Savannah, Day 2: Sapelo Island

What a helluva week or two it has been. The personal crisis has been averted and medication is now working. The conference and all of its attendant misbehavior is over.

Then more misbehavior cropped up in my inbox. This proved to be a more genteel, electronic version of a "stay away from my man, you bitch, or I'll kick your ass" Jerry Springer episode. I was on the receiving end; and she hit me right where I am weakest, personally and professionally. Yes, my professional standing, what little there is, was dragged into it, all in vaguely threatening tones meant to put me in my place as a nobody.

The accusation so completely disconnected with my understanding of reality that I wasn't sure where to put the whole episode. I'm still a little shook up about it. Eventually, it will all become a funny story -- like the last time someone accused me of trying to take her man. Except that time, the dude in question really was sort of her man, he really had been misbehaving badly, and the woman really did threaten to kick my ass. She had a good 20 or 30 pounds and 6 inches on me. She could have done it.

Really, what the hell is wrong with people?

Suffice to say that the last three weeks or so have been filled with idiotic drama. To keep from obsessing over someone else's issue, I will now return to a less dramatic portion of my summer and continue with the tale of my Savannah trip.*

First, a big bug:

I just had to take the picture because -- dang! -- that thing was huge. Dead, too, and staying right where is was. I'd say it was about as long as my thumb and twice as wide. Also, all glossy black and hard, like patent leather, it was rather pretty. I saw a few other corpses about, but none live.

The bug lay on the steps of the Visitor's Center to Sapelo Island.:
The Center is on the mainland. You can only get to the Island by boat, and you can only take the boat if you have been invited or part of a in large groups. That's all part of the story here.

This is the boat:
It's named after the last midwife who lived on Sapelo. She was the last in a line that went back to before the Civil War and perhaps all the way to Africa.

You see, Sapelo Island is a Sea Island, one of the marshy islands stretching from the very southern part of North Carolina and the very northern part of Florida, but clustered mostly along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. This is what they look like from the boat:

Way back, after the Native people had been pushed out or died, planters from the Caribbean expanded their operations to South Carolina, and from South Carolina to Georgia. They grew long staple cotton, sugar and indigo on the saltwater side of the islands, the side facing the ocean, and rice on the fresh water side facing the sound, now part of the intracoastal waterway. To grow the rice, they used slaves and, to make the story short, transplanted the institution as they had practiced it in the Caribbean.

The marshy islands, the stagnant water of rice cultivation and indigo processing, the mosquitoes and the sheer, brutal desire on the part of the masters to wring as much labor out of their slaves as possible meant that lots of slaves died here. High mortality also meant that lots of Africans arrived, right up until the U.S. banned American importation of slaves (although, it seems, not in the business that supported the slave trade -- but that's another story).

The influx of Africans from a variety of different locations and ethnic groups bringing with them their various languages, ways of understanding the world, and ways of living in the world combined with the parts of Anglo life imposed upon the Africans and the parts of Anglo life adopted by the creoles, produced the Gullah and Geetchie cultures in South Carolina and Georgia respectively. The descendants of those Africans still live on Sapelo Island and, since the 1960s, have been working to preserve the history of their people.

Here are some of their ancestors:

Behavior was a village on the island. The Geetchie people on the island say that back in the late 18th century, a ship arrived with a group of Africans. The Africans escaped into the woods to this place. Since the island is small, maroonage was not a viable option; and the planters did not want to go into the woods and kill off their investment. The two groups finally came to an agreement whereby the planters would let the Africans have a village here, as long as they stayed on their best "behavior" and showed up to work everyday. Hence, the name "Behavior."

Not all of the graves have headstones. For a long time, people would place a favorite object of the departed on the grave. Later, tourists and visitors to the island would take the objects for souvenirs.

All of the graves to face east, as is the common practice on the island. They think that this is the influence of Islam on the island because one of the slaves on the island was a known Muslim. Ben Ali, or Bilali, followed practices that other slaves identified as Muslim, and he carried a small book with him, written in Arabic, that contained Islamic saying. That book is now in the Special Collections at the University of Georgia.

Archaeologists have excavated part of the cemetery in this area, where they found the remains of slaves and African influences:

You can also see from that picture the lush, over grown terrain of the island. This is, of course, new growth, since most of the island had been deforested for sugar planting during the nineteenth century.

