Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (11 page)

By the end of the evening, the Camden County board was behind the national seashore bill, and the bridge was kept out of the legislation.

Cumberland Island National Seashore was officially established on October 23, 1972, though land acquisitions continued for the next decade. The thirty-six-thousand-acre barrier island became the country’s largest and most biologically rich national seashore.

One Carnegie heir never sold to the National Park Service: Lucy Ferguson, heir to the Greyfield estate. Lucy initially opposed the legislation creating the national seashore, and her political influence nearly prevented it from being enacted. She despised the National Park Service almost as much as poachers, whom she regularly chased off with a shotgun. Both were uninvited intruders upon her island. She believed the Carnegies had been better island stewards than the National Park Service could ever be. When she overheard a junior park employee lecturing to visitors about her island, she chimed in, “You tell ’em, goldfish. You’ve been around the bowl.”

Lucy viewed the entire island as her own, including the animals. She laid claim to the entire population of cattle and hogs that freely roamed the island. Also hers were the sea turtles—and their eggs, which she liked to use in her cakes. Even the humans were part of her island empire. “She thought she owned just about everything that walked on Cumberland,” one of her cousins quipped.

A wisp of a woman, Lucy was barely five feet if she stood on her toes, and she weighed only eighty pounds. Yet Lucy was the toughest, bossiest, and meanest in Cumberland’s long history of matriarchs. She was a strict authoritarian who demanded complete control of her island domain. According to island lore, she once shot at an airplane that flew too low across her island, though she didn’t come close to hitting it. She even ordered around the park rangers, whom she called Smokey Bears.

“With a little point of her finger, sort of like the Red Queen in
Alice in Wonderland
, she could command that something get done,” explained her oldest daughter, Retta.

Lucy and her husband, Robert, had four children, whom she raised on Cumberland. Lucy taught them how to hunt deer, swim in the ocean, dig clams, and ride horses. On the mainland, Lucy built a horse track for racing thoroughbreds. Lucy had been a champion equestrian as a young girl, and she brought her horses over to the island. During World War II, when the U.S. Army patrolled the beach on horseback watching for German U-boats, Lucy sometimes wandered over to their barracks and taunted the officers, “Why don’t you boys bring your horses to the beach and see how fast they are?” Lucy’s steed usually won.

When family money began to run out, she supported the plans to strip-mine Cumberland. She even sued her family in a separate effort to break Lucy’s trust. When the state supreme court squashed the strip-mining deal, Lucy came up with a new plan: she decided to turn her mansion into an upscale bed and breakfast. The Greyfield Inn brought wealthy tourists to the island, where they played badminton on the shore and sipped martinis on the gabled porch at sunset.

Lucy ran Greyfield Inn with an iron fist. The first sight of her jeep rolling past the north gate at Greyfield caused the staff to issue a special alert. She conducted unannounced bra checks, running her hands up the backs of female employees. She refused to buy a dishwasher for the inn because she thought it engendered laziness. She fired employees without explanation—including her son Ricky and her granddaughter Gogo.

Of utmost importance to Lucy was defending her island from intruders. She wanted to keep her family utopia untouched by outsiders. She armed her property manager, J. B. Peeples, and instructed him to chase off any poachers who set foot on Cumberland. J. B. drank a lot, and he had cut off the fingers of his right hand in a table saw accident. That didn’t stop him from smoking. He held a cigarette between his nubs and smoked it to the very end.

One sweltering, bug-slapping night, J. B. heard a boat motoring up the tidal creek behind the abandoned Dungeness mansion. He stamped out his cigarette, cocked his gun, and crouched behind a tree. Two men with rifles crept up the bank. J. B. stepped out and shone a spotlight in their faces.

“Get the hell off this island or I’ll blow your goddamn head off!” he shouted.

