The descendants of Bilali Muhammad have surnames that refer to the types of labor that their ancestors were assigned. The Grovners tended the groves, the Handys built things, the Gardners cultivated gardens, the Hoggs took care of the hogs, the Walkers walked livestock, and the Baileys baled tobacco. Cornelia Bailey is arguably Sapelo Island’s most famous resident. Born and raised on the island, Cornelia immortalized the stories of her people in her book God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island, written with Christena Bledsoe. Bailey also started the Red Bean Project to commercialize Sapelo red peas. She passed away at the age of seventy-two in 2017.20 In the book, Bailey recalls the time when hundreds of Gullah Geechee people lived on the island. At present, there are around fifty.
I was scheduled to visit Sapelo Island the morning after I arrived in Darien. The ferry to the island was scheduled to leave a dock in nearby Meridian at 8:30 a.m. My taxi driver was parked outside of my hotel before the sun started its transit from the east. We passed Confederate flags in front of homes on large lots of land. The Spanish moss hung like canopies over the road, a common sight in the Lowcountry. I was a black woman alone being driven in the dark by a stranger to a destination unknown to me in one of the harshest of the old slave states, but I had to put these thoughts aside and trust the driver. I was relieved at least that, like myself, the driver was black. We turned on Blount Crossing Road where the signs for Sapelo Island at last appeared. Doboy Sound, which separates Sapelo Island from the mainland, stretched farther than my eyes could see. I was so overcome by the beauty of the pink-and-blue skies that I made the mistake of getting out of the car to take pictures before I applied insect repellent. A large black cloud of gnats immediately surrounded me. Even after I rubbed the repellent into my skin, they clung to me and expired on my arms. It had been quite some time since I had been near the water, and I had forgotten how relentless the bugs could be in the mugginess they love.
One by one, cars began to pull up to the dock, some with PROUD SALTWATER GEECHEE tags on the back. I noticed that Geechee people may identify themselves with respect to the water. If you’re a Saltwater Geechee, you live on one of the Sea Islands, such as Sapelo. If you’re a Freshwater Geechee, you live on the mainland. Several white children in SAPELO ISLAND SPRING BREAK T-shirts jumped out one by one from a chrome minivan. The ferry coming from Sapelo Island pulled up alongside the dock to allow those who stayed overnight to depart. From the surface-level optics, Sapelo did not seem as disastrous as Tiffany portrayed it to be, especially if there were people willing to vacation on the island. But I hadn’t actually gone there yet.
To board the ferry, I had to pay five dollars in cash for a round-trip ticket. Before I boarded, a coordinator asked me whom I was going to see. The coordinator I spoke with was a white woman, which felt . . . strange. If I was going on a tour given by a Gullah Geechee guide, shouldn’t the mainland coordinator also be a Gullah Geechee? The unevenness peeved me.
This was one of my first subtle clues as to who was and was not in power.
I was going to see JR Grovner, one of the only tour guides on the island. The state owns the ferry, which makes three runs between Sapelo Island and Meridian Dock each day, two on Sunday, and none on holidays.
The tension between the mainland and island is exacerbated by the limited service, as many Sapelo Island residents find it hard to run errands on the mainland, maintain employment, or have easy access to other family members. Despite the skyrocketing real estate taxes, there is no school, fire department, hospital, or police force.21 Children who live on the island and participate in extracurricular activities at their mainland schools often have to stay with family or friends because the ferry will not accommodate their schedules. Those with disabilities find both the ferry and dock dangerous. The parking area is covered with gravel, which makes it difficult for those who use a cane or wheelchair to traverse. When the tides are low, the ramps leading to the ferry are steep and often slippery and wet. Those using a cane or wheelchair must be carried by someone. For anyone experiencing chest pains or diabetic shock outside of ferry hours with no other help available, the only hope is prayer.
