From my book, Echoes and Whispers: The Chronicles of an African American Family in the South, Chapter 4 continued

     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. 

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From my book, Echoes and Whispers: The Chronicles of an African American Family in the South

Chapter 4

…To the Gullah Sea Islands…

     Along the southern Atlantic coast of the United States, bordering the states of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, there are over 100 barrier islands.  Known as “The Low Country,” they share of history of rice plantations run by slaves and an isolation that preserved many of their traditions.  These various dots of land are masked in silvery-gray veils of Spanish moss and pulsing shadows of ancient live oak trees whose branches arch in sturdy bows to the sky or lazily dip to the sandy ground, as if giving a gentle caress or sweet kiss in honor of the beauty in which they bask.  Tall slash pines push up to the sky while tender ocean waves, with their hidden tendency for violence, tickle the sandy beaches that seem to wait in anticipation and entice visitors, irresistible to the allure, to step into the pleasures of a Sea Island swim.

    Most of the inhabitants of the Sea Islands are descendants of former slaves who actually had a chance to see at least Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman’s promise of forty acres become somewhat of a reality.  The Sea Island people have clung to their African heritage infusing their way of life and culture with the richness of their ties to the African motherland.  Joseph Stevens states, “Their ancestral traditions survived as well.  With the people, Mende and Kissi, Malinke and Bantu, came the soul of Africa, in their language, their music, their skills and their food ways, the rich legacy of a hundred tribes.”

     Yet, for all of the beauty that strikes the eye, and the mystique of the inhabitants,  these islands can cruelly mock people such as me; one who listens to the echoes of ancestors sing quiet but insisting songs, demanding that I tell their story, my story, the story of family.  In spite of the genealogical research barriers these beautiful islands impose, I dare to seek and find my history locked within the shores of the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands.

     Just as I incessantly demanded to know ancestors through my father’s stories of family and the echoes of their voices reverberating in my veins, as if in chorus, voices sung in harmony and discord.  I began to hear other whispers; their beat, punctuated with the brogue of the Sea Islands, pushing me across the salt creeks, mud flats, and ocean waters to find my mother’s blood ties.

     Off the shore of South Carolina, within sight of Tybee Island, Georgia, lies Daufauskie Island.  This small barrier island was the home of my grandmother before she came to live in Savannah.  As I was growing up in Alabama, my mother would tell stories about the island and visiting her grandmother Peggy.  To my child mind, these stories of the island seemed exotic and perhaps otherworldly.  I have come to know of Daufuskie’s rich history from its Native American inhabitants to the first white settlers whose plantations dominated the island until the Civil War.  With this knowledge, I have come to love this land of my ancestors and long for the encroaching resort development never to mar its natural beauty. 

     I did not know what Daufauskie would look like, but my imagination led me to believe it was like the islands I watched on the black and white television.  I imagined through programs such as Gilligan’s Island, Sea Hunt, and Flipper—all palm trees with smooth sandy beaches and coconuts full of rich milk waiting for me to drink while enjoying the tropical breezes blow against my face would be the same on Daufauski.

     In the summer of 1966, my mother decided, and of course with my father’s permission, that we would ride the bus to visit her parents in Savannah.  My grandfather, Paul Lawrence Brown, had been diagnosed with cancer and I think that my mother felt the need to see him before he died.  Otherwise, I am sure that my father, in his usual male dominating dictatorial manner, would have never allowed her to make the trip. 

     With shoe boxes packed with lunches made of bologna sandwiches, hard boiled eggs, and fried chicken, all wrapped in wax paper because black folk still couldn’t eat at the restaurants in cities like Birmingham where we had to change buses; we rode in the back of the Greyhound bus to Savannah.  Being a child

sheltered from the racism and segregation that ruled the south, I gave it no thought that momma had chosen for us to sit on the very back seat of the bus-that wide seat where three to five people could sit depending on the size of their behinds.  Rather, it was a fun time where my sisters and I would laugh and laugh because each time the bus changed gears, from our seats, it sounded like a giant fart.  From Birmingham to Atlanta and all the little towns between there and Savannah, we would giggle and laugh; giggle, laugh, and squeal muffled screams, until tears streamed from our eyes; little black girls riding in the back of the bus, making it extremely hard for my mother to maintain her dignified composure, with the Greyhound bus farting all the way.