A Plague in Paradise

TWO CENTURIES AGO, ships plied the vast Atlantic loaded with humans bound in chains. Wrenched from rice-growing West Africa, the slaves were deposited on a coast similar in environment but far away in distance and culture.

Today, only the ruins of the slave quarters stand on South Carolina's Sea Islands. But if you rub a hand over the crumbling, lichen-covered walls of "tabby"--a mixture of oyster shells, lime, sand, and water--you can still hear the echoes of another time.

You can hear the lilting cadence known as Gullah, the creolized language that melded the richness of African dialects and the tongue of the master. You can hear the "trickster tales" being told around the fire to wide-eyed children--the stories of Bruh Rabbit who always outwitted Bruh Bear.

You can hear the hushed tones of new parents giving their children "basket names" in the African tradition--names such as Rain or Hardtimes, Boney or Handful--that reflected a trait of the child or conditions at the time of the birth. You can hear the "shouts"--the rhythmic clapping and movement that accompanied the singing of the spirituals and the soaring of ecstatic prayers--that went on, sometimes all night long, in the "praise houses."

These were the reverberations of resistance. A unique language, stories that symbolized the undermining of the powerful by the cunning, a ritual of naming that refused the power of slave names, and prayers to a liberating God forged a courageous and strong African-American culture--a culture not only of survival but of artistry, beauty, and hope.

But if you listen, you can also hear the sound of the lash, the cry of children separated from their parents, the slamming indignities of human beings being forced to live as property on Sea Island plantations.

The African slaves became the backbone of the rice culture. They planted, harvested, and "fanned" the grain in large baskets--made of bulrushes and pine needles laced with strips of palmetto in the African way. They tended the indigo and the "Sea Island cotton," which gained a wide reputation for its long fibers. Work went on "from 'til to can't," according to the Gullah phrase.

After the Civil War, Northern industrialists confiscated island plantations. Freed slaves worked in return for wages that they used to buy parcels of land. Recurrent hurricanes and the boll weevil's arrival in 1916 eventually sent the Northerners back home, and the Sea Islands became an isolated haven for a flourishing culture.

SOME SAY THAT slavery is over now on South Carolina's Sea Islands, but others argue it has simply reappeared in a new form for a new era.

The narrow roads through South Carolina's "low country" wind under canopies of tall oaks draped in Spanish moss, past makeshift stands where boiled peanuts, fresh peaches, and Sweet Vidalia onions in bright-red net bags are for sale.

Route 278 leads over a bridge to Hilton Head Island--and to a different way of life. This premier playground for the wealthy boasts miles of golf courses, marinas for private docking, exclusive tennis clubs, and upscale shops and restaurants. Its endless string of resorts and private residential communities behind security gates are called "plantations."

Doris Grant lives in a trailer at the end of an unpaved road, part of the "other Hilton Head." Minimum wage in South Carolina is $4.85, and much of the work is seasonal. "People work two-and-a-half jobs," Grant says. "One to pay the bills, one for the children, and a little for yourself. It's like a slave market.

"I couldn't take it. You fight over a 15-cent raise--and then they spend $18,000 on a picture for the wall," she says, referring to a recent $5 million renovation at the island's Hyatt resort. Because of Grant's outspokenness about Hilton Head's apartheid system, she can no longer get hotel work. She says she lives "on a wing and a prayer."

Three years ago a small group she calls the "Underground Railroad" began meeting in her backyard. They are spreading the word and organizing, she explains, just as slaves did in another century. Doris Grant says she is concerned that present-day Hilton Head is the future of the island just across the sound.

A COLD, MISTY RAIN shrouds Vagabond, the boat to Daufuskie. No bridge connects the 5-by-3-mile island to the mainland.

As Vagabond churns into the Calibogue Sound, a great blue heron glides across the bow, and Capt. John Wampler says that the crossing will be lucky today. Half an hour later, a young man who introduces himself as Al arrives at the dock. He relates with pride that he was a student when novelist Pat Conroy taught in the small elementary school here. Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides, recorded his year on Daufuskie in The Water Is Wide, which was later made into a movie called Conrack.

As Al's car chugs into Louise Wilson's yard, the sun breaks through. "The weather--it changed its mind," says Wilson, one of only 45 native Daufuskians left on the island. Her 10-month-old grandson crawls over her lap; his twin sister is napping inside.

A rooster struts the perimeter of the yard and crows as Louise Wilson begins, "It may be a losing battle, but you gotta show some people you're not scared. You got to fight back and let them know you was here when they came."

