Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  In the 1950s and ’60s, alligators were hunted almost to extinction. Alligator skins were also very valuable during slavery, but of course the risks were great. One could lose an arm or one’s life. So white hunters used slave babies as bait to trap alligators, a legend much disputed until it was unfortunately confirmed to be true.28 Hunting wildlife is still popular in and around Butler Island Plantation, especially for waterfowl and shorebirds. The Altamaha River, famous for its ducks, attracts hunters throughout the year. Tiffany expresses much disdain for the hunting game here, believing that the state of Georgia prioritizes the wildlife over commemoration of the enslaved who worked this land. Tiffany, who carried around a large binder with maps, coordinates, and historical documents, is not affiliated with the state whatsoever.

  Our first stop was in front of the plantation historical marker, which reads:

  Famous rice plantation of the 19th century, owned by Pierce Butler of Philadelphia. A system of dikes and canals for the cultivation of rice, installed by engineers from Holland, is still in evidence in the old fields, and has been used as a pattern for similar operations in recent years.

  During a visit here with her husband in 1839–40, Pierce Butler’s wife, the brilliant English actress, Fanny Kemble, wrote her “Journal of a Residence On A Georgia Plantation,” which is said to have influenced England against the Confederacy.29

  “This is the only Georgia historical marker,” Tiffany says. “You know these are about three or four thousand dollars apiece. I’ve been trying to get one, but they won’t help me. They pick three for the state each quarter, and generally it’s a competition for them to give you one, but my agenda has not succeeded in six years.” Upon later research, I found out that the costs are a bit higher. A Georgia historical marker costs $5,000, and there are restrictions, as laid out in the Georgia Historical Society guidelines: “Historical markers are not monuments. Overly adulatory language that departs in any way from an objective and dispassionate recounting of the historically documented facts will not be approved. Further, marker texts with lists of names (such as in memoriam tributes) are discouraged.”30

  “What do you wanna put on yours?” I asked Tiffany.

  “Basically who we are. Our family names and how we were enslaved here. There’s nothing talking about us. This is about the authors. All the books that they write are about slavery here, but they don’t talk to you about that.” The historical marker for Butler Island Plantation did not adhere to these guidelines, for calling a British actress “brilliant” is neither objective nor dispassionate but adulatory. Why was this part of history approved while Tiffany’s was not?

  What they don’t talk to you about are the unspeakable atrocities that have happened on Butler Island. At one time, five hundred slaves worked in the fields. Summer brought upon malarial fevers. The mortality rate on rice plantations was second only to that on Caribbean sugarcane plantations. Half of the children born and raised on Butler Island died before their sixth birthday; 60 percent died before the age of sixteen.31 According to Barbara J. Little’s Text-Aided Archaeology, infants and children comprised 50 percent or more of the annual deaths on Butler Island. For example, in 1820 there were 416 slaves working on Butler Island. Among them, there were 16 deaths, and 9 of those were infants and children. In 1830, the slave population dropped to 395. There were 25 deaths that year, 15 of them infants and children.32 Working in the water year-round made slaves susceptible to cholera and other water-borne illnesses. The water was not clean, leading to gastrointestinal problems and deaths of children due to parasitic diarrhea. In Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838–1839, she recounts being horrified by the sight of enslaved women who convulse and have nervous breakdowns after being flogged by the overseer for requesting time to bathe their children, women who had spinal problems due to work demands, women whose insides were falling apart because of constant childbirth. Miscarriages, low-weight births, and stillbirths were common. Tiffany took me over to the infirmary, which was close to the dock. There slaves would be brought in and scrutinized for disease. In Fanny Kemble’s words:

  I walked down the settlement towards the infirmary or hospital, calling in at one or two of the houses along the row. These cabins consist of one room about twelve feet by fifteen, with a couple of closets smaller and closer than the state-rooms of a ship, divided off from the main room and each other by rough wooden partitions in which the inhabitants sleep. They have almost all of them a rude bedstead, with the grey moss of the forests for mattress, and filthy, pestilential-looking blankets, for covering. . . . Such of these dwellings as I visited to-day were filthy and wretched in the extreme. . . . 33

  If you disobeyed, you were taken to a place called Five Pound Island, a punishment so cruel that it was dubbed Beyond the Whip. Tiffany told me a story of one woman who resisted Roswell King, a former manager of Butler Island Plantation, was whipped, then sent on a boat, where she was raped en route to Five Pound Island. The story is that she subsisted on large blades of grass for months, grass too tall and sharp for any slave to escape through without getting welts and cuts all over. In her journal, Kemble tells of three enslaved women, Sophy, Judy, and Sylla, who had each given birth less than a month before. Mrs. K, the wife of the father of Judy and Sylla’s newborns, ordered that all three be whipped, then sent to Five Pound, where they were to be beaten daily. As Fanny Kemble writes, “If I make you sick with these disgusting stories I cannot help it; they are the life itself here.”34

  While the Department of Natural Resources employees work around the plantation and both locals and visitors travel to this spot to hunt game, Tiffany conducts these tours independently, an activity that she says she feels is a privilege to do: “I feel honored to be here telling people about it, because there’s nobody else to do it. I’d rather be doing that than it just being a desolate place like they mean for it to be, and just homes and deer and stuff all here. I’d rather it be something to represent who we are.”