The men took off running back to their boat. J. B. recognized one of them as A. L. Hickox, a man Lucy had arrested for poaching a few weeks earlier. He pursued them and demanded that they stop. When they didn’t, he shot Hickox in the back. The wounded poacher limped back to the boat and escaped.

The doctor who treated Hickox on the mainland confirmed that he had been hit in the back with buckshot pellets. But Hickox claimed that he had accidentally shot himself.

A few weeks later, on June 24, 1959, the grandiose Dungeness mansion caught fire. The blaze was spotted just a few hours after sunset. It had started on the third floor of the abandoned estate. Fed by the tinder-dry pine paneling, peeling wallpaper, and rotting curtains, the fire swallowed the fifty-nine-room manor.

Carnegies were having cocktails on the veranda at Plum Orchard Mansion when they smelled smoke. Suddenly, one of Lucy’s employees raced up the drive, shouting, “Dungeness is on fire!” They dashed down to Dungeness and stood helpless beside the burning mansion. They watched the floors crumble and the family hearth collapse, and they could hear the furniture’s pine resin exploding. With no water or firefighting equipment, all they could do was try to keep the fire from spreading. Palm trees beside the mansion were on fire, so they cut them down. Boats lined the Cumberland Sound to gawk. The arsonist was also allegedly there that evening, watching his handiwork from the shadows.

The fire burned all night. The bright orange glow could be seen from the town of Brunswick thirty miles north. By morning, the ruins still smoldered. Only a charred shell of the three-story castle still stood, its roofless ruins pointing jagged brick fingers to the sky.

With no energy source inside the vacant mansion and no lightning storms nearby, authorities ruled it a clear-cut case of arson. A. L. Hickox, J. B.’s victim, was the obvious suspect, but the proof had gone up in flames with the mansion. The sheriff determined that there was insufficient evidence to arrest Hickox. He was never charged.

Though they differed in their political views, Lucy and Carol were remarkably similar in both personality and appearance. Like Carol, Lucy had high cheekbones, chocolate-brown eyes, dark hair, and a radiant, olive complexion from a life outdoors. Both wore old, discarded clothes from thrift stores and carried a bandana and buck knife wherever they went.

Lucy and Carol were misunderstood loners who found refuge in nature. They saw and experienced the world differently, and one reason may have been deafness. Carol had lost much of her hearing in her right ear after the shooting range accident with her dad. Lucy was nearly deaf, a legacy of having scarlet fever when she was thirteen. But Lucy could still hear well enough to become adept at selective listening, especially with National Park Service personnel. She often feigned deafness when she didn’t like what was being said, a trait Carol instantly admired.

They both felt a close kinship with animals. Lucy raised thirty Dalmatians, dozens of chickens and peacocks, and a pet deer. She traveled the world and brought back exotic animals. Ostriches laid eggs on the porch of the Greyfield mansion, and kangaroos bounded across the freshly mowed lawns. Sicilian donkeys roamed the island with a herd of fifty Hereford cows.

Like Carol, Lucy even had a fondness for vultures. Lucy once rescued a baby black vulture from the mainland and raised it on the island. It perched on Lucy’s shoulder and ate only the choice-grade beef that she hand-fed it.

Both Lucy and Carol were expert naturalists who spent their days wandering the woods and mucking deep into the marshes. They were the only two women who lived full-time on Cumberland. Though forty years apart, Lucy and Carol were eccentric, bareback-riding, gun-wielding women who felt a deep affinity for the wild. The elder Carnegie matriarch and the penniless young naturalist shared an abiding passion for the island—but they would soon clash sharply over how to save it.

8

When Carol arrived on the island in the summer of 1973, Sam Candler gave her an aerial tour of the island in his single-engine Cessna. Carol marveled at the lemon-colored marshes between Cumberland and Little Cumberland, threaded by brown ribbons of tidal creeks. Christmas Creek snaked across the north end, splintering Little Cumberland from the main island like a hangnail.