The battle she refers to began in 1984 when International Paper Corp. bought 1,040 acres of Daufuskie for $8.5 million. Haig Point is now a private residential community whose promotional literature boasts one of the country's top golf courses and "a lifestyle enjoyed by only a few." The Haig Point centerpiece is a mansion that was carried by barge 100 miles up the Intracoastal Waterway to the island.

International Paper projects that by the year 2015, development expenditures will total $81.2 million and Haig Point will include 16,600 residents. Sales executive J. Michael Manney says that Daufuskie natives are glad for the presence of Haig Point, because it has provided jobs.

According to native Sallie Ann Coleman, "At one point, we thought it would be good for them to come--to bring jobs, to bring some people home. But things that were promised just didn't happen. People are tired of promises."

Also in 1984, Melrose Corp. bought up 720 acres of Daufuskie for $6.5 million. With the arrival of the Melrose Plantation resort--whose memberships begin at $50,000--came fences, "Members Only" signs, and the takeover of the road leading to Daufuskie's nicest beach. But most outrageous to the native islanders is their belief that Melrose built its "welcome center" over top of the islanders' Cooper River cemetery.

"I know for a fact my grandmother is under that house," states Louise Wilson, as dark clouds roll back over the sun. "Look like it wanta have some rain out," she says as she gathers her grandson in her arms and moves inside.

"BACK WHEN everybody was poor as a snake," begins Billie Burn, who drove the school bus and delivered mail on Daufuskie for 21 years--"we got along," Yvonne Wilson, Louise's daughter, says, finishing her sentence. "Everybody was like one big family," Yvonne continues. "Anybody who caught a fish or planted a field shared everything."

"If you had, I had," says Sallie Ann Coleman of the days when a thousand natives lived on the island.

"We didn't consider we were poor," adds Burn. "We considered we were blessed."

Older Daufuskie residents remember when boats from Savannah carried people over for picnics on the beach and the sharing of communion on Sundays, as well as baptisms on the shore. "We'd go to church every Sunday," says Louise Wilson, "and prayer meeting every Tuesday." She smiles. "You couldn't get 'round that. Church and Sunday school--you better have yourself in there."

Billie Burn explains that the whole island was once one big pasture for cows. The cows were tethered until November 1, after the sweet potatoes had been dug up. Then they roamed free until April 1, when the gardens were planted again. But in 1986, when the Haig Point golf course was completed, the cows headed straight for it. Islanders couldn't afford the fines imposed or feed for their cows during the winter, so one day most of the cows were carried off the island on a barge.

"The island is gone as far as all of us are concerned," says Burn. "Eventually we will all be pushed off this island. The taxes are so high, people on fixed incomes just can't make it." Property taxes rose 400 percent one year. When she is asked where people will go, Burn replies, "Heaven only knows."

"Some move to housing projects on the mainland," says Yvonne Wilson. "It kills them--the adjustment is just too much."

"I'm gonna stay here 'til the Good Master carry me," says Louise Wilson. "That's the only way I'll go."

As we leave, Burn mentions that 400 acres of trees were cleared for a golf course out on Bloody Point, the southern tip of the island, wiping out a beautiful forest and a natural storm buffer. "I wanted to cry," says Yvonne. "I think I did," says Billie Burn.

An opossum ambles across the headlight beams of the car as Yvonne Wilson talks about the efforts to confront developers. "I would like my children to have reason to come back to this island," she says. "If we younger ones don't do this now, our whole way of life will be lost. It's a survival thing now. We have to survive this plague in the midst of paradise."

The words of Sea Islander Emory Campbell come to mind: "Land is probably the most important element of black American life. It symbolizes freedom." Two deer peer at us from the side of the road as Yvonne Wilson sighs. "You can't make any more land. Once it's gone, it's gone."

IT IS YVONNE WILSON'S 39th birthday. She walks carefully through the Cooper River cemetery, explaining that the graveyards of her people are located near water so that it can carry the spirits of the dead back to Africa and on to heaven. She talks with difficulty about the infant son she buried a year ago last September.

Late one afternoon, her son's breathing became shallow and irregular. It took 30 minutes for the volunteer emergency medical service to answer her call for help, another half hour for the boat ride across the sound, and an additional 30 minutes to drive to a hospital, where her 5-week-old son was pronounced dead on arrival.

