Weeping Time
Jekyll Island, GA
May 14, 2022
In 1804, on the right bank of the Hudson in Weehauken, New Jersey, a duel took place. The sitting Vice President of the United States shot and killed the first Secretary of the Treasury.
Aside from becoming increasingly uncouth, dueling was illegal in New Jersey. So with Alexander Hamilton dead at his hands, Aaron Burr took to his heels.
He went south, and holed up at the home of an associate on the central coast of Georgia. Pierce Butler was an Irish immigrant who owned plantations on St Simons, and around what is now known as Butler Island.
Hundreds of slaves planted, pulled, packed, and portaged the rice, sugar, indigo, and cotton from the fertile fields and surrounding swamp.
Burr thought little of the low country scenery, lamenting that it “presents no scenes for a painter.” He stayed a month before returning north, where charges were dropped. He soon went west, where new ones were raised.
Burr wasn’t the last notable who came to Georgia on escape from New York. TL Huston was a civil engineer who worked in Cuba during and after the Spanish-American War.
When he returned, he bought the New York Yankees, and acquired Babe Ruth. After selling his stake in the iconic team, he purchased acres of land that had been a notorious plantation.
On that plot he built a mansion, and lived there till his death eleven years later. Ruth would visit. Through a dormer window on the uppermost floor, he could see a stark reminder of a disturbing past.
We’re spending a couple days exploring Gullah Geechee culture. Our group left Sapelo Island on the first ferry this morning. After disembarking under a chilly sunrise, we met for breakfast about ten minutes south, at Spartina Grill in the town of Derien.
Several local officials, community representatives, and the Gullah Geechee Ring Shouters joined us there. The latter is a distinctive group that combines what’s been described as “counter-clockwise dance and call-and-response singing”, with rhythmic hand-claps and sticks beating against wooden floors.
The stick-on-the-floor replaced conventional drums when the African ritual was revived on this side of the Atlantic. Apparently, masters and overseers prohibited drums as sacrilegious, and (more importantly) as furtive communication to incite rebellion among the slaves.
The “ring shout” lasted into the 20th century, but faded as blacks tried to distance themselves from an unpleasant past. But the Shouters resuscitated the practice in Derien, in 1980.
The award-winning group has performed at universities, municipal centers, museums, and festivals around the country. Like all Gullah Geechee, they descend directly from West Africans brought as slaves to the southeast coast.
The term “ring shouter”…like “North Avenue Trade School” or “East Alabama Cow College”…was initially an epithet, applied in this case by antagonists who merely saw slaves prancing in a circle and making lots of noise. But as with those dismissive college insults, this one was soon embraced by the defamed, who’ve since worn it with pride.
As they should. The performance was wonderful. It alternated rapid pace with a deliberate message, and interspersed Geechee songs with English translation. All songs were of Geechee origin. Some, like Come By Ya, have been ecumenically adapted into global culture.
After the Shouters sat, another man stood. He relayed a small portion of a remarkable history. He began at the beginning:
“Sometime after 1750 there was a girl, deep in the jungle of a place now known as Sierra Leone.
“Someone took her from her village. She was probably between 12 and 15 years old. We don’t know. We don’t know her name.
“She was brought to the west coast of Africa, placed on a ship, and brought here…either to South Carolina or Savannah.
“She was either raped on the ship, or shortly after she got here. Because she had a daughter. And we know the daughter’s name. The daughter’s name was Catherine. And Catherine was half white.
“Then Catherine had a son, by the plantation owner’s son, Edward Delegal. She named her son Mustafa Delegal, who later changed his name to Shaw.
“Mustafa fought in the Union Army. He came home, and asked his grandfather for land. But he refused to let him have any. So his father sold him another parcel for a dollar.
“He took his mother, Catherine, and his wife, Taba, and raised his children on that land. One of his children, Amelia Shaw Dawley, is my grandmother.
“Amelia Dawley had one daughter: Mary Moran, my mother. She was born September 24, 1921. Mary Moran had thirteen children.
“My grandmother, Amelia Shaw Dawley, was a very special person. I never left her house from the day I was born. She looked white, because her father was quadroon. I loved her because she could cook just about anything, and make it taste good.”
Then the man paused, caught his breath, and resumed.
“I don’t know what your idea of freedom is. But for the enslaved from west Africa, the idea of freedom was a plot of land. The fight for our land started when General Sherman was marching from Atlanta to Savannah, destroying everything in his path.
