Sitting Up with the Dead, page 18
That night, in a motel in Beaufort, I hardly slept at all, and got up looking a little gothic around the eyes. Soon a plague of chambermaids came upon me: I could hear their housekeeping carts rolling like thunder on the pavement outside my room. I stumbled to the door and hung a Do Not Disturb sign on my knob, he modern equivalent of blue-painted trim to keep unfriendly spirits at bay. I’d read on a notice posted in the lobby that the average time it took to clean a room was twenty-two minutes.
By three that afternoon I was swaying along with the wave-ridden dock in Meridian, Georgia, where the Sapelo Queen was moored. Although the crossing only costs a dollar each way, one does not approach Sapelo Island casually. A visitor’s center on the mainland underscores its environmental uniqueness as the token of a passing glacier: a delicate barrier island of pristine marshlands, beaches, and forested uplands, roamed by white-tailed deer and overseen by over two hundred and fifty species of birds. Seeing as I was taking the second-to-last ferry of the day, the national park officials politely but firmly asked where I would be staying. “At the Gardners,” I said proudly, pretending I was an insider. Since there are only about sixty-five residents on Sapelo, I expected instant recognition, but the park people looked stumped. They chatted among themselves: Gardner. Gardner? You know a Gardner?
“Oh,” said one of them, finally, “you mean Dan Gardner. Sure. All right, have a good trip.”
All the portents suggested that Sapelo was special, a little prickly, different. I cautiously took my place on the small ferry alongside a dignified, middle-aged lady in a straw hat who was reading the Bible — she later proved to be a minister — and two house painters who looked like they’d been caught in a paint squall. All around us was water: heat-stilled flatwater, strewn with puddles of golden-green spartina grass in a very convincing reversal of the land-sea equation. I was the only white person in sight.
The crossing was brief and smooth. As everyone else chatted about weekend plans or hummed to themselves with Friday afternoon contentment, I scribbled furiously, making lists of questions, trying to remember the color of Renee Cathou’s eyes (blue).
“What you doin’, girl? Calm down. Look at the view.” I glanced up with my pencil in my mouth and found the painters laughing at me. “Be calm, be calm, it’s the weekend.” I took a deep breath. It was going to take a conscious notching-down of gears to get along with Sapelo. For the first time all day I let my shoulders quit bookending my neck and drop into their natural slouch.
As we docked I asked the painters to point out Dan Gardner. “The one with the hat and glasses,” they said. I marched up to a gentleman of that description and announced brightly, “I’m staying with you tonight!”
“You ARE?” he replied, startled.
One of the painters silently took me by the shoulders and steered me around forty-five degrees. “There’s Dan,” he wheezed, helpless with laughter.
Mr. and Mrs. Gardner and I sat leg-to-leg in the front seat of their shockless pickup truck, and lurched to the interior of the island. She had on a big straw hat with a flower in the front; he wore a pressed, short-sleeved shirt with a pocket clip for pens and pencils. They talked in unsynchronized stereo the way so many older couples do.
“Now, we’ve left the air conditioners on for you. Just turn them off when you leave,” said Mrs. Gardner.
“Did you tell her about the air conditioners?” he asked a second later.
In less than three minutes we pulled up in front of a tidy, mint-green ranch house with a squat palm tree in front. The Gardners gave me a key and fussed like parents for a few instruction-filled moments, then roared off in their truck to catch the returning ferry to their full-time home on the mainland.
Cornelia Bailey’s house was a short bike ride away, but not an easy ride. The dirt roads, booby-trapped with drifts of soft, tan sand, had directional opinions of their own, and sent me weaving in an uncertain course past a few modest homes and a sign that read, Hog Hammock — An Historical Community, Established 1857. Pop. 70 to Cornelia’s shocking-blue bungalow. I rapped on the door a couple of times, but got no answer. Soon a little girl appeared with a bag of sunflower seeds, and let me in. “Gran’ma’s got the TV on,” she said, leaving a trail of husks behind her.