There are no hospitals or medical services on the island. In case of injury, medical personnel have to be called in, or the injured person has to be transported off the island. The state, specifically the Department of Natural Resources, limits boat traffic between the island and mainland. There are eleven major sea islands off the coast of Georgia. Three are connected by bridges (St. Simon’s, Tybee, and Jekyll) and five can only be reached by a private boat or charter (Wassaw, Blackbeard, Wolf, Ossabaw, and St. Catherine’s.) Sapelo is included with two other islands, Little St. Simon’s and Cumberland, that provide ferries to and from the mainland, but it is the only one under this subgroup whose ferry service is controlled by the state.22
When the ferry pulled away from the dock and moved to where the Duplin River empties into Doboy Sound, I stood on the deck and took in the fresh air, captivated by the long stretches of marshland. Several birds that I had mistaken for seagulls followed behind the boat. They were actually black skimmers, who get their name from their habit of skimming the surface of tidal sloughs. The ecology of this area is why many travel from all over the world to study the salt marshes and diversity of animals. Resident scientists of the University of Georgia Marine Institute live on Sapelo year-round to conduct their research. After thirty minutes, we arrived at the Sapelo Island dock. As soon as I descended from the ferry, I was taken aback by the trees. They were tall and expansive—sentries, as I liked to call them. They seemed to have stories embedded in their leaves and trunks.
JR Grovner, my tour guide, is a dark-skinned man in his late thirties. JR has been doing tours on the island since he was ten years old. I was the first one at his van, and I soon realized that I was the only black person on his tour. I chose the front seat. He stopped my hand as I reached for my seat belt. “You don’t need to do that here,” he said. I was confused. What if we hit someone else on the road? What if he made too sharp a turn and my face smashed into the windshield? As if I knew the land better than he did. There were no other cars on the roads. For one, Hurricane Matthew had scattered large trees that blocked off certain paths. There were no traffic lights, no stop signs, no median lines. This was a place where you don’t need to have an actual driver’s license. I saw a twelve-year-old maneuver a car into a parking lot better than I could—and she was carrying two smaller passengers in the back seat.
The first stop of the tour coincidentally aligned with one of the questions that had been brewing since my first call with Tiffany: What is our truest relationship to water? If water is no longer to be feared, what circumstances and systems continue to instill that fear?
Water held memories of ancestors’ deaths, but it also could promise a life beyond this one. In Behavior Cemetery, where Cornelia Bailey is buried, most of the grave markers and epitaphs are written on wooden boards nailed to surrounding trees, along with some of their loved ones’ favorite things. There is a belief that that particular favorite item will be with the person in the afterlife. The graves face east. In the Bible, particularly in the Books of Malachi and Matthew, the arrival of God’s kingdom will come from the east. For the Gullah people, there are two possible reasons for this tradition: (1) They want to be ready for when the archangel Gabriel blows his trumpet from the east signifying the return of Christ, though Gabriel is only specified as the trumpeter in negro spirituals and not scripture, or (2) they want the bodies to face Africa so that the souls can return there in the afterlife.
A song moved to the forefront of my mind—“Take Me to the Water.” Any time a baptism was about to be performed in a black church, this song would be sung. It was sung at my baptism and at the many baptisms that my mother attended. “Take me to the water / To be baptized . . . / I’m going back home, going back home.” It’s one of those songs that you’ve heard so many times that you can sing it abs
ent-mindedly. I never thought of its meaning other than the obvious: someone (re)dedicating his or her life to Christ. The water, one’s forehead is sprinkled with it or one’s entire body is submerged in it, symbolically washes away one’s sins so one can begin anew. But that’s not all. No. Not for African Americans. I thought about other water-based hymns, such as “Get Away, Jordan,” in which we ask to cross over to see the Lord, or “Wade in the Water,” in which the singer encourages the listener to believe that God will calm the water en route to freedom. If, for the Gullah people, water could lead to freedom and heaven was an idealized Africa, then when I was baptized, “going back home” meant that water was not my guide and my inheritance. I would belong to God, and the water would take me to Him. As I looked at the many graves, I thought about the bodies underneath, their spirits elsewhere.
There was a fence around the cemetery, and I asked JR why this was so. He told the group that people had been vandalizing the graves and stealing food and valuables left for the dead. He was noticeably cryptic. Before the rest of the group returned to the vehicle, I asked JR what was one thing he was afraid to tell people on these tours. He said he never wanted to tell them if anything was for sale. I inferred that the more of them who buy the land, the less of a connection the remaining Sapelo Island Geechees have to that land and its waters. This disruption further diminishes their culture and community.
