A Turn in the South (15 page)

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 mother 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.

I
T 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, separating 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.

The importance of a colony depends principally on its economic possibilities. The French exchanged Canada (or their idea of Canada) for the very small West Indian sugar island of Guadeloupe. The Dutch gave New York to the British in exchange for the South American coastal colony of Surinam in 1667. (When I was in Surinam in 1961 I was told by a Dutch woman teacher that in Dutch schools it was said that the Dutch had got the better bargain, because the British had lost New York, while the Dutch—in 1961—still had Surinam.) And without the United States at its back, post-plantation Charleston might have been like Surinam or Guyana in South America, or Belize in Central America, former continental slave colonies from which, after the money went, the slave-owners or their successors had finally to go, leaving the place to the slaves and the people who replaced the slaves. Whereas the Charleston that survives, the Charleston of the old families, the romance the tourist travels to, is a white town, where the black people (though they outnumber the white) appear as intruders.

So, just a five-hour drive east and south from Atlanta (founded as a railway terminus in 1837), was a history quite different from Atlanta’s. Though, as in Atlanta and northern Georgia, that history could be seen layer by layer: the tourist town, segregation, the Civil War, the plantations, the large slave population, the wealth, the eighteenth-century colony.

I
T WAS
in indigo that early fortunes were made, Jack Leland said. “When the revolution started, Great Britain was paying a bounty on indigo. Indigo was a good dyestuff. India was not yet in the picture. The bulk of British indigo came from here. After the revolution there was no British market, and indigo faded out. No indigo was planted after 1800. The planters concentrated on rice and cotton. These were crops they already had, together with the indigo.

“The rice-planters were at the top. The cotton-planters were just under them. The run-of-the-mill farmers were down at the bottom with the shopkeepers. It was like a caste system. You still hear people saying of somebody, but not so much nowadays, ‘He’s in trade.’ And that means he’s a little bit outside the pale. It’s changing rapidly now. Money has become a big factor. Before, family was always more important than money.”

The social prejudices of England, reinforced by colonial wealth—it seemed from this account that (even apart from the fact of slavery) success, when it came to the Charleston plantations, began almost at once to undo itself. But the land was blessed: it was so fertile and well watered, so flat and easy.

“After the loss of indigo this area became very prosperous. This strip of land which runs from North Carolina to Florida became probably the wealthiest agricultural area in the world. And these planters were the people who started Newport, Rhode Island. They built their summer residences there.

“The Civil War was the first big blow. The war freed the slaves, and the planters had to pay them to work. And after the war the plantations fell apart, literally.”

That was easy now for me to imagine. I had only to think of the oak avenue at Middleburg, set slave cabins below the oaks, imagine a slave population on holiday or disaffected; imagine the rice growing in its water-logged fields, growing fast; think of the great distances, and the heat; the numbers of the blacks and the fewness of the whites. And it was easy to see how the little kingdoms that had created wealth for a few generations, had built houses in Charleston and summer houses in Rhode Island, could just collapse.