Time Catches Up with a Special Island
The conflict is old. Older than the trees, older than any of the people involved. It is older than everything but the land itself.
The land is an island. Somehow, over the years, it always is. Small islands and large, in the North and the South, and out West. Islands, off Massachusetts and Georgia and California, and in New York. Nantucket Island. Manhattan Island. Hilton Head Island. Always, an island.
Environmentalists want to insure their natural integrity, preserving them as living museums. Developers want them turned into exclusive habitats for the rich, or popular resorts for the middle class. Still others want to create their own versions of Disneyland. Each camp has its own flag, and the islands of America are where they want to plant them.
This time it is Daufuskie Island. Off the southernmost coast of South Carolina, not far from Savannah, Georgia. It is one of the group called Sea Islands, barrier islands extending southward from Georgetown, South Carolina, to northern Florida, and including some of our most exclusive resorts. Kiawah, Sea Island, Jekyll, and, of course, Hilton Head.
Most of these islands share the same heritage. In the years before the Civil War they helped support the prosperous agricultural economy of the Old South. Their plantations were the homes or summer homes of the southern aristocracy, and their fertile soil yielded the famous Sea Island cotton, so prized for its silky texture that it sold for four times the price of regular cotton. Like the others, Daufuskie had its grand plantations, and its slaves to serve them. Today, it alone holds clear ties to those years. For while the others had relatively easy access to the mainland—at first by boat and later by bridge—Daufuskie is separated not only by two rivers and a creek, but by miles of marsh grass and swamp. Modern technology has proven that a bridge can be built virtually anywhere, but no one has ever tried to build one to this island of 6,000 acres.
For that reason, the twentieth century has come slowly to Daufuskie. What tangible evidence there is has arrived within the last twenty years. Now there are power lines strung from frail-looking poles, and television antennas sprout from many of the simple, one-floor houses. At least half the people have telephones. Only recently have automobiles come to outnumber the carts drawn by oxen along the dusty roads.
• • •
But the essentials of life on the island have not changed. It still takes the better part of two hours to walk from Bloody Point on the south end to Haigh’s Point in the north, and during the hot days of summer you had better stay on the road, because the cottonmouths and rattlers in the woods are not mere legend. Cold still grips the island in winter, and each hurricane season brings a threat to Daufuskie’s very existence. Because of all this, the space has remained safe. Safe for the people who have occupied it for more than 200 years, safe for the deer and the alligators and raccoons and opossums, safe for the live oaks and the ospreys, safe for all the tiny sea creatures and the fish which thrive in its estuary. One by one, each of the other Sea Islands has faced the decision about its future, whether to be developed as a posh resort or preserved as a park, but not Daufuskie. Periodically the topic has surfaced--with one private sale of 740 acres six years ago, and in 1978, with the proposed gift of 500 acres to the state for a park--only to settle back into the great salt marsh.
But the era of conversation and abortive attempt is over. In May 1980, 2,630 acres—about 45 percent of the island at the northern end—was sold for $4,480,602.50. Planners and surveyors began working on that tract last April, and the first earth-moving equipment is expected by Christmas.
The old conflict—what will be done with this precious land—has come to Daufuskie.
Rarely have the stakes been higher. Daufuskie is unique, rich in the past of North America and magnificent in its own raw and natural beauty. Indians hunted and fished there long before white men turned the soil. During the Revolutionary War, the wealthy English landowners who settled there supported the Tory cause, while Hilton Head, just across Calibogue Sound, stood with the upstart Americans. By the Civil War, seven and maybe eight plantations covered the island.
Even today, as you walk the seven miles of twisting roads that run the island’s length and cross its two-and-a-half-mile width, it is all there. In some cases the evidence has become a tourist attraction, as with the well maintained white cemetery on the southern end, its tombstones dating from the late 1700s, or the old lighthouse at Haigh’s Point and the nearby remains of tabby huts, their walls of oyster shell and sand once charged with protecting slaves from the elements. Often it is necessary to stray from the main roads. Deep in the woods still grow the fruits that helped enrich life on the island—plum, pear, and apple trees, pecan and walnut trees, vines yielding two kinds of grapes, and bushes full of berries. If you walk on to the Atlantic side at low tide you can see the foundations of the Melrose Plantation mansion; a century of erosion has taken part of the island and all of that great house, leaving its remains a hundred yards offshore and its attending guard of trees stark and bleached on the sand, immense giants fallen in battle. Sometimes the evidence must be searched out: arrowheads, bits of pottery, and other artifacts are endlessly unearthed by wind and wave and tide.