This is the remains of one of the old sugar houses, where mules trod in circles grinding the juice out of the cane:

The sugar house, like many of the buildings from the 19th century and earlier, was made of a mixture of oyster shells, lime, and sand (I think that's the recipe) called tabby. This is what it looks like close up:

No slave cabins survive on this island, and most of the people living there today live in regular wooden houses or trailers. They passed restrictions on the size of houses after some people from the mainland moved in and built summer homes that were the size of McMansions. They absolutely do not want to turn into Hilton Head, where all traces of the black past have been erased in favor of creating a vacation spot for the wealthy.

Sapelo could have easily developed in that direction, too. For much of the 20th century, R.J. Reynolds -- yes, THAT R.J. Reynolds -- and his family owned a majority of the island land and employed most of the people living on it. He used that leverage to control more of the island.

He also built this:

That's a turkey fountain. A fountain with turkey statues on it. I had to take a picture of it because you don't see a turkey fountain everyday. I thought that this image might make nice Thanksgiving cards:

Reynolds had the fountain built as a wedding present for his third -- or was it fourth? -- wife. She divorced him.

This was the Big House. Not the original Big House, but one built in the 20th century (if memory serves):

I swear to you, you could use this as a setting for a closet mystery, like in Key Largo or a southern Gothic Agatha Christie. Imagine a hurricane. All communication from the mainland cut. Then, a dead body appears in the ghastly circus ballroom amid the trapeze artist chandeliers and murals with Stephen King clowns and -- I shit you not -- "Africans" with spears and bones through their nose. Later, another body is found in the pirate-themed bowling alley with the boat-shaped bar.

Today, they use the mansion for big parties and weddings. I pointed out that you may have your wedding there, but you wouldn't want to spend your honeymoon there. All of the beds are twin.

"You must not be doing it right, darlin'," replied Elmo. "You don't need but one space."

I had a good retort to that, but decided that would perhaps reveal way too much about myself there.

Lest we forget the heritage of the Big House, this was on the piano in the sunroom:"Dixie" sheet music.

Our real reason for the visit to Sapelo, beyond just learning about the history of the island, was this woman:
Her name is Cornelia Walker Bailey, author of God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man. The book is a memoir in which she describes growing up on Sapelo Island in the 1950s and 1960s, immersed in the Geetchie culture. As the older generation passes away and the 20th century made life on the island more and more precarious, she became aware of the loss of that Geetchie culture and wanted to preserve as much of it as she could as both a personal mission and as part of preserving black history. So, she has worked with other Geetchie on the island and the State of Georgia to make Sapelo a nature preserve and a site of education. They limit tourism to the island to groups such as ours, or to people who are sponsored by someone on the island.

The woman on the left side of the picture, the one laughing, is an anthropologist. Bailey rode on the ferry back to the mainland at the same time as we did that afternoon. The anthropologist sat with her and had a long discussion about the Geetchie culture. Later, she told us that, through that conversation and through everything else she had learned that week, she felt she had done her own ancestors a disservice by seeing only the oppression of slavery, and not also seeing the humanity and perseverance of the people enslaved. Talking to Bailey had allowed her to make that connection.

I saw Bailey as living history. Not living history in the sense of open air museums such as Williamsburg or Plimouth Plantation, but an actual connection to the past. Someone who lives the continuity in a very conscious and personal way. History with a pulse.

After lunch with Bailey, we went down to the beach. Here are my feet in the Atlantic Ocean: Yes, I really am that white.

Since there were no tourists, the beach was empty:

Some of our group commented on how isolated they felt there, and wondered how that had affected the Africans and black creoles on the island. I looked out east -- or what I thought was east -- and thought of an African walking on the beach two and a half centuries before me. Did she look out over the water and think, "that way is home?" Did she know she would never see it again? I thought of the graves on the bottom of the ocean. That's a hard history to have, full of grief.
It isn't mine, either; and I still wonder why I study it. What is my connection? Perhaps it is the one thing in my life that isn't self-centered. Yet, I still sometimes feel like the colonizer, appropriating something that doesn't belong to me. I know, intellectually, that this is a ridiculous feeling since we would be very limited if we only studied that to which we were directly and personally connected. Still, I sometimes wonder why I don't study "my own" history. Then, I realize, I don't feel connected to any history to call "my own." I suppose others might call me blind to my own privilege, but that's not really how it feels. It feels mostly like a disconnection.

When I was younger, I wanted to be part of something bigger than myself. Something important. History, this history, is important; and I decided back then that I wanted to spend my life trying to understand it, even if I am, to some extent, and outsider.

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*Incidentally, the is the second time I've written this post. Damn Blogger did some weird thing or another so that, despite my saving every minute or two, all of it was eaten. Bite me, Blogger. Bite me. It would hurt less.