Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (71 page)

In his electric cart, we followed a sand lane a short distance into the trees where we came upon a clearing with a pair of small frame-houses. We climbed through a fence to enter by the back stoop, Scurry calling her name as we went, Miss Flossie appearing at last in the doorway, portable phone in her hand, the flicker of a television coming down the darkened hallway. So much for isolation. She led us to her dining room, a place made even smaller by a big table piled with papers and mailed flyers, in a corner the glowing television screen, her easy chair pointed at it. Atop the set, beneath a picture of the
Black Madonna,
was a photograph of her late husband, placed so she could see him during commercials.

Miss Flossie, I guessed, was in her seventies, tall for her generation, thin but straight in the spine, wearing a long dress, her hair tightly bound up in a red kerchief. She could have stepped into the Savannah of 1890 and gone unnoticed. Scurry made small talk, seeming rather uncomfortable for having brought unannounced strangers into her home, although she was cordial and apparently content to be interrupted. He declined her offer to sit, so we stood, and I just tried to absorb her words, her speech, to imagine what it would have been had she slipped into full Gullah dialect. As it was, her sentences had the lilt one hears from African descendants in the British Caribbean islands, and it was fast enough I missed some words. Scurry would later tell me that she could have lost me in a flash had she wanted to; I asked could she lose him (who wasn’t native to Daufuskie). “No,” he said, “but I can’t speak it.”

Only rarely on my travels do I stumble into crevices in the wall of time, openings one briefly can enter into another era before it evaporates like morning miasma. There she stood, surely from generations gone, looking away as if we weren’t really present, her words sweetly rolling forth, she who knew stories that I would never hear, some that nobody would hear ever again. Her age — not in years but in experience — seemed beyond anything I had seen before. I almost believed the moment wasn’t truly happening, that I’d not really found a crevice, that I was merely dreaming. But we
were
there, voyagers looking in from a time no longer hers.

Several days after our voyage ended, I phoned Wick to see whether he’d be able to arrange a longer visit he’d suggested, but I think his heart wasn’t in it, and it didn’t work out, and now, weeks later, I’m not sure I really wanted it to. I like the mythic Miss Flossie whose evanescent appearance has given me a perception of the Gullahs that may outlast their time on the island, her face emerging whenever I happen onto the name Daufuskie.

Once Q and I were again home from the Waterway, an antiquarian-bookshop owner showed me a scarce item, Marcellus Whaley’s 1925
The Old Types Pass — Gullah Sketches of the Carolina Sea Islands.
Much of the narrative is in that creolized dialect. Here are two sentences I take at random:

“Him ole ’nuff fuh know nuffah do sishaz dat,” declared Lizzie, in hearty accord. “Gal en boy all two, en man en’ ooman fuh sich ’uh mattah haffuh know ef dem git outtuh bed on de wrong side dem gwine bex ’tell dem guh sleep dah night.”

Spoken quickly with a certain lilt, it was something like what I heard in Miss Flossie’s dining room, but to read a whole book of it, despite the lure of its yellowed pages, demanded more than I could give.

When we got under way the next morning, I noticed on the chart how the remarkably shoe-shaped Hilton Head (should be Hilton’s Foot) seemed to be drop-kicking the little deflated football of Daufuskie westward. Scurry had told me of improved ferry-service across Calibogue Sound he would soon offer, his boat to run from the toe to the ball, but where Daufuskie will land, who could know? My guess is on the drop edge of yonder. Maybe its only hope is the curse a Negro conjurer years ago placed on the island:
Lay no why mon nebba mek no dolla heah nebba.
For a while, the old malediction had worked.

11

Fanny Kemble Speaks

F
OR A FEW MILES
the
Bogger
wound her way through a marshland of wide reaches of spartina — cord grasses — matured to the color of a wheat field ready for harvest. She crossed the Savannah River as if it were a roadway, entered Georgia, and headed southward below the slightly elevated land atop which sits Savannah, and there the magenta line further contorted. Of the four Waterway states below Virginia, Georgia has the fewest Intracoastal miles, but because it yields its leagues slowly, the distance seems greater, and, for those who find curving lines more interesting than straight ones, it’s an excellent run. Were a direct sailing line along the Georgia route possible, it would be about a hundred miles, but because the Intracoastal there makes extensive use of rivers and creeks, the distance increases by a third. Names color the passage: Ogeechee River, Bear River, Front River, Old Tea Kettle Creek, Little Mud River, Jekyll Creek, the Narrows. All of the encumbrances encourage powerboaters wanting to make time — those whose wakes rip the banks and can swamp small boats — to “bump outside” to the open Atlantic. But for those staying inside as we did, the shores are near and the requisite slower progress allows a deeper acquaintance with the territory.