And still other times what remains must be sensed, as when walking through the forest beneath the majestic live oaks, their crown of Spanish moss and intertwining vines blocking out all but random patches of light and locking in a feeling of time past. Time past, but not lost. Not death, but life, everywhere. Life in the great trees and the scraggly bushes. Life in the insects and the animals that are aware of every unfamiliar footstep. You can sense that everything that has come before, the centuries and all their events, are alive, held there in the eerie half-light.
But the greatest resource of Daufusukie is its people, most of whom are descended from the slaves who once serviced the plantations of Melrose, Bloody Point, Haigh’s Point, and the others. While worsening economic conditions on the island have driven the majority of the young adults to the large urban centers of Washington, New York, and Detroit for work, a community of about 100 remains, down from nearly 1,200 before the Civil War and 700 as late as the 1950s.
In the very old and the very young is entrusted the legacy of the island. The old ones tend the memories and, often, with so many parents off the island working, they tend the young as well. Nearly half the children on the island are being raised by grandparents and great-grandparents. Many of those not officially handling that daily responsibility assume it in reality. They know how precious are the children.
The children of Daufuskie are special. Bright and animated, they reflect both the suspicious nature that is so common among isolated peoples and the openness of their youth. It is youth which ultimately dominates. Even the children in the preschool center are proud to stand up straight and introduce themselves, and, without being asked, count in English, Spanish, and Swahili. And while they and the eleven students who attend the elementary school just across the yard watch television, read magazines, and are otherwise conscious of the world outside, there is strong involvement with their island, its superstitions, its history and legends.
It is the very old, however, who hold tight to Daufuskie’s past, and who remind the children how important is that connection. It is they who continue to mix their own medicines from the island’s bounty—a spoonful of boiled snakeroot mixed with water and whiskey for a cold; a paste of okra blossoms, alcohol, and Epsom salts applied to any swelling; Spanish moss wrapped around the neck for a sore throat. It is they who paint blue around their doors and windows to keep away evil spirits, who will pass a young child over the casket of a mother or grandmother at her funeral to prevent the death spirit from returning to claim that child, then lay a few personal effects atop the grave, eyeglasses or medicines, to help the deceased in the next world. And it is they who remember the old days, when the island bristled with activity.
One of the senior residents of the island is William “Hamp” Bryan. At seventy-nine, he has no trouble remembering.
“I lived on this island all my days,” he told me one cold afternoon last February. “My father and my grandfather were born here. My great-grandfather worked on the plantation. We’ve been here a long time, and I’ve seen lots of changes.”
We were sitting in the dim light of his living room, not far from the little oblong wood stove so common in the homes there. He talked about the thirty-five years he worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, helping to dredge the rivers that separate Daufuskie and the other Sea Islands from the mainland and help form the Intracoastal Waterway, and about the oyster factories that were the last source of the island’s prosperity.
“This island use’ta be alive,” he said. “Boats goin’ back and forth all the time. The Beaufort and Savannah Line, with boats runnin’ from Beaufort to Savannah to here and back. Sometimes two boats at a time, comin’ and goin’. “We always did for ourselves. Doctored for ourselves. Built for ourselves. All the people was farming, and the boats took the goods to market. You could look way over the island and see nothing but farms, all of it open land. Now there’s trees everywhere, and the people plant gardens.”
The oyster industry, he explained, was so healthy that three factories were kept busy, with men doing the fishing and women opening the shells. That continued for six decades, into the late 1950s, when industrial wastes dumped into the Savannah River finally took their toll. The oysters were declared contaminated, the factories closed, and all that remained were empty shells and the white signs placed on the oyster banks: Polluted--do not eat! Farms grew melons, grapes, okra, and beans for the Barnard Street Market in Savannah, but that ended in the mid-1950s with the rise in popularity of supermarkets. Bryan talked about a crab factory, and, at one time, a logging business with its own railroad that ran the length of the island. But all of that was gone now.