Cumberland was a sliver of sensuous beauty, shaped like a conch shell. It was three miles wide at its midriff, though its girth narrowed to less than a half mile at its southern waistband. Most of the Cumberland’s interior was cloaked in thick forest, scarred only by the Candler compound and four Carnegie mansions.

The plane yawed in the sea wind. Sunlight glinted off Lake Whitney, the freshwater heart of Cumberland and home to most of the island’s alligators. Sam banked left and glided low over the wide, blond strip of beach. Cumberland’s soft, cream-colored sand was 150 million years of weathered Appalachian quartz and granite that had washed downriver into the ocean, where waves had sculpted sandbars into barrier islands. Cumberland—like all barrier islands—acts as a shock-absorbing shield, sheltering the mainland from the full force of storms and tides.

As they flew south, crumbling slave chimneys appeared
through the trees, near an overgrown meadow and landing strip for the Carnegie planes near Stafford mansion. Just past Stafford, the Greyfield Inn came into view. The gabled manor and its sprawling green lawns were nestled against the western edge of the island, with a dock jutting into the sound. One mile south of Greyfield, Charles Fraser’s abandoned real estate office had been turned into Sea Camp, the National Park Service headquarters, where rangers met passengers disembarking from the ferry. Near the southern end of the island, Sam’s plane swooped over the charred, crumbling ruins of Dunge
ness, which overlooked a vast expanse of tidal creeks all the way out to the pelican-dotted jetty.

The developed beaches of Florida loomed to the south. North of Cumberland were resort beaches stretching all the way to Savannah. And on the mainland across from Cumberland were marinas, factories, and the belching smokestacks of paper mills. Even from the air, Cumberland was an oasis, a place apart.

Woolly mammoths, sloths, giant tortoises, and saber-toothed tigers once roamed the island after migrating from the mainland during the last Ice Age. After the glaciers melted, many animals—including deer, coyote, bobcat, and armadillo—swam over. Today, Cumberland has the greatest biological diversity of any barrier island. It was designated a national park in 1972, six months before Carol arrived.

Sam banked the plane north toward home and put the entire island under his wing. He spiraled down, nearly skimming the pine tops, and landed on a bumpy grass airstrip near the Candler compound. He swung open the plane door to utter silence. Two horses grazed on the edge of the runway. One looked up to watch people emerge from the giant painted bird, then returned to munching grass.

Climbing out of the plane with Carol was her boyfriend, John Pennington. Two decades of hard-nosed investigative journalism had worn him down. He was ready to chuck it all and follow his girlfriend to a remote island, where they would work as hired help for a wealthy family. An award-winning writer for the South’s largest and most prestigious newspaper was now folding linens and changing lightbulbs.

John was broad-shouldered, robust, and chiseled, with dark skin, a sharp nose, and a gray-flecked beard. Carol especially loved the light that danced in his hazel eyes—a warm, flickering flame that threw sparks when he laughed. He had a deep, mellifluous voice that was gentle and reassuring, and he radiated an aura of intellect and authority.

John had recently left his wife and three children. Soon after, he began pursuing Carol. He was sixteen years older than Carol and was enchanted by her boldness, beauty, and brilliance. They had been dating only a few months in Atlanta when Carol was offered the custodian job for Sam Candler’s family on Cumberland Island. Before she left, John asked if he could join her. They were both looking to escape, he said. They should do it together.

John had other reasons for following Carol to Cumberland. He was burned out, his marriage had fallen apart, and he needed a fresh start. Amid the island’s isolation and inspiration, he hoped to pen the next great American novel. He lugged a battered old Royal typewriter to the island and began pecking at the keys.

“Island life promised few temptations for the pocketbook. I left my newspaper job in Atlanta and paid the price in lost income to get away from the contrived environment of the city,” John wrote in a story about Cumberland for
National Geographic
. “I wanted to feel the touch of a clean breeze, the wet kiss of the rain in a natural setting, to hear the ocean’s roar instead of the freeway’s, the trumpeting call of the pileated woodpecker instead of the jackhammer’s clatter. I wanted to calm some discordant notes and reattune myself to nature’s rhythms.”