“Sherman issued Field Order 15, giving every outlying island…from the southern tip of North Carolina to the northern tip of Florida…to the enslaved.
“But after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, President Johnson was forced into rescinding Field Order 15 by the powers at that time.
“So what happened was, my people lived on 2,688 acres of land owned by the Harris Family, mainly Margaret Harris. And Margaret Harris, being gyped by the white overseers, employed Robert Delegal, who was born on the plantation, to oversee the land, herself (she was old), and her invalid son.
“He agreed. And she made a last will and testament that he and her son would get, and in turn be able to sell, portions of the land. In 1865, he sold all the acres to 75 families, who lived on the land. These families flourished, until 1942.
“At that time, merchant ships were sailing from Jacksonville, Brunswick, and Charleston, going to England, were being destroyed by German boats. The American government thought they needed a place they could protect the coast with their airplanes.
“So, as the story was told, our county fathers, and some others, convinced the Federal Government to take our land to use as an airbase, even tho’ there were thousands of acres of uninhabited land surrounding us.
“The government claimed eminent domain, and gave my people two weeks. If they didn’t leave, the government would burn their places down.”
The government, for once, was true to its word. The families were displaced from the land still known as Harris Neck. No provisions were made for the people pushed out. Their land, crops, and homes were burned and bulldozed to build an Army airfield.
Most, but not all, descendants of freed slaves received $26.90 per acre. The few white landowners received $37.31.
But another government promise still remains unfulfilled. The Feds promised former landholders that their property would be returned after the war.
It wasn’t.
The airbase failed. But developers and speculators were given first dibs. Because they were unable to make anything of it, the property given to the county.
Then…as on Sapelo Island, and in countless places around the country…the State abused our affinity for nature to sanction its theft. The US government reclaimed Harris Neck, and created a National Wildlife Refuge on the stolen Geechee land. The families who once lived there are still fighting to get it back.
After breakfast, we crossed the Altamaha River, and a few miles later passed the original smokestack on the Butler Plantation. It’s ruins are the only surviving structure from the original plantation.
The north side of the stack is covered in moss, which according to legend grows only on that side of any structure.
It’s not true.
But legend has it that escaped slaves followed the compass of the liberating moss to guide themselves north.
We turned past the stack, up the drive, and parked beside the Huston House.
This dilapidated mansion is the only edifice on the once-thriving property to which Aaron Burr fled. When Burr arrived, it was Pierce Butler who offered him sanctuary.
Butler was born in County Carlow, Ireland. He came to America as a British Red Coat, resigned his commission during the War for Independence, became adjutant general of South Carolina, and settled there after separation was secured.
He returned to Europe, but came back to Philadelphia before the Constitutional Convention. He signed the document its participants produced, and was largely responsible for the Fugitive Slave clause that soon became infamous.
Butler became South Carolina’s first US Senator, but relocated to Georgia after the death of his wife. He hired Roswell King to manage his plantations. Four decades later, King relocated from the coast to the Piedmont, where he developed cotton mills, and founded the eponymous town a few miles from our home.
Pierce Mease Butler was grandson of Aaron Burr’s buddy, and had inherited the property twenty years before. In the 1850s, the plantation primarily produced rice, cotton, and sugar. More than 900 slaves grudgingly extracted these crops from the ground.
Butler married Fanny Kemble, an abolitionist actress who was repulsed when she witnessed the source of her husband’s wealth. Their disagreements produced divorce, and her scathing account of what she saw in the fields…later published as a Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation.
By 1859, Butler’s marriage and finances had come to ruin. With his life a shambles, he destroyed his legacy. For two days, on a rainy racetrack in the city of Savannah, Butler auctioned 436 men, women, and children in the largest sale of human beings in American history.
Husbands and wives were ripped asunder. Brothers and sisters were pulled apart. Children were torn from parents’ arms. In honor of the wails that rose from the auction block, and the drops of tears that fell from Heaven, this despicable coda to the saga of slavery became known to history as “The Weeping Time.”
When the auction ended, the rain stopped. But the memory didn’t.
With us at the Huston House was Eunice Moore…Queen Mother Eunice. Last year, on the anniversary of the Weeping Time, she had the idea of installing 436 solar lights around the grounds to honor each of the unfortunate souls who were sold in Savannah. Because of periodic flooding and necessary maintenance, the lights must sometimes be moved.
But they are handled with care. As Mother Eunice told us, “for every light you move, you move one of our people.”
And Lord knows, those people were moved enough.
JD