Cornelia greeted me casually but kindly. There was so much ebb and flow through her dark lime-colored kitchen — sons building bathrooms in need of cold drinks, granddaughters and their friends demanding to be paid for chambermaid work, friends wanting to borrow hairstyle magazines, a family of microbiologists, also old friends, come for the weekend — that to function at all she had to prioritize her attentions. I came in somewhere below the televised soap opera, and above her teenage chambermaids.
Cornelia calmly took her position in the center of this maelstrom like the matriarch she was, in purple pedal pushers, a “Gullah Connection” T-shirt, cowrie-shell earrings, big, goldframed glasses, an orange-beaded head band, and bare feet. We talked about mosquitoes. My shins looked like bug-eyed tropical fish from the bites I’d gotten while unlocking the Gardners’ bicycle. Cornelia pointed out that most people in the Low Country wear at least one piece of dark clothing, so that when you swat a mosquito you’ll have a place to wipe your hand where the blood won’t show. She asked where I was staying.
The Gardners, I said, and she looked dazed for a minute. “Oh, you mean Dan Gardner’s place. Oh, that’s good.”
Cornelia wanted to know if I’d done my homework. Had I seen her Web site? Had I read Sapelo’s People, by William McFeely? I answered no to the first, yes to the second, and she immediately discounted McFeely. “He don’t know nothing about us. He lived here two weeks and he calls his book Sapelo’s People. Like he knows Sapelo’s people.”
McFeely knew more than I did, at least. From him I had learned that Sapelo had been the site of one of the largest prewar rice plantations in Georgia, under the ownership of an inventive entrepreneur named Thomas Spalding. It was Spalding who brought six hundred or so slaves to the island from markets in Charleston and the West Indies. When Union troops blockaded the sea islands during the Civil War, Spalding’s son marched his slaves inland, to central Georgia, where he thought he could avoid their liberation. Unfortunately for him, he settled them smack in the path of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who freed them as his troops burned their way to the sea.
For practical reasons — to rid himself of hangers-on, rather than from any soft-hearted sentiment — Sherman issued Special Field Order 15 in January 1865, which literally gave the sea islands south of Charleston to former slaves, allotting forty acres for each head of household. The majority of Sapelo’s liberated slave families eventually walked back to the island to take the U.S. Government up on its offer. It was they who founded Hog Hammock, named for Samson Hogg (a pig raiser whose family later changed the name to Hall). Their descendents exclusively comprise the current population of the island.
The former slaves stayed, but did not prevail. Under pressure from wealthy Southern planters, it didn’t take President Andrew Johnson long to overturn Sherman’s order, by then an act of Congress, and return the land to the men who had owned it before the War. This arrangement effectively turned freed-men, who for a short time had been land-owning farmers, into sharecroppers, working the land for the same families that had once owned them. Over the years, Sapelo’s residents avoided the worst of the sharecropping system, and the Spaldings’ attempts to revive their plantation never took hold. Wealthy outsiders eventually bought up huge tracts of the island, though today those parcels have been sold to the state of Georgia as scientific and wildlife reserves, with the ever-dwindling population of Hog Hammock — the number has fallen below three-digit figures in Cornelia’s lifetime — sandwiched in between.
The soap opera had ended, and the TV blared the news, now, from its place of honor between Cornelia and me on the kitchen table. In between visitors she talked about the generous pace of island life. How there is always time for get-togethers, which tend to be phone-planned, and stop-bys, which are spontaneous happenings of the sort I was witnessing in her kitchen.