As they drove from the airstrip to the Candler property, they passed the Settlement, the cluster of collapsing, abandoned shanties where the African American freedmen and hotel servants had once lived. At the edge of the Settlement was the First African Baptist Church—now a sagging one-room structure with white clapboard and a rusted tin roof.

Then Sam toured them around the Candler property: the old two-story hotel where the family dined; several modern chateaus where Sam’s brothers and sisters vacationed; a one-room cabin where a Gullah fisherman named Jesse Bailey lived; the house of African American couple George and Audrey Merrow, African American handyman and cook; and a dingy, decrepit cottage where John and Carol would be staying. The hired help were the only year-round residents on the compound. The Candlers visited their vacation retreat a few times each season.

Sam, Carol, and John stood on a cedar bridge spanning a tidal creek and watched for the gator that lived in an algae-covered pond. Carol tossed an acorn into the pond, rippling the surface.

“There’s something you should know about my family,” Sam said. “They’re somewhat traditional. They’re not comfortable with an unmarried man and woman living under their roof.”

Carol kicked at the bridge pilings. “We’re not leaving. We just got here.”

Sam scratched the back of his neck and wiped beaded sweat from his brow. “Maybe you could imply that you and John are planning to get married.”

“There’s a church just down the road,” John said.

“I’m not getting engaged,” replied Carol.

“Just play along,” Sam said. “For a while, at least.”

“Come here, missus,” said John, wrapping his arm around her waist. The light in his eyes twinkled. In the pond, the alligator rose to the surface, its snout covered in lime moss, its corrugated spine barely dimpling the water.

“Call me that again and you’re gator bait,” Carol said.

Carol put in her hours polishing silverware for the rich and famous, while John drove the Candler boat back and forth to the mainland, hauling groceries and supplies. George mowed the lawns and tinkered with engines, and his wife, Audrey, cooked meals for the families. The Candlers sat around a long, wooden table and rang a dinner bell when they were ready to be served. Audrey appeared through the swinging door with shrimp cocktail, shucked oysters, and wine-braised pork tenderloin.

Audrey was a plump, ponderous woman and a deeply devout born-again Christian. “Cumberland is the Lord talkin’ to himself,” Audrey told Carol. “And my, how he do carry on. Ain’t it all so praiseful?”

It soon became Audrey’s singular mission to save Carol from her sinful, godless ways. Once, when Carol went out to the beach to gather mussels, she found an empty glass bottle planted squarely in the middle of the mussel flats. In the bottle was a note scrawled in Audrey’s handwriting that read: “Give your heart to Jesus and be saved.”

“Do you know anything about this message in a bottle?” Carol asked when she returned to the mansion.

Audrey grinned. “That was God’s handiwork, not mine.”

Carol didn’t have much use for religion. It was a comforting fiction that people invented to avoid facing death. The biblical command to “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it” was one reason the planet was such a mess, she reckoned. Jesus seemed like a stand-up guy, though John the Baptist inspired her more (“the guy wandered the wilds living on locusts and wild honey!”). She was impressed by Jesus’ forty-day sojourn in the wilderness, and she liked his speeches about poverty and living simply. But she didn’t buy his water-walking miracles or his heavenly gibberish. Jesus was a good man—maybe the best of men—but still a death-bound mortal like the rest of us.

“Why do the sleepy-eyed masses flock to church every week to recite the same worn-out prayers?” Carol wrote in her journal. “Most of them are afraid of dying. They want absolute reassurances of an afterlife to shield them from the hard realities of life and death.”

Still, she was intrigued by Audrey’s unswerving faith in a heavenly hereafter. She had never met someone so unshakably certain.