“Use’ta be, you’d sit on your porch and just talk to all the people as they passed by,” he said. “Now you can be there all morning and hardly see anybody. They all gone. Gone to the cities for work, or just gone. The best of us is in the graveyard.”
• • •
He sat for a moment more, then, using his chair to help himself up, led me outside to his yard and the bright sunshine that took the edge off the 30-degree air. It was an attractive home he had built for himself some fifty years before, but not fancy. No trimmed lawn, no rows of flowers. Nothing without purpose. The porch kept the hot summer sun off the windows, and the fence kept the animals from the house. He showed me his cows, his chickens, and his vegetable garden, all vitally necessary on an island whose one store sells only canned goods, detergent, beer and soda, and a few other basics.
As I listened to the light, quick cadence of his words, I thought about the natives of Daufuskie, and how truly special they are. Hamp Bryan and his family, all of the families for whom this island has always been home, represent one of the last groups of blacks brought over from West Africa and the West Indies as slaves. Many of those people were brought to the islands and coastal lowlands of South Carolina and Georgia to work on plantations, and many of their descendants have remained, primarily on Johns Island, St. Simons, Sapelo, and Daufuskie. The name given to these people--and their language, a blend of English and African, born out of circumstance and necessity during the years of slavery—is Gullah. Some of the people can be understood easily enough, especially when they are talking to a stranger and trying. With others it takes intense concentration. Eavesdrop on two residents of this island, especially when their conversation is heated, and you may never catch a word.
The subject—even the word Gullah—must be approached delicately in that area. For forty-five years, professors and students of linguistics, sociology, and anthropology have crawled over the islands with pads and pencils, cameras, and recorders, documenting and studying the appearance, habits, customs, and speech of those blacks they consider to be Gullah. Scholarly books such as Lorenzo Turner’s Africanisms In The Gullah Dialect and Mason Crum’s Gullah: Negro Life In The Carolina Sea Islands, both written in the 1940s, were early studies about the people and their language. The 1972 novel by Pat Conroy, The Water Is Wide, and its movie version, “Conrack,” focused more subjective attention on Daufuskie. Subsequently, popular print and film journalists have been drawn by the hundreds.
For the local community of blacks, the attention has proven to be a headache and a source of embarrassment. Reporters and academics shove microphones in their faces and snap their cameras without bothering to ask if anyone minds. During the warmer months there are regular excursions from Hilton Head. Two and sometimes three times a day, boats make the trip, and truckloads of curious visitors are taken on a guided tour. “Bring your camera and binoculars,” reads one flyer commonly displayed in hotel lobbies. “Daufuskie is a world unto itself.”
While some interaction occurs between the tours and the islanders--meals are available at the pavilion, near the government dock where the boat is moored, and the co-op store there is open--it is limited and superficial. Some tourists I encountered last April wondered why the island wasn’t “prettier,” more like Hilton Head, why they didn’t see gardens such as they had back home, and why people were sitting around instead of taking care of their lawns. What the residents were doing looking at the tourists, the overwhelming majority of whom were white and comparatively prosperous. Mostly the locals prefer to keep a polite distance. They are especially leery of those adventuresome few who come on their own, to wander about as if they were in some public park. I have seen strangers yelled at for taking pictures of a house and yard. Most residents simply refuse to talk for the recorders or pose for the cameras, and such behavior has earned them a low rating by many professional sightseers. One recent book on the Sea Islands includes the following warning: “Daufuskie is not really a tourist destination. In fact, some visitors have reported feeling unwelcome on the island.”
• • •
The scars inflicted by repeatedly being singled out as an oddity, however, are not erased by ignoring that attention. Such abuse, once experienced, is remembered.
Frances Jones taught school on Daufuskie for thirty-nine years. She is an articulate, educated woman of seventy-one, who speaks in firm, well-formed sentences and avoids no questions.
“There is no Gullah on that island,” she told me one afternoon on Hilton Head, where she had gone to take care of her ailing mother, who is ninety-seven. “I don’t believe Daufuskie ever had any Gullah.”