The tragedy pointed up both the inadequate medical care on the island and the fact that islanders have no control over their transportation needs to the mainland. Now there are trained paramedics on the island. And residents are permitted to ride the boat that takes high-school-age children to Hilton Head and back every day; but the timing is often inconvenient and the county has laid down strict and patronizing rules, including that parents can't speak with their children on the boat.

Yvonne Wilson buried her son according to the tradition that was carried by her ancestors from Africa. She placed his spoon and plate in his tiny casket, and his bottle and clothes on the grave--so that he would have these items for the afterlife and Yvonne's grandmother could take care of him there.

"I AM POOR IN MONEY, yet rich in heritage," wrote Louise Wilson in a letter to the developers and their clients taking over her island. In a plea for the removal of the Melrose Plantation welcome center, she continued, "Please don't let the notions of exclusive, private, and separate blind you to doing the right, just thing." So far her plea has gone unheeded, as Melrose officials continue to insist that their center does not violate the Cooper River cemetery.

In 1990 the Southern Justice Institute (SJI), a public-interest law group, became aware of the struggle for survival on Daufuskie when South Carolina state Sen. Henrietta Canty investigated the tax structure there. Canty discovered that the island's new white landowners--whose oceanfront property was assessed at a much higher value than the interior land owned by blacks--were taking advantage of an "agricultural exemption" and paying a fraction of the taxes native Daufuskians were. SJI's growing involvement with the islanders subsequently became a catalyst for the bringing of a lawsuit against Melrose Corp. for trespass and desecration of the Cooper River cemetery; Louise and Yvonne Wilson are among the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit has ramifications well beyond the future of a small Sea Island. It brings together, says Lewis Pitts of SJI, several issues that comprise a plague for African-Americans across the nation: the theft of black-owned land; disrespect for a heritage that adds up to cultural genocide; and the collusion between public officials and developers.

Melrose developer Jack Scurry serves on the South Carolina Coastal Council, and Melrose Corp. lawyer Wes Jones is its chair. It is, says Pitts, "a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse." The same people who are "supposed to protect the land for the public are facilitating the theft of it." Melrose Corp., according to Pitts, had no difficulty obtaining permits not only to build over the cemetery but also to place boat slips for docking across its water access, a particular affront to the native culture.

SJI filed a conflict-of-interest complaint against Wes Jones with the South Carolina Ethics Commission, which found probable cause and scheduled a hearing. Pitts believes that collusion between public officials and the developers led to the eventual dismissal of his complaint. The complaint "prompted them splitting the club," says Pitts, referring to the Daufuskie Island Community Club, which Yvonne Wilson served as president.

Steve Kiser, son-in-law of Jack Scurry and a partner in Melrose, showed up with some of his colleagues at a club meeting, passing out new by-laws, according to Yvonne. When Yvonne confronted them, "They started cursing and hooting and hollering like crazy people--in the church, no less, in God's house," she says.

"They had the police out there," Yvonne continues. "It's the first time I saw that at a community club meeting." Yvonne told the disrupters to leave the church, at which point Steve Kiser stood up and unilaterally named a new club president, to a swell of cheers.

"They went to their cars drinking," says Yvonne. "It was a full moon. I'm thinking, This is how Ku Klux Klan rallies get together; people may kill me. It was shocking and frightening. We stayed an hour later trying to get ourselves together."

Her voice grows sad. "People we had known and loved for years went to such an extent out of fear of losing jobs," she says. "We were a family. That's really what they took away from us." She pauses. "I am hopeful we can come to be good neighbors again."

THE ISLANDERS ASKED Lewis Pitts and others from SJI to attend the first club meeting after the takeover. The captain of the school boat refused to carry the SJI staff to Daufuskie, however, because of their lawsuit. He put it bluntly: "We're docking at Melrose and you're suing them."

Pitts and the others refused to leave the boat. The captain called the sheriff, who secured a Melrose boat for the school children. Rather than intimidating the islanders, as it was intended to do, the incident produced an empowering moral outrage.

The cemetery lawsuit is likely to go to trial in the fall. "If we get a jury trial, we have a fighting chance of winning," believes Pitts. But the judge could derail it with a summary judgment.

Most court cases, says Pitts, are what he calls "Piggly vs. Wiggly suing over widgets." But, he says, "if you bring in gross inequities aimed at systemic change, the judiciary spreads its wings to protect the system. It's totally improper and illegal. It completely dismantles our constitutional democracy."