“What’s heaven gonna be like, Audrey?” Carol asked while washing dishes together one evening. They worked side by side in the clammy kitchen, the windows wet with condensation. Carol lathered and rinsed the dishes while Audrey dried and stacked.

“Aww, honey, in heaven, there’s no misery, no work. God will wipe away every tear.”

“What exactly does this heaven look like?” Carol asked.

“Why, it’ll look just like this, sugar, but everything gonna be good. Once you got your ticket to heaven, this world don’t matter no more.”

Carol turned off the water and leaned against the sink. “So you’re just waiting around so you can die and go to heaven? We’re already living in paradise. Heaven is right here if we open our eyes to it.”

Audrey swung her towel over her shoulder. “That’s easy for a pretty white girl like you to say. This life ain’t no heaven for me.”

The pretty white girl made a meager $25 a week working for the Candlers. John was paid more and worked less, but Carol didn’t care. She would have worked for free to live on Cumberland, and she didn’t need much money to get by.

She had to feed herself, though. So Carol plowed a garden using the Candlers’ tiller and planted okra, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, pole beans, creasy greens, and collards. In the cooler months she grew radishes and arugula. She fertilized her garden with seaweed that had washed onto the beach. She also raised chickens and kept a hive of bees.

The island’s white-tailed deer and wild hogs were plentiful, and she gathered wild chanterelles and salad greens from the lush maritime forest. But the most abundant island resource—tidal creeks teeming with shrimp, crabs, and fish—remained elusive. She tossed a fishing line from the Candler dock with little success. She hung crab traps from the pier that caught nothing but grass and mud. She found a drift net on the beach and cast it in the creek for hours, but she came up empty every time.

Carol was practicing casting the net off the Candler dock one evening when she heard a voice behind her: “Yo arm broke?” It was Jesse Bailey, the reclusive resident fisherman. He lived alone in a small cabin by the creek, and he rarely spoke to anyone except his mangy, flea-riddled mutt, Jessico. Jesse was responsible for gathering fresh fish and shrimp each day for the Candler family.

“Throw that net wide,” he told her. “Put some muscle behind it.”

Carol tried again, but dragged in only a tangled, dripping net.

“Don’t aim it. Throw it.” Jesse showed her how to hold the net like a bullfighter’s cape, arm extended and parallel to the ground. From his hands, the net swirled out like a windblown blossom over the water.

Imitating Jesse, she threw the cast net again. It spread wide and sank to the bottom. Then she pulled the drawstring toward her and yanked hard. The net came up jumping with mullet, sea trout, and flounder.

“Hot diggety!” Carol shouted, amazed by her catch flapping about on the dock.

“You can admire ’em later,” Jesse said. “Get yo net back in the water while the tide’s right.”

Jesse had spent his entire adult life on Cumberland Island. The fifty-six-year-old fisherman was the king of Christmas Creek, a serpentine tidal sluice coiling through the north end’s saltwater marshes. It lived up to its name: Christmas Creek offered abundant gifts of fish and shellfish, and Jesse knew its maze of meandering tributaries like the lines on his palm.

Carol began joining Jesse on explorations of the creek and its marshes. At low tide, she met Jesse before dawn at the Candler dock, where his rusted motorboat was tied to a barnacled pier. Jesse climbed in first, followed by Jessico, who curled beside the boat’s bucket stove, still warm with glowing coals from the previous night. Jesse stirred the embers with a cedar stick until a small flame leaped.

“Make yo self useful,” Jesse said to Carol. “Grab them nets.”

She heaved the cast nets into the boat and climbed in. Jesse tugged the rip cord several times until the engine finally sputtered to life, spewing puffs of dark smoke.

“I is too hungover to chitchat witcha,” he said, arcing the boat away from the dock. He held a cigarette between tobacco-stained fingers. Jesse’s weathered face was ringed with white stubble. His clothes—a worn denim jacket, threadbare khaki pants stuffed into gum boots, a faded hat—were all smeared with marsh mud.