To the traveler in quest of a human hand laid lightly onto nature, the Georgia coast is a sublime example in its almost total protection through a wedding of private and governmental ownership. Although the sixteenth-century Spanish probably had the opposite in mind when naming those outlying lands the Golden Isles, people who visit them in November, surrounded as the islands are by vast spreads of harvest-yellow spartina, will find them — at least in here — auriferous indeed.

Of the Georgia islands, only St. Simons and Jekyll have direct road connections to the mainland. While the former is widely developed, Jekyll, despite its resort amenities, must remain sixty-five percent in a “natural state” according to a decree Georgia declared when it bought the island for a park in 1947. Wassaw, Ossabaw, Blackbeard, Sapelo, and Wolf islands are all wildlife refuges of various sorts; a zoological foundation owns St. Catherines; a homeowners’ association controls Little Cumberland; and Little St. Simons, with its single road, is the last family-owned island in the Georgia chain. The National Park Service oversees the largest one, Cumberland.

Some of the islands — where an acre of tidal marsh is ten times as fertile as the richest one in Iowa — have been brought back from heavy human use and returned to nature. The exhausted cotton fields of Ossabaw began changing when it became Georgia’s first heritage preserve, now a place for scientific and educational endeavors — further evidence that profits from land need not be concomitant with depletion of the underlying resource. The result of the innovations is that Georgia, even while allowing public access to all beaches up to the high-tide line, today has miles of coast that, if not pristine, still suggest what its shores looked like when Europeans began surveying them for military and mercantile enterprises. To excursionists arriving from the almost unbroken development of the Florida beaches, the change along the Georgia coast is stunning.

As the
Bog Trotter
made her way behind the Golden Isles and crossed the Altamaha River, I asked a man I’d often seen along the rail, his binoculars always at-the-ready, whether he’d picked up any noteworthy birds or beasts. The scowling fellow, whose attitude happily did not match his expression, said, “Slim pickings. I thought I’d see many more birds, even though the big migrations are pretty well completed now. But it’s been mostly cormorants, herons, and some pelicans. A couple of kingfishers.” I mentioned that early travelers along the inside passage spoke of large populations of many species. He shook his head. “The Christmas bird counts in lots of places across the country show numbers holding up, but I think that’s because these days more people are out there counting. I mean, how could numbers possibly stand steady along the ICW with all that new development?”

Only eight miles up the Altamaha was a different disappearance. On Butler Island in 1839, English actress Fanny Kemble (Mrs. Frances Butler) made her first visit to her husband’s rice plantation operated almost entirely by slaves. Her several weeks there and a couple more a few miles away on St. Simons Island exposed her to the realities of agricultural bondage. As a youth, Fanny took up the boards out of financial necessity, but she never lost hope for a life in letters. To help herself come to grips with the appalling conditions of the slaves — especially the women — she wrote and wrote, describing in precise and poignant detail a system largely kept hidden from outsiders. But after she left, for eighteen years she too considered publication of her forthright account a “breach of confidence” intolerable to her spouse, and she didn’t change her mind until 1863, long after her marriage was dissolved but soon following final proclamation of the Emancipation Act. In her
Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation,
her keen percipience and exactitude raise it from a powerful documentation of slavery (its accuracy now widely accepted despite earlier Southern challenges) into the canon of American historical literature. If you’ve ever toured an antebellum mansion, here’s something you may not have heard. While on her husband’s St. Simons estate, she wrote:

We skirted the plantation burial ground, and a dismal place it looked; the cattle trampling over it in every direction, except where Mr. K had had an enclosure put round the graves of two white men who had worked on the estate. They were strangers, and of course utterly indifferent to the people here; but by virtue of their white skins, their resting place was protected from the hoofs of the cattle, while the parents and children, wives, husbands, brothers and sisters of the poor slaves, sleeping beside them, might see the graves of those they loved trampled upon and browsed over, desecrated and defiled, from morning till night. There is something intolerably cruel in this disdainful denial of a common humanity pursuing these wretches even when they are hid beneath the earth.