Those, like Yvonne Wilson, who speak out pay by losing their jobs. "Unless we get outside money for economic development," says Pitts, "it's down the tubes, I'm afraid."

After the boat incident, Daufuskians invited the Racial Justice Working Group of the National Council of Churches to the island. The working group facilitated the founding of Friends of Daufuskie. "It's a chance for people around the nation to understand this David and Goliath struggle and chip in for it," says Pitts. The islanders have taken their stand, "and now it's totally left up to how much hope and faith the rest of us have.

"If we can pull this off, we can pull anything off," Pitts says, adding, "About the only thing holding people together is pure naked faith and hope."

"OH, IT WAS GOOD," says Albertha "Bertha" Robertson Stafford of her childhood on Daufuskie. "We didn't have no trouble. They let us ride the boats. There was nothing to worry about except your own self--and watch for snakes sometimes."

A wall of Stafford's house is painted blue--the color of heaven, to keep away evil spirits, according to Gullah tradition. She serves her own special variety of famous Daufuskie deviled crab on half a crab shell. The iced tea is mouth-puckering sweet. Music from Savannah's gospel radio station fills the house while she talks.

Bertha Stafford has four quilts in progress. The patchwork includes floral designs, stripes, solids, and recurrent patches with golf club insignias; she explains that the latter come from her son-in-law who works on Hilton Head. "Summertime I fish," she says. "Winter I sew."

The woodstove is going, and the sheets of plastic designed to keep out the wind are flapping. She talks about the storms she has survived on the island. A tornado came through that sounded just like a train, she says, but her simple wood house survived it. "Thank you, Jesus, you were good to me."

Stafford shops for groceries once a month on Hilton Head, buying sausage 20 pounds at a time. She has 16 chickens that keep her well supplied with eggs, which she keeps in large baskets on the kitchen table.

News of the outside world comes in on her black-and-white TV set. A CBS newsbreak mentions indictments against members of the House of Representatives for check-bouncing. "I don't understand it," Stafford says, shaking her head. "They're the ones that got the money." She says that sometimes she doesn't like to watch the news.

BREAKFAST IS GRITS with oyster gravy and smoked sausage. "You're just playing with your food," Bertha Stafford says, heaping another pile of grits on my plate. She, like many of the island's older residents, once made a living from the famous Daufuskie oyster industry. The men poled their flat-bottom bateaus to the oyster beds at low tide, while the women waited to shuck them.

Pollution from the Savannah River tainted the oysters, and in 1959 the oyster factory closed after almost 70 years in operation, creating an exodus from the island. Stafford has to buy oysters now on Hilton Head. She says sadly, "They're all gone." Then she starts naming her friends who are gone, too.

She pulls out a family album. Among the photographs is a property tax receipt dated 1945. The assessed value of her great-grandmother's 10 acres was $50. She paid $1.35 plus two cents penalty in property taxes that year.

Bertha Stafford takes out her walking stick and saunters to the edge of her property, pointing out a "No Trespassing" sign put up by Haig Point and a ravine dug to enforce it. Construction of the development was noisy, and so dusty she sometimes couldn't hang her laundry out. She says that, in return for right-of-way through her property during the construction, Haig Point promised her she could ride their boat to the mainland whenever she wanted. "That lasted a couple of months," she says. "They tell you one thing and mean something else."

A hot sun beats down as she points out the varieties of lilies in her garden. Her goat is trying to climb a pecan tree for a reach at the nuts.

As we start down the road, Bertha Stafford stops to study winding tracks in the dust, distinguishing a copperhead's trail from a black snake's by the curve. We pass a sign advertising 17 building lots for sale, and she shakes her head.

Capt. John Wampler gives us a lift in his truck. Stafford needs some oil for the car in her front yard that she hopes to get running soon. Roosevelt Brownlee, who co-manages the co-op store on the island called Ujima's ("collective responsibility" in Swahili) comes off his porch to open the store for her. In a glass case are "prayer shells" he makes by painting Bible verses in clusters of oyster shells.

We stop at the expansive white Daufuskie beach, home to many sand dollars, and Stafford speaks wistfully of the joyful picnics on the shore when she was a child. On the way to the dock where Vagabond is waiting, we drop her off by the road. She maneuvers around a tethered bull, walking stick in one hand and bottles of motor oil cradled in the other. She heads home.

"The rich people are going to destroy this Earth," Wampler says as we watch Bertha Stafford disappear among the trees. "It's just a matter of time."

