court documents, and plantation records to color what is missing from the Joneses' accounts. Although his approach ensures a smooth and even narrative, it makes it necessary to sift through footnotes in order to distinguish what happened from what might have happened in the lives of the Joneses' slaves. The strengths of the book, however, far outweigh any effort it takes to disentangle sources.

Clarke's expertise in American religious history is evident throughout the work. He skillfully leads readers through the development of Jones's religious beliefs, his questions about slavery, and how Jones reconciles beliefs with behaviors. Ideology for Jones is personal. His obligations are not to a [End Page 211] region or a class but to family and home. Although he is benevolent to his slaves, his strong sense of commitment to family home, and to preserving a way of life that necessitated slavery, obligates him to favor succession and ultimately war. Clarke's evenhanded treatment of both the powerful and powerless makes it difficult not to feel empathy for the Joneses as Sherman's forces ravage a series of plantations that they and their kin owned. The family must have felt as if Sherman had personally targeted them for destruction.

Clarke's analysis, however, is not limited to Jones's ideological development. His epic succeeds in showing us the counterpoint of planter ideology by revealing the many ways in which black families resisted the shackles of slavery to retain their humanity. Clarke rescues the enslaved from the pages of the Jones family's letters by meticulously tracing kinship among blacks owned by them and their kin. In doing so, Clarke is better able to interpret the actions of both master and slave. For instance, what often appeared as routine behavior and mundane decisions to the Joneses, sometimes had devastating effects on the lives of slaves in their care. Clarke's attention to detail in reconstructing slave relationships heightens our understanding of how black families were able to carve out a modest measure of autonomy within the confines of slavery.

Peggy G. Hargis
Georgia Southern University
...

pdf

Share