“You feel part of you is working so hard to retain this part of Georgia … My ancestors walked here, and we’re walking on the same soil. I’ll fight to stay here. But then, sometimes, I start to wonder how long we’ll be able to hold on.” Cornelia stopped for a moment, then made a fist and gave the table a little pound. “Then I say, No, I won’t think that way. There’s a saying, ‘The positive works you the hardest.’ ”
“… And in another item, today the authorities seized more than five hundred barrels of marijuana. And listen to this, folks, it’s worth over one million dollars! They arrested forty-year-old Jose Mendez of El Paso, Texas …”
I lost the thread for a moment, seduced from Cornelia and Sapelo by canned footage of healthy marijuana fields gleaming on the television screen. Cornelia was saying that she likes to tell “human interest” stories, as she called them, in which she tries to convey the island’s history and culture — stories she learned sitting with the elders as a child, stories that “don’t need no copyright, that represent my papa and mama and all the people of the island” — as well as Brer Rabbit stories, and “Why” stories. When I looked quizzical, she explained, “You know, kids bug you to death with ‘why’ questions. I like to make stories out of the answers.”
She expounded on her storytelling philosophy. “I can take a story and change it around for any audience. For example, if parents came to me and asked me to tell their child a story, I’d tell a black child a human-interest story about the island, so he’d get to know his roots. If it was a white child, I’d just tell a made-up story. See, the black child’s parents would be able to fill in the details, but the white child’s wouldn’t.”
“What would you tell a black child whose parents weren’t from around here?”
Cornelia conceded she’d have to tell him the same story she’d tell the white child. Did she have a human-interest story for me, I wanted to know, to help me learn about Sapelo?
She looked at me for a moment as if sizing up my worthiness, or perhaps the potential for this Northern white girl to listen with an empathetic ear. I must have passed some test, because Cornelia cleared a space around her with her hands, as if she were setting up an invisible podium, then began to speak.
People ask me, What religion are you? Umm. Born Muslim and became a false Christian, I say. My great-great-grandparents were of the Islamic faith, but they weren’t allowed to practice it as slaves. When their children were freed they formed the First African Baptist Church here in 1866. Well, it was formed by people who still had the ways of their parents and their grandparents in them. Christianity and Islamic faith rolled into one.
Now one of the stories about that church goes like this. It’s about my grandmother Winnie. Her mother Harriet and her father John was very strict. According to the church rules … well, everybody was strict. They were strict with their children like everybody else. And you couldn’t get pregnant out of wedlock. That was a no-no. And if you did by chance, the church stepped in, and you were made to marry that young man.
So, my grandmother broke all rules. She decided she wasn’t going to marry nobody she didn’t want to marry. No matter how many kids she had. So she had one child, two childs, three childs, four childs, five childs, without benefit of getting married. Now that was unheard of. Grandma was a free spirit from the get-go. So finally the church told her that we cannot take this no more …
“…and the police are searching for a woman wanted for shoplifting [photo shown], and a man accused of terroristic threats and trespassing…”
“Winnie,” they said, “you have to come before the board of elders and tell us who is the father of your children.” So Grandma got all dressed up that day and she went to a church conference. And she went there and she looked around, and all she saw was a church full of women who were her friends, and cousins, and others. And I can imagine them all sitting on the edge of their seats, saying to their-selves, Lord, I hope she don’t call my man’s name.
So she looked at the elders up there who were waiting for her to speak and say who is the father of her children. She looked at them sitting up there — they were all men — and she said, “Now, if I tell you all who is the father of my children — I wonder which one of you all up there might be the father of my babies? — there wouldn’t be nobody in this church but me now, would there?”
All heads went down and the women let out a sigh of relief, and nobody questioned Grandma no more. That was the end of that. She later got married to my grandfather and had three more daughters, and they lived happily ever after…
All this happened before I was born, but Grandma and others told that story and retold that story and retold that story … I knew grandma well. She was stubborn until the day she died.
The weather forecast, full of rain and humidity, came onto the television, and I asked Cornelia if she knew any good weather stories. She said that they didn’t have weather stories on Sapelo, just weather predictions. But then she remembered the tale of Mr. Hamp Wilson and the Hurricane of 1898.