It Is hard to dispute Miss Jones about Daufuskie. She was born there and has lived there all her life. She went to the one-room school near the Baptist Church, attended high school in Savannah, but returned to the island to teach in 1930, when she had ninety-six pupils, preschool through sixth grade. She remembers the better days on the island, and the things that changed it: the fall of cotton as a big money crop; World War II, and all the soldiers who went away and never returned; and, of course, the oyster factories. Everybody remembers the closing of the oyster factories.
She sat there in an old rocking chair, straight and proud, next to the crutch without which she cannot get around, and told me about the people she grew up with. She told me about her uncle, who was born on the island and who she knew was descended from slaves. She knows what Gullah sounds like, she said, and would recognize it if she heard it.
“I don’t know anyone on the island who is Gullah,” she insists. “I know I’m not.”
I asked how that was possible, considering her background. She was raised by her grandparents. Her grandmother had come from St. Simons Island, and her grandfather from just below Charleston, both considered strong Gullah communities.
“All I know is I’m not,” she said. “As a crippled child I spent time with many of the older people, and I’d listen to them telling the Brer Rabbit fairy tales, and they was never Gullah.”
There was a weariness in her voice, and I could guess that it came not only from her accumulated years, all but the first few burdened by the childhood fall that left her lame. The weariness came from the battle. For thirty-nine years she had taken the convoluted speech of her students and tried to “teach them to talk right,” tried to help them to function in a conventional society that is unforgiving of any deviation. Even now, twelve years after she retired, the battle continues. Outsiders still probe into the “local idiosyncrasies,” casting the people apart. Students who complete the eighth grade on Daufuskie and go on to high school on the mainland in Bluffton are still ridiculed for their way of speaking. And it gets worse. Bookstores, card shops, and record stores carry Gullah records, whimsical stories about the Gullah people and their peculiar speech. Even the newsstands at the Savannah and Charleston airports carry copies of My Friend the Gullah, the little book offering humorous tales about these simple, backward people. There should be no mystery if local blacks deny they have any Gullah ties.
“Those records are disgusting. They’re caricatures. They’re done by people--white people--who tell funny stories about the Gullah to illustrate their ignorance. Who would want to be identified with that image?”
The speaker is J. Herman Blake, a research director in the Kinte Library Project and professor of sociology and provost of Oakes College, University of California at Santa Cruz. He is also a native of Johns Island, and for the past eight years, a resident of Daufuskie.
“Of course these people are Gullah,” he insists. “These Sea Islands are rich in that culture. We’ve found birth and naming practices, motor movements, fishing practices, styles of dress among women, the use of gourds and shells, language patterns, and local crafts which reflect distinct African roots. What makes this island so special is its isolation. This community hasn’t suffered the interference of the rest of the coast.”
While Professor Blake spends much of his time in California, at home he has been working on a social and cultural history of Daufuskie. His goal: “To articulate the values which have sustained the community for so long when they did not have external support. Or interference.”
“They do not deny they are Gullah,” he says, “but they have a lack of consciousness about their heritage. They’ve never been given the opportunity to understand it in terms of its more profound impact.
“There has been a systematic and deliberate pattern of miseducation or no education through the public schools, through the media, and through social pressures. There is no commitment here to integrate classic education with their cultural ties, to teach them to function with the mainstream and to educate them about their backgrounds.” According to Blake, the situation on Daufuskie reflects the attitude of the educational system of the State of South Carolina.
“This is an oppressed population in the classic sense of the word, oppressed as to their cultural identification. They’ve only been exploited by those who’ve come in here, taken pictures, run away, and tried to popularize what they’ve seen.” Unfortunately, that condition is more likely to deteriorate than improve. Not that Daufuskie is a rock, stuck in the river of time. The younger children read the books of Syd Hoff and Maurice Sendak, and watch the Dukes of Hazzard on television. The older boys are fans of football stars Earl Campbell and Franco Harris; their parents have heard Ronald Reagan speak, and watch soap operas and religious shows. But these staples of contemporary American society are only guests on the island, come for an occasional visit. Soon they will take up full-time residence. When development comes, changes will be swift and dramatic, and the direction will not be back to the old ways.
