Prof. Erskine Clarke will discuss his book, Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (Yale, 2005) and his forthcoming book *Charleston: An American Epic (Yale, 2026, To be published this summer). Both are narrative histories that explore the separate worlds of white Southerners and black Southerners and the ways those worlds have overlapped and shaped one another.

Dwelling Place and Charleston: An American Saga*
by T. Erskine Clarke, Professor Emeritus, Columbia Theological Seminary and Montreat Resident

Dwelling Place is a plantation story built around the white Charles C. Jones family in Liberty County, Georgia, and four generations of enslaved blacks whose labors and sorrows provided the wealth of an influential lowcountry white community. Charles Jones, a Presbyterian minister, was known among whites as the “Apostle to the Negro Slave.” The book won the Bancroft Prize awarded by Columbia University for a work “of exceptional merit” in American history. It was the “originating inspiration” for the opera Caster and Patience whose librettist was Pulitzer Prize winner and US Poet Laureate Tracy Smith.

Charleston: An American Saga is the story of five generations of the white Adger/Smyth(e) family and a dense network of remarkable African Americans whose lives were intertwined with those of the white family over many generations. Second Presbyterian, Charleston, plays a key role in the narrative. A paternalistic concern for black Charlestonians marked the well-intentioned Adger/Smyth(e) family and a Puritan ethic marked the lives of many of the African Americans, including an honors graduate from Glasgow, the second black graduate of Harvard Law, and an early graduate of Princeton Seminary.