She said to me, “All of you people that are from up north, your grandparents or your great grandparents came from the South, right? There’s no running from it or getting around it.” At some point, one has to reckon with the past. The past was always within my home, and I consumed that past every time I ate a meal cooked by an older family member. But soon I would have to enlarge my field of view to see the connections between the “up north” folks like me and the Southern folks like Tiffany, to understand the differences and what else was at stake. Food was the entry point, and now I had to walk through that portal. Like the African Americans of yesteryear, I would have to understand the waterways.
2
I REMEMBER THE accident as if it happened yesterday.
My uncle Rodney had a home with a large swimming pool in an isolated area within a town called Galloway in South Jersey. Backyard games had been set up. Hamburgers and hot dogs were on the grill. Gospel music was playing. Everyone was cheerful. Until a scream tore through the atmosphere like a machete piercing skin. If I focus hard enough, I can still hear it. I didn’t know where to look until I saw three men from my church, running faster than I’d ever seen them go, dive into the water to pull out a small, visibly shaken child. He almost drowned. But the party didn’t stop. Instead, the adults wrapped a towel around the boy and sat him in a corner, where he preoccupied himself with sucking his thumb for the rest of the day. I don’t even remember the boy’s name. But what I do know is that I never forgot him, and I was bewildered at how everyone resumed their activities as though the near-drowning wasn’t some major traumatic event—almost as if it were routine for a black child to be teetering on the verge of death if water was anywhere nearby.
I’m not sure that I ever got over that scene, because my relationship with water is just as traumatic. At one point in my life, I was that little boy, and so was my mother. We both had accidents in which we almost drowned. My mother never learned how to swim. Her parents never taught her, and that didn’t make sense to me. My mother and her siblings grew up in Atlantic City, a five-mile barrier island called Absecon Island that is located along the Jersey Shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Surely if they were living that close to the water, they would’ve learned to swim in it, right? There were many blacks who lived in Atlantic City just like my family. I wondered if my mother’s peers didn’t swim either.
At one point, Atlantic City’s black population surpassed that of Harlem. This was due in large part to the Great Migration intersecting with the hotel boom. After Atlantic City was incorporated in 1854, African Americans from the South migrated to the Jersey Shore in search of better-paying jobs. Ninety-five percent of African Americans there worked as laborers or in the service industry at white-owned hotels.
My grandfather, Fred II, whom I affectionately call Pop-Pop, was one of them. He washed dishes in a hotel whose name he cannot recall, and from there he went on to construction. Fred II was born in June 1943, and he worked in Atlantic City from the late 1950s to early 1960s, when Jim Crow was still in effect. Segregation in public spaces was maintained to appease white tourists from the South, who did not want to integrate with black people.1 One of these segregated spots was Chicken Bone Beach, a beach exclusively for African Americans. My grandfather never swam there. Neither did my grandmother, Sylvia, whom he married in the mid-1960s. Sylvia gave birth to four children, and despite their proximity to the water, none learned to swim.
When I ask my mother why, she always tells me that it had to do with our hair. We never learned to swim because of our hair. But many black men we knew who kept their hair short didn’t swim either. She was at a loss for words. She’s never considered that. Not swimming is so ingrained in our culture that growing up, she’d often hear both black and white people joking about it. She concluded that this was something we “just didn’t do,” at least not often, and those inside and outside the community knew it.
I was privileged enough to take a swimming class. I was the only black child in it, so I wondered if not swimming was also about access. I got emotional. How could we joke about not knowing how to swim when there were those, like that boy I saw at my uncle’s party, who could’ve died? What about the ones who had? Was this comedy a coping mechanism for our pain? How have I and the rest of my community learned to fear an element that’s necessary to our lives?
My relationship to water is characterized by many ironies and contradictions. I’m putting language to a hostility that has been in my family for generations, though never parsed. My hesitation in articulating this fear is almost equal to the fear of water itself. But it’s not just fear. It may not even be just hostility. We don’t sneer at its waves, the sound that it makes, or its depth. We fear its uncertainty, the unknown beyond its surface. Maybe a better word is intimidation.
I was born in Somers Point, the oldest settlement in Atlantic County. A fourth of its area is water. My own name means “of the sea.” I’ve traversed the four-mile-long Atlantic City boardwalk many times, replete with saltwater taffy, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve swum in the Atlantic Ocean. My family and I had our bathing suits. We might have even dipped our toes in when the waves rushed against the shore. Maybe. But the idea of submerging ourselves entirely in the water was met with such obvious dismissal from one another that the beach itself seemed like nothing more than a pretty picture. We were there but never really a part of it. It was as if there were borders and restrictions that no one could see but us.
There were black people I knew who swam, but there was always an albatross of precaution awaiting us at the entrance of a swimming pool or the mouth of a large body of water. My mother or some other female relative would be sure to give us a warning.
“Don’t put your head underneath the water, or else the chlorine will mess up all that pretty hair.”
“Don’t go off into the deep end.”
“Be where I can see you.”
“Don’t horseplay too much.”
“Don’t swim when there’s no adult around.”