In 2015, fifty-seven Sapelo Island property owners and residents and two local groups, the Help Organization Incorporated and the Raccoon Hogg Community Development Corporation, filed a federal racial discrimination lawsuit against McIntosh County. Besides their grievances over the ferry schedules and lack of basic services on the island, the plaintiffs noted that there is no water department on the island. The water pressure for the fire hydrants is too weak to quell any flames. Though the Department of Natural Resources does provide water services, the plaintiffs claimed that the water is “rust-colored, cloudy . . . has a foul taste and odor . . . at times . . . foamy and has particles floating in it.” A recent report confirmed that the water tested high for polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, which is carcinogenic and can cause immunological and neurological damage to children. In 2017, the Department of Natural Resources tested a water sample and found that it also had double the allowable amount of lead. I made an immediate parallel to Flint, Michigan, a city with a predominantly black population that has not had clean water for more than five years. Because of this lack, Sapelo Island locals cannot drink the water that surrounds them; they must get their water from the mainland. They have no access to a sanitary sewer system but only septic tanks that are emptied infrequently, causing them to overload and overflow. It appeared to me that the water, once crucial for Sapelo Island locals to survive, was now a dangerous threat.
In the complaint, some black Sapelo Island residents who lived on Hog Hammock asserted that they had been forced to sell their homes because they could not handle the tax inflation. Many white people vacation on the island, and white developers encroach on the land in zones that McIntosh County specifically delineated in order to protect the Gullah community. After the Civil War, many Gullah people were able to earn money for their labor, which they then used to buy their own land. In 1912, Howard Coffin, one of the founders of Hudson Motor Car Company, bought the entire island except for those black communities. One of the most iconic sites on the island was formerly known as Spalding Mansion or Spalding Plantation Manor, named after Thomas Spalding. During the Great Depression, tobacco heir and environmentalist R. J. Reynolds purchased the mansion—now known as Reynolds Mansion—as well as the vast majority of the island. Reynolds’s goal was to consolidate all the black communities from their various waterfront properties throughout the island into one—Hog Hammock—and make the rest of the island a wildlife preserve. The Gullah people got a deed of land in Hog Hammock but could not get land back on the north end because they could not prove their ownership.23 To this day, Gullah people cannot reclaim land for which they still pay property taxes. Many roads on the island are still undeveloped, and yet the Department of Natural Resources provided a culvert for a driveway for one particular white couple who occasionally vacation on Sapelo.
On an island where there once resided five thriving communities of West African residents—Hog Hammock, Shell Hammock, Lumber Landing, Belle Marsh, and Raccoon Bluff24—only the first on the list remains, and 97 percent of the island is now owned by the state of Georgia. R. J. Reynolds’s wife sold the land to the state after his death.25 As Tiffany lamented, “People don’t be listening. That’s what brings me to tears, chile. People do not listen, they don’t care. They leave us here to perish, and they want our legacy to die so that there’s no argument. We look like a fool trying to argue with them—no, no, no.”
After JR showed us the Native American shell rings, Hog Hammock, and the Reynolds mansion, he let us relax on the beach, where I learned a little bit more about him. He had a particular disdain for the Department of Natural Resources—with good reason. In 2016, he filed a lawsuit against them on the grounds of employment discrimination. Back in 2012, there were open captain positions, and JR applied for one, and in 2013 he applied for a mate position. Both jobs would have given JR some management authority over the waters that his ancestors used. He was already working as a boat captain for a construction business, as well as being a tour guide. He had the qualifications, and yet a white person was chosen over him for both jobs. A Washington, DC, civil rights firm, Relman, Dane & Colfax, which also represented the fifty-seven Sapelo Islanders in the previous case, filed a lawsuit on Grovner’s behalf. While that case was pending, Grovner applied for another position, but the Georgia Department of Natural Resources disregarded the application because of the ongoing litigation. Another lawsuit was filed in retaliation. A judge dismissed the initial case on the grounds that there wasn’t enough evidence to prove racial discrimination. But the second case continued forward, and it was settled for an undisclosed amount.