  For the climactic part of our trip, Tiffany asked me to turn off my recorder and stow away my notebook and pen. She needed my undivided attention. I was not allowed to give the exact location. All she granted me permission to divulge was that we were at a place where the Altamaha meets the Champney River. She took a turn and traveled down a winding path. No one in the car spoke. The only noise were the tires crushing the gravel. The car gradually pulled to a stop, and Tiffany motioned for me to get out. When I did, she pointed at the murky brown water and told me that this is where the bodies of hundreds of Butler Island slaves were buried. I imagined their spirits drifting underwater in turmoil.

  I don’t remember how long we stood out there, but I do know that I was transfixed by the movement of the water. Before this day, I had never set foot on a plantation. I didn’t believe such tours were meant for me. The horrors of slavery are too whitewashed on plantation tours for my liking. Like the Sapelo Island tourists, to whom there was no mention of the land-ownership struggles between black locals and white vacationers, plantation tourists are mostly white, and therefore the narrative is tailored to appease them. And who wants to listen to an hour-long recital of the brutal methods of punishment and the death rates of slaves while walking through beautiful sprawling estates and their magnificent trees?

  But to distance ourselves from this history only reinforces the disconnect between our ancestral lands and those who moved away. Our enslaved forefathers and foremothers aren’t the only ones forgotten. The resting places of ancestors from one or two generations ago are in peril too.

  Dr. Edda Fields-Black, an associate professor in the History Department at Carnegie Mellon University, has been studying rice plantations for years. Both sides of her family were born in the Lowcountry. One of her cousins on her father’s side was buried on a plantation in Colleton County, South Carolina, in the 1960s. Many of her relatives on her father’s side, the Fields family, have been buried on this plantation for generations. She asked me not to di
sclose their names so that the owners of the property won’t try to curtail her access for more research. When Dr. Fields-Black went to visit the area, which was full of unmarked graves, she found her cousin’s grave with the help of another relative. The grave was underwater. His skull and other bones were floating inside the casket. “He was swimming in his grave,” Dr. Fields-Black says. It is a moment that leaves her mentally and spiritually undone. To this day, none of his grandchildren, many of whom have migrated across the country, have done anything to restore his grave. Dr. Fields-Black argues that the reason for these underwater, unmarked, and relatively unknown graves is that, aside from climate change flooding, burial grounds are below sea level, the rice plantations have changed hands, and the owners don’t have a connection with the family. She was right. The only other Butler Island descendant I found aside from Tiffany and Griffin Lotson (mentioned below) was a woman living in California, who had never visited the plantation. The unmarked, flooded graveyard made sense of Tiffany’s decision to work outside of institutions. She has no connection to them nor they to her.

  To understand how fear of water flows across time and space, I wanted to see how “higher powers,” such as the state of Georgia, handle the narrative about plantations. To the unsuspecting mind, Butler Island was a place where rice was cultivated and where a famous actress and writer chronicled her time, because that’s all that the plaque in front of the plantation indicates. There is no mention of who cultivated that rice or of the lives lost to make a profit for white people. Tiffany has received recognition from archaeologists for her work, yet she cannot get a Georgia historical marker to honor the slaves who were forced to sacrifice their lives for its wealth, those who made Butler Island what it is now. Hundreds of those slaves, who survived the horrendous journey across the Atlantic Ocean, now share the same fate as those who didn’t—submerged and forgotten.

  There was no justification for this underwater cemetery. There weren’t any houses around. There was nothing but wildlife. Why have these bodies been deserted? Although I have read and studied many cases of the way black bodies are treated in life and death, I still expected to find compassion somewhere. Maybe that’s naïveté on my end. Tiffany told me that I would be awakened once I traveled to the Lowcountry. When I did, I was made not only more conscious of our history, but also more sorrowful. I thought about the many near-drowning accidents that I had, growing up. This trip broadened my view of water from something to be enjoyed to something to be understood as a place holding all those who came before me. As Marquetta Goodwine perfectly stated, water was in fact the bloodline, not only for Gullah Geechee people, but also for many African Americans, like myself.

  Fear of the water has been instilled in me for as long as I can remember. It was in Georgia where I realized that my fear is rooted in the historical fact that water has been a site for much black death. We were often kidnapped in water, we traveled through water to get here, we worked the water to produce crops, and many stipulations were put in place to keep us separated from it, lest we swim or sail to freedom. Many miles away, in my South Jersey hometown, I still felt the rawness of that fear and separation like a ripple effect. I thought of that little boy again. I never saw him again after that day when he almost drowned, but I think of his story as one within a larger story, of how an otherwise innocent pastime like swimming has never been so for black people. I found that his near-death experience with water, as well as mine, as well as my mother’s, was such a routine occurrence because that was our unfortunate birthright as African Americans. To break the association of death with water in the African American experience would be to purposefully forget what has been done to us. Maybe that’s why I was never able to forget that little boy. I knew, even as a child, that his saving was too clean, too matter-of-fact, that these adults had done this before, maybe even had it done for them.

