# 3: On Sanctuary (my remarks from the Audubon Society’s Beidler Forest at the opening of their freedom sites, originally delivered 9/16/23)
“HARLEYVILLE, S.C. (Sept. 16, 2023) — U.S. Congressman James E. Clyburn (SC-06) joined representatives from Audubon South Carolina, the National Park Service (NPS), Clemson University, and other community leaders for an event at Audubon’s Center and Sanctuary at Francis Beidler Forest to commemorate the Four Holes Swamp watershed’s role in the fight for freedom from slavery in South Carolina. Congressman Clyburn offered remarks at the event, hosted by Audubon South Carolina, which was planned for September in honor of International Underground Railroad Month. ”
Four Holes Swamp (or what is now known as the Beidler Forest and Sanctuary) taken from the Audubon website
ASHTON:
“This site is a sanctuary – of course. But what we can learn today is how to expand that word “sanctuary” – for not only is it a precious place for birds and other wildlife to find a semblance of safety and, may I say love, in this world, it also provided a kind of sanctuary to the first peoples who roamed here (and let us honor the presence of Chief Creel of the Edisto Tribe who is here with us to also mark this moment and this site). This swamp also certainly provided a sanctuary as we see today, a sanctuary from suffering, a site of solace, and -sometimes- a site of hope. Sanctuary also has meant the innermost part of a church …the holiest of places and we see that holiness perhaps flying around us.
There has always been a special call between birds and the plight of those in bondage.
Like any captives, enslaved people frequently imagined themselves as birds. John Andrew Jackson who had been enslaved in Sumter County wrote: “When we were picking cotton, we used to see the wild geese flying over our heads to some distant land, and we often used to say to each other, "O that we had wings like those geese, then we could fly over the heads of our masters to the 'Land of the free.'"
It wasn’t just flight, though, William Wells Brown, enslaved in Missouri wrote that the "song of birds woke within him the desire to be free” and William Walker of Virginia wrote that “even the birds seem to realize our sad situation.”
But imagining flight and calls with the birds wasn’t a simple response to romanticize nature for these men and women. Enslaved people in the Carolinas knew well the terrors, of this environment too--both those from men and nature. James Matthews, who escaped from Dorcester county and hid on several occasions in these very swamps, told of finding bodies of dead fugitives in the woods often left there to die after having been shot by their pursuers.
Senator James Clyburn and Dr. Susanna Ashton at the Audubon South Carolina’s Francis Beidler Forest (or 4 Holes Swamp)
As James Matthews testified about his experiences in Four Holes swamp in the 1840s, many men who had been whipped or abused horribly on nearby plantation labor camps, would come to the swamp, this swamp we are in right now, to die. Knowingly. Alone. But perhaps, too, finding some solace that they might die on their own terms - finally with the sounds of the birds and the trees to embrace them in a new kind of freedom.
I sloppily but earnestly paraphrase the Gettysburg Address a bit here when I say that we cannot consecrate or sanctify this ground. It is consecrated already by the people who struggled here far beyond our poor power to add or detract. And the damp mobility of this sinking, shifting watery ground, should awaken in us a special reverence for how people here found literal and figurative solidity in what was fluid.
James Matthews was an example of what we might call a liminal maroon – that means his flight to 4 Holes Swamp wasn’t one where he set up a life there …he used the swamp as a place to retreat – then venturing back to nearby properties to beg for food, to scavenge what he could, to seek solace, and to see his sister. But he also recalled camps of runaways who found in 4 Holes swamp a reason to be kind to one another and to take one another in.
The birds so many of these fugitive folks remembered from their times here, also bore a kind of witness. They watched these men and women suffer and survive. They watched choices being made --sometimes choices of cruelty and sometimes choices of love. They watch us too, today, trying to make hard choices and face hard histories. Their flight still inspires us and their song can still force us to be still and listen to one another just a little bit more.
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To Cite:
Ashton, Susanna. "On Sanctuary." Runaway Chronicles. Squarespace. 05/27/2024. https://susannaashton.squarespace.com/config/pages/65c93bd35c81e32bb1a08098/content
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