We board the boat. I clutch a paper bag containing eight brown hard-boiled eggs from Bertha Stafford's chickens, and one of Roosevelt Brownlee's prayer shells. The verse inside reads "I love the Lord because he hath heard my voice and my supplication."

The sun begins dropping toward the western marsh. Pelicans drift on the wind, then fold their wings and plummet headfirst into the sound for their supper. We slowly pass by the Daufuskie lighthouse and the point where slave ships landed with the ancestors of the islanders. A dolphin jumps beside the boat, then hugs the bow, "surfing" on the wake.

John Wampler points to an osprey nest high in a tree on Daufuskie. "The osprey is an endangered species," he says. Like Bertha Stafford, I think. Like a way of life that embraces the best of the values we claim to hold dear: community, partnership with the Earth, joy, simplicity, faith.

The late author Alex Haley called Daufuskie "the last survivor of the historic Sea Islands." There are few voices on the island left to listen to. But they whisper a secret that we need to know in order to save ourselves.

Their past holds a key to our future--to our very survival. For--despite the view of those who believe that every beautiful spot on Earth is theirs to turn into a golf course--we have a responsibility for each other and a mutual destiny. As Louise Wilson expressed it, "Concern for one another is a heartfelt expression of our common status as God's children."

The sea breezes from Daufuskie carry a simple refrain: "If you have, I have." There is plenty to go around if we share and respect one another. Unless we begin to live again by that truth, all may be lost.

Sidebar: A Family Reunion

The words "Welcome Home" graced the banner hung in the small village of Taiama in Sierra Leone, bearing invitation to a family reunion of strangers. The music of the drums was festive, the embraces warm.

"I knew I would look like them," said Elaine Jenkins from South Carolina, "but they never thought we would look like them." The Sierra Leoneans listened with rapt attention as the story of slavery was told, as gaps of history as vast as the ocean that separated them were filled in for both peoples. They touched with awe a coiled basket made in the South Carolina Sea Islands in the identical style that has been passed down in their own culture for generations.

"No question about it--these are our people," said Lance Cudjoe, another member of the South Carolina delegation that journeyed to Sierra Leone in November 1989. The joy of recognition bore truth to the fact that 200 years ago, thousands of captives were taken from the "rice coast" of West Africa to a similar coast in South Carolina.

The delegation's journey included a somber pilgrimage with their newfound sisters and brothers by boat to Bunce Island. Slave traders built a mansion there, complete with a rudimentary golf course. Delegation member John Matthews talked about the "two-tier" reality of the island: "There was this lavish house with a lavish living style--and 20 feet away they had people in chains and eating rice out of a trough."

Eyes welled with tears and voices choked as various delegation members tried to describe their sacred moments at the ruins of the slave stockade. "I was imagining the scream in their hearts," said Earnestine Jenkins, as she pictured her captive ancestors. Strains of "Oh Freedom" broke the sorrow as a family reunited after two centuries of separation sang together on the way back to the mainland.

"A lot of wounds were healed in my soul," said delegation leader Emory Campbell. "The main wound that's healed is now I know where home is."

"I can't even imagine some of what they probably went through," reflected Lauretta Sams on the life of the slaves. "But they made it." She smiled and addressed herself, "So you can--don't give up."

The South Carolina delegation's journey to Sierra Leone was recorded in the PBS documentary Family Across the Sea.

Sidebar: Preserving the Culture

It has been called a light set on a hill. For 130 years Penn Center, located on the South Carolina Sea Island of St. Helena's, has been a beacon for freedom.

It began as a school to educate freed slaves. In the 1960s, it served as a training facility for civil rights workers, a "citizenship school," and a place of retreat for Martin Luther King Jr. and his staff.

Today, Penn Center is committed to preserving the Gullah culture of the Sea Islands. Gullah, says Penn Center director Emory Campbell, is "the purest form of African culture to survive in this country," flourishing in the isolation of the Sea Islands. But it is under threat of extinction by developers.

Along with a variety of academic, cultural, and empowerment programs, Penn Center's projects include a Gullah museum, an annual heritage celebration, and the undertaking of the first Gullah translation of the Bible.

Because of the ravages of the coastal climate, this historic landmark is now in jeopardy. The center has launched a capital campaign to raise $3.2 million to save Penn Center and expand its programs aimed at self-sufficiency of the Sea Islanders. "If you save people's culture, their history, and their way of life," says Campbell, "you save people."

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.