Or simply, “Don’t you get in that pool.”
When I ask my mother why she never learned to swim while growing up on an island, she says after a pause, “I don’t know. I guess they [her parents] never taught us because they didn’t want to lose us.” I found her answer quite intriguing. If my mother and her siblings learned how to swim, then logically they would be able to return to shore. But maybe their knowledge of swimming wasn’t what her parents feared most. Maybe it was a fear of who might kidnap them from the lake or river. It is estimated that 80 percent of enslaved Africans knew how to swim, but when the transatlantic slave trade was ongoing, some Africans forbade their children from swimming for fear of them being lost to them forever.2 The circumstances were different than they were four hundred years before, but irrespective of time and space, my grandparents still felt an almost instinctive fear that their children might be taken away in the water.
This intergenerational fear is one that could be explained through epigenetics, the study of how we inherit certain mechanisms without there being a change in our DNA sequences. Dr. Rachel Yehuda, professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, conducted a study to gauge how trauma is passed down from Holocaust survivors and found that, years later, their children inherited this PTSD because of how overactive their amygdala was. The amygdala is the site in the brain that is responsible for processing our emotions, retaining memory, and tapping into our survival instincts. Through the research, Dr. Yehuda concluded that when people experience trauma, their genes are affected, and now those influenced genes will pass on to their offspring. Sociologist Dr. Joy DeGruy added to the conversation about trauma transmission when she coined the phrase post-traumatic slave disorder to publicize the effects of trauma on the descendants of the enslaved.3
Carl Zimmer of the New York Times wrote in his Matter column that the history of African Americans is shaped by two journeys: the transatlantic slave trade and the Great M
igration.4 Both journeys involved one or many bodies of water. The Atlantic Ocean is one of the most traumatic sites in all of African American experience. One-third of all captured Africans died before their feet were ever planted on any dock in the Western Hemisphere. In the four centuries of the triangular trade, ten to eleven million people were brought to the New World. This figure does not include those who died aboard the ships due to suicide or dehydration, nor those who were tossed overboard when sick from one of the rampant illnesses. The Atlantic Ocean is the unofficial burial ground for uncounted captured Africans, a sunken graveyard.5
Zimmer also reported that a team of geneticists found that genetically related African Americans are usually found along the routes taken when their ancestors left the South. In light of this research, the aversion to water becomes explainable as an ingrained fear shared among many African Americans throughout this country. This commonality is often discussed in media:
“Everybody knows black people can’t swim. If we could, we wouldn’t be here.”—Marsha Warfield, Chicago
“I can’t really swim. Today I took my first swim lesson since I was five. My dad learned in his sixties, so I feel like I’m ahead of schedule.”—John Legend, Ohio native
“My dad almost killed me one time. When I was younger, I couldn’t swim . . . nobody ever taught me how to swim. My dad picked me up, grabbed me, and threw me in seven feet. As soon as I hit the water, I almost died immediately.”—Kevin Hart, Philadelphia
“So, we have to spend our Saturday with people that we don’t like so that you can prove to someone whose opinion you don’t care about that you can swim? Which, might I remind you, you cannot.”—Dr. Rainbow to Dre, Black-ish, Los Angeles
“Because this water drown my family, this water mixed my blood . . .”—Frank Ocean, New Orleans by way of Long Beach, CA
I had recognized that the problems of African Americans with water was not specific to my own family through jokes, lyrics, and script writing—through comedy. What we felt about water wasn’t funny and yet I laughed. I knew that comedy often comes from pain, and I wanted to know more about this pain. How and where and how many times was it inflicted? Could the South provide me with any answers?
I made the mistake of painting with a broad stroke when talking with Tiffany about the water. Instead of saying, “The black people I know . . . ,” I said, “Black people don’t swim.” Tiffany cut me off. “Oh no, no, that’s not true! That’s not true.”
Where Tiffany lives, in the Lowcountry, the water is an invaluable resource that holds much black history and is thus revered. Marquetta Goodwine, also known as Queen Quet and chieftess of Gullah Geechee nation, says, “We literally live on the water, and I often say to people, the waterways are our bloodline. . . .” There are two things that are crucial to the sustainability of a Gullah community: traditional burial grounds and community access to water.6 Land and water have to be both spiritually and physically in alignment with each other. Part of the reason why the water is the bloodline for Gullah people is because it is one of their main sources of food. The waters allow them to harvest fish and shellfish.7 From just below Georgetown, South Carolina, to the Florida border, a thousand islands comprise the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. Some islands, like Absecon Island, border the Atlantic Ocean; others might be as far as twenty miles from the mainland. It wasn’t until the end of World War I that bridges were constructed to close the gap between these rural communities and the more industrialized regions on the mainland. In fact, in the 1930s, those who traveled to the Sea Islands found residents who had never even visited the mainland.8 The ocean, lakes, marshes, and rivers encircle the lives of Gullah people. Not only does the water provide the food they need to stay alive, but it is a portal between the living and the dead.