Today, the chattel system is gone, Butler’s plantation with it, but the rice-field levees and cemetery, I’ve heard, remain as witness.

12

Turn Left at the Fan Belt

O
N OUR LAST MORNING
aboard the
Trotter,
a small pod of bottle-nose dolphins broke the water ahead of her bow to lead us toward the wide and choppy St. Marys River bringing down the tannic waters of the great Okefenokee Swamp thirty-three miles west. Not far south lay Fernandina Beach, Florida; for us not the sandy strand of vacation cabins and condos but the old commercial and industrial section that had partly recast itself to accommodate tourism. As if to welcome the boat, a dozen pelicans perched atop pilings, their prodigious beaks resting on their breasts, their eyes alert to our approach. If you cross a heron with a goose, you get a pelican, a bird ungainly in all it does (notably backward crash dives for fish) until it takes up its low and lovely flights just above the waves, its big wings creating a cushion of air substantial enough to support its bulk.

The boat tied up at the city dock just down the Amelia River from one of the pulp mills. Under a dismal sky, we went topside, saluted farewell to our doughty little tub, disembarked, stashed our bags, and began walking down Centre Street with its refurbished shop-fronts and a capably restored courthouse. We made our way toward Route A1A — the old snowbird highway — which begins or ends there. The breeze was out of a quarter that brought with it from a kraft-paper factory an effluvium not really nostril-plugging but a bouquet making it seem, under the dark sky, we were walking inside a damp grocery sack.

A woman had told Q that locals liked breakfast at an eatery in an old filling-station still pumping gas but with its grease pit turned into a café. We followed the alphabetized, tree street names south until we saw a station with parked cars and a sign for gasoline but nothing for food, so I asked a couple of pert gaffers sitting outside the station — as is the Southern custom — if we’d found T-Ray’s Burger Station. “You’re there,” one said, the other adding, “Turn left at the fan belt.”

In what was formerly a double-bay garage, under a picture of an inexpertly painted hamburger captioned with time-bleached letters — 
STOP IN AND KETCHUP
 — we took a rickety table with chairs out of somebody’s 1946 kitchen, and ordered up eggs, french toast, and grits. Next to us sat a young couple, hands linked, praying long over tomato omelets and toast but eating faster than canines, then bolting for the door so she could fire up a cigarette, inhale rapidly, puff her cheeks almost maniacally before exhaling smokelessly. She’d gotten all of it, and, after a few drags, she appeared to settle down as if calmed by the hand of her Lord. If you’ve witnessed modern anesthetics delivered, then you’ve seen her performance. It seemed to me their earlier, celestially directed gratitude “for what we are about to receive” might have been more honestly spoken over the tobacco than over the tomato omelet.

T-Ray’s father stopped by the table to ask how our food was — it was good and honest and reasonable — and I asked about his forty years of business along A1A. He spoke of old north-coast Florida, the shrimp boats, the menhaden fleet. “We used to have a trolley,” he said, pointing outside to the intersection of A1A and Beech Street. “It ran right past there and on to the beach. That’s why the street’s named that.” (Someday I’m going to encourage Q to write a history of America as it gets reported in cafés and taverns and churches, versions that shape local understandings. A woman the other day had told me Queen Isabella had Christopher Columbus executed for torturing Indians: she got the torture right, but as for his demise, he died wealthy in his own bed.)

South of Fernandina Beach, the Waterway is another kind of voyage, I hear, a route of so many excavated stretches it’s popularly called “The Ditch,” a place that reveals the nature of contemporary Florida and its daily throng of arrivals; once there, one in twenty new residents will operate a watercraft of some sort. Use of the ICW in the state is heavy enough to warrant a special agency to oversee it with specific regulations. Instead of rivers and sounds and creeks and marshes, there are concrete seawalls backed by even bigger walls of tall buildings blocking the Atlantic. It’s for that place — the last miles called the Gold Coast — most Intracoastal boaters are bound.