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.