  Here I was in the Lowcountry, where the stories of drownings carried a more spiritual connection. Beyond the voluntary drownings at Igbo Landing, there were these countless bodies floating somewhere beneath the surface. I was ashamed that I had never heard of Butler Island before the making of this book, but then, this information was never readily available to me. There are many corners of black history still being uncovered hundreds of years later. This four-hundred-year-old pain we carry about the water was never meant to be ours. In a joke or story, we confess what the water has done to us. Naturally that memory is more visceral in the South.

  3

  LIKE MY FEELINGS about water, my conditioned attitude toward magic, especially “roots,” was full of both ominousness and hilarity. Almost every time the root has been brought up by a family member, it was in the context of a woman, most likely single and older, who’d been suspected of hexing with herbs and roots, or planning to do so. I remember as a child, an older woman who liked to dress in vibrant colors came to our South Jersey church one day. In a matter of weeks, people suspected that she was involved with roots and witchcraft because she “kept doing things with her hands”—moving them around in circular motions and making designs with her fingers in her lap. Another single woman visited my church after the vibrantly dressed woman and people also suspected her of practicing witchcraft. There was never an explanation as to why. Once the rumor dispersed among the congregation, the woman left as unexpectedly as she came. Whenever someone in my community couldn’t explain a sudden illness or a run of bad luck, it was assumed that someone had “put a root on” that person. I’ve used the phrase facetiously many times, but I never really understood what a “root” was. Was it something from the ground? No one in my community was a farmer, so why did they keep referencing something like this as though they were familiar with it?

  I was traveling in the Lowcountry to reclaim some of what was lost along the migratory paths, but I met challenges, especially when it came to the root and all its properties. Tiffany told me that, besides the language and food, the healing remedies are vanishing, because the old people are dying off and young people are moving away to metropolitan areas throughout the country. But for those, like her, who stuck around, memories of the powers of those who practiced with a root are rich. Because Gullah Geechee people grew their own food, they also used the earth to assist in both healing and curses. Tiffany spoke of spirits as though they were flesh and blood, mentioned her ancestors in the present tense, and offered this anecdote: a healer helped an ailing woman by giving her a potion. The sickness left her body in the form of a scorpion crawling out from underneath her. Even though the results were sometimes said to be dramatically beneficial, my family spoke of these community healers with sharp condemnation. They were demonic and needed to be avoided at all cost.

  The potential source of this disdain is embodied in one of my grandfather’s most visceral memories while growing up in southern New Jersey. My great-grandparents were very religious. My great-grandmother, Gladys, was a born-again Pentecostal and attended church regularly. My great-grandfather, Fred I, was religious as well, though not as devoted. They were also hard workers. Fred I worked in construction and saved enough money to buy a large flatbed truck and chainsaws in order to start a pulpwood business. Gladys cleaned rich white people’s houses five days a week. Fred was well known around town, because his business was successful. I suspect that he was good-looking, and maybe that’s why he attracted the attention of one woman in particular.

  Her name was Iris, and she wanted my great-grandfather badly. She was a dark-skinned woman whose eyes were said to have emitted a red hue. “Real devious-looking,” my grandfather, Fred II, says. Iris migrated from Georgia and settled in a South Jersey town called Newtonville. The Jerkins family was one of many other families who lived in this predominantly black community in the 1950s. On one occasion, my mother, grandfather, and I drove through Newtonville as he regaled us with stories of how angels, demons, and other ghastly apparitions appeared alongside people and scared the daylights out of him and his siblings. Because I get frightened easily, I
tried to tune him out. These stories reinforced my grandfather’s belief that the spiritual and natural worlds interact with each other. The supernatural easily slid into the quotidian schedules of him and his neighbors.

  Newtonville is an unincorporated town in Buena Vista Township of Atlantic County, New Jersey. It was founded by runaway slaves and began as a camp that made and sold charcoal.1 Newtonville is a relatively rural town, surrounded by pine barrens, farmlands, and rivers. My grandfather and great-uncle can recall hiding in their neighbors’ fields and devouring their raspberries.

  But that Iris! My family can’t recall if she had a husband or children, and in those days, being single was suspicious enough. She would tuck some kind of substance inside the band of a hat belonging to a man whom she desired. No one ever told me if my great-grandfather Fred had an affair with Iris, but I do know that my great-grandmother got terribly sick right around the time that Iris set her eyes on him. No one knew what the sickness was or how to cure her.

  I asked my grandfather, “When your mom had to go to the doctor, did she go to a regular doctor? Or were people like, ‘Hey, you just need some turpentine’?”