There is one about the Great Hurricane of 1898, when water went over most of the island. They didn’t lose anybody. They lost some cattle and some chickens and some stuff like that, but nobody was lost on Sapelo during that time. But after the storm they did have to round up everybody to see who was there. Well, they took a head count and they couldn’t find Mr. Hamp Wilson. And they looked far and wide, and they looked all over for Hamp Wilson, but they couldn’t find him nowhere. So they went to Hanging Bull, and they called out for Hamp. And they heard this music playing. And they were going, “Now why would there be music playing with all this water all over and everything?”
But you see, the church is located in a part of the island called Hanging Bull, and Hamp was afraid the water would come up over there. So he gone and got the little organ that the church had, and he drug it all the way to the steeple up there, and he was sitting there playing music. So they found Hamp Wilson by the music of the organ. They found him safe and sound in the steeple, playing that organ. His wife — Miss Sylvia — was quite happy. They found her husband.
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“No, I didn’t know him, but I knew his wife well.”
“Was that her story?”
“No, that was everybody’s story. She told it, but other people did too. My father was born a few years after that, and it was told to him as a child. Everybody knew the story.”
With the exterior stairs missing, the crumbling threshold of the door to Sapelo’s second First African Baptist Church, in Raccoon Bluff, came up to my waist. (According to McFeely, the first First Church, in Hanging Bull, was destroyed in the hurricane of 1898. Now this rendition of events stranded me in a war zone between McFeely s facts and Cornelia’s stories — academic and islander also differed on loss of life in the 1898 hurricane — and I instinctively sought refuge in Cornelia’s tale. McFeely’s version leaves the past empty; Cornelia’s replaces destruction with the miraculous image of Hamp Wilson playing as the rains came, and lends us a glimpse into a value system which placed music and the Lord over life itself Understanding is often a more useful resource than truth.)
I peered inside the church into a monumental space that had once been holy. It was dark and gray with dust, but I could make out the wainscoted ceiling and walls, an uneven floor that listed like a sinking ship, chandeliers knitted with cobwebs. What little light there was filtered into the church through colored-glass windows, filling the sanctuary with a filmy, amethyst haze. Earlier, in Hog Hammock, I had asked a local resident what he thought was the most striking thing about the island. “People’s religious customs,” he’d said without missing a beat. “There’s nothing extraordinary about their relationship with God, but here people have a reverence for life after death, the existence of a Supreme Being. It’s not showy, not passed down mouth-to-ear, but by precept, by example.” The confidant, matter-of-factness of the building confirmed his perception.
I couldn’t linger long at the abandoned church: I had worked up such a sweat biking the five miles there from Hog Hammock that whenever I stood still I became a big slab of mosquito bait (Racoon Bluff village had been deserted at the urging of an off-island landowner who bought up the property for himself, and consolidated residents in Hog Hammock). The ride had been torturous. I’d fallen off my bike twice when its wheels went astray in unseen sand traps. There were no houses, no other souls in motion that Saturday morning except tiny, translucent crabs. The air was hot and still. To either side of the road was a phalanx of tall pine trees bursting into green enthusiasm fifty feet off the ground, where their needles met the sun. Otherwise I had only the dark forest floor for company, filled with banana-green saplings, palmettos, and unseen, unsettling rustlings. The hand-painted sign for Racoon Bluff had led me into a grove of ancient live oaks, all strewn with tattered curtains of Spanish moss, which kept a perpetual twilight in the church enclosure.
McFeely says, “There is no echo of Africa in the building,” and he’s right. It looks just like a nineteenth-century New England church. Africa doesn’t linger in buildings, but in people, in Winnie, the free spirit who took on church elders because the mores of turn-of-the-century America didn’t suit her. Once again, it is the story record, rather than the written or structural record, that tells the truth. I suddenly slapped a mosquito, drawing more blood as thunder began to growl down by the horizon, which I wearily took as a sign to leave.