One of the first places that I visited on the Georgia Sea Islands was Saint Simons Island, which was the day to Darien’s night, so to speak. Miraculously, I was able to secure a Lyft to take me across the F. J. Torras Causeway, which connects Brunswick, near Darien, to Saint Simons. When I told my driver where I was going, he groaned because the people “over there” were different. As he lamented the multimillion-dollar estates and golf courses that we were about to see, I searched among the waters to find the site of Igbo Landing.
John Couper and Thomas Spalding, two slave merchants, purchased captured Nigerians for $100 apiece and put them on a slave ship called the Wanderer in 1803. From it, the captives were unloaded and then loaded onto another ship, called the York, to take them to Saint Simons, where several sprawling plantations awaited them. The story goes that seventy-five slaves rebelled and drowned their captors. Once the ship reached Dunbar Creek, the Africans were singing as they marched ashore and, following their chief’s command, entered the marshy waters and drowned themselves. Some say that the Africans’ souls flew back to Africa. The Igbo Landing has been so influential in African American folklore that it’s been popularized by Alex Haley and Toni Morrison,9 among others. But you wouldn’t know that upon visiting, because there’s no official historical marker.
Some of Tiffany Young’s ancestors worked on Saint Simons Island. If you looked into her family history, you’d say that the water nurtured her family line in the Lowcountry. The earliest ancestors that she could find were part of an event now infamously known as the Weeping Time, the largest slave auction in history. In March 1857, nine hundred slaves were gathered on a racetrack in Savannah, Georgia, and within two days, families were separated and divided in order to settle the massive debt accrued by their original owner, Pierce Butler. The slaves’ crying and wailing combined with the sound of the torrential downpour to suggest the name, the Weeping Time.10 Tiffany’s ancestors were sent to both Butler Island, which I’ll get to later, and Hampton Point Plantation, which is now an exclusive neighborhood and an eighteen-hole championship golf course on Saint Simons Island.
Over the years, Young has positioned herself as a noninstitutional cultural historian, meaning that she makes pilgrimages both by herself and with groups and speaks in an undiluted and touristy way. One of the biggest events that she organized was a homecoming for a group of Igbo women from Nigeria to Dunbar Creek. The homes and lots for sale on Dunbar Creek go from $349,000 to $1.6 million. You cannot freely access it. Nevertheless, Tiffany was able to get close enough to the site with her group to embellish the “Flying Africans” tale. But upon arrival, they were met with angry white people and their raging dogs, forcing them to leave. Though the story of Igbo Landing is taught in schools around coastal Georgia, there is no public acknowledgment, such as a memorial that commemorates the event.11 The lack of public acknowledgment spans many decades. In the 1940s, a sewage disposal plant was built beside the site, much to the chagrin of local African Americans.12 Our fear of the water was learned all along the Mississippi River, on the Atlantic Ocean, in the bayous and swamps of the Deep South, and in swimming pools in the North.
Black people’s ambivalence toward water has been engineered for decades even in the North. Before the influx of African Americans, working-class and middle-class white people swam in separate municipal pools. Due to the Great Migration, middle- and working-class whites formed a common identity in order to “other” black people. As a result, middle- and working-class whites began to share the same municipal pools, where black people were prohibited.13
In some cities, like Pittsburgh, police and city officials encouraged whites to assault black people if they saw blacks using their pools.14 Such discrimination was common. One of the most famous photographs of this kind of violence is a 1964 photograph of a white motel manager named James Brock, who poured muriatic acid, which is used to clean pools, in the water when he saw blacks swimming in a Florida pool with whites. Although muriatic acid should be used with caution, its concentration was small enough that one swimmer drank some of the water to calm others’ fears.15 Nevertheless, racial terrorism became closely associated with leisure swimming. It’s not surprising that black people wo
uld avoid the water altogether, for fear of what might happen. That fear is passed along to children, who may never learn how to swim. Unfortunately, because of this hostility, black children are dying in record numbers.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), African American children are three times as likely to die from drowning as white children.16 In 2010, the USA Swimming Foundation published a study that found that 70 percent of African American children do not swim, as opposed to 40 percent of white children.17
Despite all these reasons to fear water, there are places in America, particularly in the Lowcountry, where African Americans are in harmony with land and water—but barely. One such place is Sapelo Island. Among the fifteen barrier islands along Georgia’s coastline, Sapelo is the fourth largest. Georgia and South Carolina are responsible for 80 percent of the East Coast’s salt marshes, and Sapelo has some of the most unified of them. The island was first settled by Native Americans ten to twenty thousand years ago. In the mid-1500s, the Spanish took control of it, then the English in the late 1600s. As the French and English dominated it in the 1700s, West Africans were enslaved to work the land.18 Most Gullah Geechee descendants can trace their earliest ancestor to Bilali Muhammad, who was first a slave in the Bahamas before being taken to Sapelo. Thomas Spalding, one of the antebellum planters on the island, had hundreds of slaves, including Bilali. Other planters derided Spalding’s supposedly too kind treatment of his slaves, so among them Sapelo Island was called Nigger Heaven.19
Wandering in Strange Lands Page 3
