We stayed with my grandparents on Rockefeller Street behind the icehouse, a street to my amazement that was sandy, unpaved, and I was afraid of my grandfather. I knew that he was going to die and while we were there, he would take naps in the living room. I would watch his chest rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, then pause—pause for what my child’s mind thought was an eternity and surely meant that he was dying before my very eyes.
It was during this trip that my mother finally took us to
Daufauskie Island.
The boat ride from
Savannah was an adventure in it itself!
This little, black,
Alabama girl had never been on a boat before in my life!
The
Savannah River loomed large in my sight, as all things do when you are young, but I was not afraid.
Through Field’s Cut the boat ploughed through the waters and made a slow progress to our destination.
I was excited about this new adventure because back home in
Tuscaloosa, daddy wouldn’t hardly let us play outside of our yard.
The boat pulled up at Benjies Point on New River to the weathered, bleached by the sun to a washed-out gray, wooden dock, on Daufauskie and the first thing that I could see was the millions of shells that lined the shore. They were everywhere. These were the only remnants of what was once a thriving oyster industry, the L. P. Maggioni Oyster Factory that succumbed to the pollution of their pristine waters by the 1950s. I thought, “Where was the white sandy beach?” Then I saw waiting for us, standing on one crutch with her withered right leg wrapped around it and the other firmly planted on the gray, sandy, ground, was Tanny, whose name was Frances Elizabeth Jones. She was my aunt and in reality, my mother’s first cousin who had been raised by my grandparents and to whom my mother was close enough to call her “Sister.” We exchanged our greetings and then we were off, trekking by foot to the old house where my mother’s grandparents, Joe and Peggy Mikell, had made a home and where my mother felt that special love grandparents know how to give to their darling grandchildren.
On the walk from the dock to the old house, I saw Daufauskie for the first time. We passed through lush, forested places on sandy paths that crossed sandy roads; tracing through woods crowded with palmetto, sweet gum, pine, and majestic ancient live oak trees, all laced with Spanish moss hanging long silvery gray tendrils that reached the ground. Tanny led us at a break-neck pace along a path that was deeply shaded in greens and grays, with sporadic rays of golden sunshine insistently peeking through the thick canopy here and there; giving glimpses of a sky that was the bluest blue I had ever seen in my eleven years. As we walked to the old house, I remembered my mother once telling us about a place on the path to the old house that “made her feel funny.” I wondered at every little section that held unfamiliar shadows, if this was the spot. Momma later explained,
“That was the short cut that went by the house of Amelia Jones’ family. Someone got gored by an ox in the spot in the bottom and I guess knowing about that story made me feel funny.”
I felt that I had been there before; that I knew these places, and now in retrospect, I know that it was the echoes of my ancestors, whose blood and bones are a part of this island and a part of my soul.
In the summer of 2006, as I continued my exploration of finding family, I asked my mother to tell me her memories of family and life. Visits to Daufauskie, for my mother, were the highlight of her life.
“I loved going there to see my grandparents,” she told me. With a twinkle in her eye that sparkled like sun through the center of a diamond, she continued,
“During summer visits to the island, cow cakes (paddies) were burned at night to keep the mosquitoes away. Grandpa had an oxcart and the ox was called Old Ned. On Sundays, the highlight of the day was meeting the boat from the mainland at Benjies Point. The Fripps had a store at the landing and there was a lighthouse on Bloody Point. There were quite a few people who used to live on the island. They had some businesses on the island at different times like the Maggioni Oyster Factory, and a sawmill. The paper mill up river polluted the oyster beds and drove the islanders off. They didn’t have any way to make a living and they had to leave.”
In our conversations, mother recalled her grandmother from these visits to Daufauskie Island, SC. Mother remembered,
“My grandmother’s name was Margaret.
They called her ‘Peggy,’ but her name was Margaret Mikell.
She was a Gibson before she married my grandfather.
I was told that Grandmomma was born on St. Simon’s
Island, Georgia in the year of freedom, 1863 or 1864.
She was born in a tabby house she told me.
Her knowledge of her birth was the year that Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation.
Grandma said that before freedom for the slaves, her father was a ‘trusted slave,’ meaning that the master would let him do things that might mean going off the plantation.
This was on St. Simon’s
Island.
Grandma said that his master would send her father to get the mail from the boat.
Near the end of the war, he was sent to get the mail and was met by some soldiers.
The soldiers told him to stoop down and get some turtle eggs out of a nest because those eggs would be some good ‘eatin.’
When he did as they bid, he was run through with a bayonet.”
My mother’s memories began to flow like smooth currents sliding over glistening river rocks and continued her stories of Daufauskie:
“On Daufauskie, my grandma had just a little house with wooden shutters on it. I used to love going to that house. She made the best flap jacks and would fix me turkey eggs.”
I don’t know if my mother realized it, but as she traveled through the corridors of her memories, her speech returned to the island’s Gullah brogue and the child-like language that her grandparents must have used when they spoke to her. Her aging eyes belied her eighty-one years and began to twinkle and sparkle as she remembered her times on the island.