As for the future of Sapelo, JR is pessimistic. To him, Sapelo is not developing. Black people are leaving the island for the mainland, and those who remain aren’t banding together to retain their properties. Gullah and Geechee are still used as a pejorative term indicating an uneducated, lazy, unrefined person, so some younger descendants reject the label. Worst of all, he thinks other black people don’t give a damn about what’s happening to those on the island. I was the only black visitor on my tour. Grovner laments that more do not come. “Black people like to shop—city lights.” Once we got back into the car and drove farther, one white woman asked if there was any land for sale there.
I don’t remember what JR said. I know that he didn’t say yes or no outright. When she asked the question, I was too gobsmacked to remember what happened afterward. I bet he’d been asked this question many times before. I sensed the dissatisfaction in his brow, an expression that I’d misinterpreted as manly steeliness at the beginning of the trip. He was tired. The home that he knew was shrinking before his very eyes. Many of the people who tilled the land were either dead and disrespected or neglectful and modernized from moving inland. I now understood why he didn’t specify just which kind of tourists were stealing from Behavior Cemetery and why he was afraid of telling any tourists that anything was for sale. He was being cryptic because white tourists were providing him with a sustainable income. Circumlocution was his safety net, and given all the problems faced by the island’s black locals, Grovner knows his presence here is important.
As for me, the outsider who happened to find Sapelo and meet JR, I was the minority by my presence but the threatening majority in my thoughts. When he spoke of blacks drawn to the city lights, he was talking about me. That’s what I idolized since I was young. I had no other option. After all, my grandfather was drawn to the city lights too, hence his move to the Jersey Shore. That’s all I knew. I moved to New York City because I imagined it was the place where my publishing dreams could come true.
; By this movement, however, we had forgotten those who came before us and how much they had flourished where they were. This separation of ourselves from home, wherever that may have been, and from yesteryear’s synergistic relationship among us, the land, and the water, had as much to do with capitalistic development as with our forgetfulness about what was once ours. The Jerkins family grew up on an island yet never learned how to swim. Sapelo Island families, such as the Grovners, may have learned to swim, but now their travel on the water surrounding them was restricted to the ferry services. We are united along these two poles of experience, access or lack thereof. We are mindful that the water is treacherous. It’s roiled by the forces of white supremacy and intergenerational disconnect.
Tiffany and her fiancé joined me in the latter half of the tour as we headed back to Darien. She had to tell me about her discovery. As I mentioned, there’s a rumor that the bodies of enslaved children are somewhere underneath Highway 17, which spans the entire Lowcountry, as well as parts of Virginia and Florida. In McIntosh County, the rumor has circulated for years among local politicians, journalists, and others. Over lunch, Tiffany said to me, “If you’re native to McIntosh, more than likely you were enslaved between Sapelo and Butler.”
Butler Island is located just one mile outside of Darien via Highway 17 and across the Butler River Bridge. I felt unsettled even before Tiffany began speaking as a part of her private tour, because I had never been on a plantation before. I couldn’t help but imagine the unspeakable things that happened there. Palmetto trees flanked the main house on both sides. A seventy-five-foot chimney of the rice mill demonstrates the significance of this particular plantation. Before electricity, water would flow in through a tidal gate to power the machinery. The delta of the Altamaha River and the surrounding marshlands were perfect for rice cultivation.26 Tiffany estimates that there were up to forty plantations in and around this small county because of the water and the rice. As a test, Tiffany drove me to Butler Island, where we stood on a bridge among the rice fields. She asked me if I could see the alligator. The seconds felt like hours. I squinted behind my glasses and found nothing but the tall weeds. When Tiffany and her fiancé finally pointed out the alligator, I joked that I would’ve been dead if I’d had to create dikes and levees to cultivate rice. But many did die. The enslaved Africans were brought to this area mainly because of their previous knowledge of how to cultivate rice. They developed the irrigation systems, levees, ditches, culverts, floodgates, and drains. The danger of these jobs came not only from the master’s brutality, but from nature itself.27
Wandering in Strange Lands Page 4
