Gillian Clark, Christianity and Roman Society - Huntington University

138 BOOK REVIEWS
acquaintance with that lost world, always staggering the reader with his intricate mastery
of every facet of life there. We smell the salt air of summer homes on the Sea Islands,
feel the caress of breezes in the warm evenings, hear the tramping of feet and hooves on
dusty roads, taste and smell the distinctive cuisine of the low-country (menus and recipes,
even!), and throughout are reminded of Ashley Wilkes’s “moonlight and magnolias”
letter in Gone With the Wind—though with the force of minute historical fact far
exceeding Margaret Mitchell’s novel. Jones’s drive to create a lovely dwelling place, a
perfection of architecture, landscape, lifestyle and person, tantalizes the reader with its
deceptive allure.
For it was, after all, deeply deceptive—and Jones himself knew it. His lovely life
rested on the sweaty shoulders of slaves. Changes for the convenience of his family
routinely ripped the fabric of slave community. Early on we see how events in a
slaveholding family had two meanings—black and white—as when a patriarch died or a
young couple married, prompting the division of human property. Who has not heard of
slave auctions and imagined their horrors—yet here we know individual names,
personalities, family ties, the prearranged bargains, background of previous sales and
removals, and later outcomes. By a deft reading of plantation records, letters, court and
church books in the context of recent studies of slave life in the aggregate, Clarke has
managed to recreate the black world in nearly as rich detail as the white. Applying
analyses of generic slave experience to these specific people in a specific set of
circumstances, Clarke gives us faces and personalities to make it all real, tangible, and
forceful. Recent topical studies on resistance, conjuring, slave psychology, folktales, and
more find situated, narrative instantiation here.
Slave resistance in its many facets, including the interpretation of evangelical
Christianity in distinctively African American ways, forms one of Clarke’s most
recurrent refrains. Clarke joins the trend to celebrate slave agency in religion, even to the
point of celebrating syncretism. But again, the stories of particular people bring abstract
ideas down to concrete historical experience—for example, Cato the trusty slavedriver,
who ran one of Jones’s plantations faithfully, yet guarded the secret world of slave
thievery. He was “a deeply complex man…neither all internalized subservience nor all
clever deception,” and calls into question the stereotypes of “Sambo” and “Nat” that
characterized studies of slave psychology a generation ago. And on the issue of skewing
Christianity, Clarke shows himself an admirer of both slave creativity in refashioning the
masters’ religion, and the orthodox religious experience of the masters themselves.
Christian historians will doubtless find Jones’s missionary activity among slaves a
compelling, ambiguous story. The interplay of his New England training in “disinterested
benevolence” with his Georgia slaveholding experience is perhaps the central
preoccupation of the book, as far as it concerns Jones himself. Clarke shows us a deeply
pious, humanitarian man genuinely concerned for the welfare—eternal and temporal—of
his slaves, who in seeking to make conditions better under slavery ended up legitimating
the system. His sermons and catechetical methods reveal a determination to provide even
illiterate slaves with meaty, sound doctrine. His work with slaveholders emphasized the
need for decent housing, clothing, and above all the hallowing of slave marriages and