• • •
By normal standards of commercial development along the East Coast, the Sea Islands are new projects. People have been going to Atlantic City for fun and games since 1870. Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard have been popular vacation spots for the rich since the tum of the century. Hilton Head, the first of the Carolina Sea Islands to be reborn as a super resort, was developed in the 1950s. The others—Kiawah, Seabrook, and Fripp among them—followed Hilton Head’s success, copying its design. Driving down the coast of South Carolina, one cannot but be impressed with how tastefully each of the islands has been developed. No Miami Beach here, with garish hotels stuck right on the ocean. Very tasteful. Very classy. The theme that was established at Sea Pines Plantation, the earliest and one of the more exclusive developments on Hilton Head, is reflected over and over. Careful planning is the keynote. Beautiful landscaping. Lots of space. Private homes, built in small groups; small clusters of condominiums. Low-profile structures, all finished in natural wood tones, clean and weathered looking, all fitting subtly into the lush, green grass and tall, straight trees. While choice home sites do exist on the beach, much oceanfront is public. A certain amount of marshland and wilderness is preserved, a reminder of what the island was. There are lakes and tennis courts and golf courses, and most of the houses are built adjacent to one or more of them.
But as I drove from island to mainland to island, after my initial pleasure with the esthetics of the tasteful shops and tasteful homes, the tasteful condominiums and the tasteful restaurants, what I was most struck with was how under control and exclusive everything is. Little guard houses are everywhere, populated by uniformed men who politely asked just what my business was. At the entrance to Kiawah I was directed to the public areas of the island, and urged to respect the signs marking the private sections. The guard at Seabrook led me to the information station, where I inherited a guide who showed me the sections to be seen by nonresidents. I was refused access to Fripp completely, with a later explanation that “security is of prime importance to our residents and guests.”
All very clean and very orderly. The perfect residences for people who have money and taste and a desire for privacy and safety, where all the unsavory elements of life are excluded in the planning or at the gates.
The problem is that space to be developed in such an elite fashion has become precious. Especially this kind of space. Barrier islands are developing at a rate of 14 percent, compared with the 3 percent rate for the rest of the country. The good-size islands with easy access to the mainland either are already developed or, as in the case of Hunting Island, near Fripp, and of Cumberland on the Georgia coast, they have been declared public parks. Still others, to which access never was developed—North, South, Cape, Bull, Capers, and Turtle islands in South Carolina; Wassaw, Ossabaw, Sapelo, and Blackbeard in Georgia—have been designated wildlife refuges and sanctuaries. In any event, as far as developers are concerned, they are untouchable.
Which brings us to Daufuskie.
Never has an island been so close to the fraternity of paradise resorts, yet so far away. It is, from land mass to land mass, less than a mile from Hilton Head. Sitting on the patio of the Cafe Europa in Harbour Town, Hilton Head’s posh center of commercial activity, you are within sight of Daufuskie. You can be reclining in a perfectly manicured garden—beside suntanned women wearing bright-colored shorts and tops and sipping their banana daiquiris and watching the great white yachts pulling into the harbor—and see Daufuskie’s tree-lined shore just across Calibogue Sound. If you wait long enough, at some point in the day you will likely see one of the little skiffs making the short trip, at the tiller a black man dressed in dark work clothes, coming to buy gas. He will tie up at the floating dock by the pump, speak to no one, fill his boatload of five-gallon cans, pay, and head back across the open stretch of water, back to his island of unplanned communities and dirt lawns.
It was not so long ago that Hilton Head and Daufuskie were virtually twin islands. In 1954, before the bridge to Hilton Head was built, there were just five white families and one grocery store on what is now the most populated island along that section of coast. In 1957, after the bridge, when the Sea Pines Plantation had just opened and 100 new homes had gone up in the previous five years, the Charleston Evening Post reported the permanent population of the island to consist of 1,000 blacks and 300 whites, the latter population swelling to 2,000 on summer weekends. There were two motels, a supermarket, a snack bar, a bath house, and one office building. Today the resident population is 11,000, which becomes 40,000 during the summer. The island is neatly divided into six development areas, or plantations. Each has its own stretch of beach, its own golf courses, often its own restaurants and its own guarded entrance.
Even in Sea Pines it’s getting crowded. The original “commitment” to one acre of space for every acre of development already has been compromised. Where once there were great stretches of space between developments, now there is construction in those spaces. What is being built is still attractive and tasteful, but there is a lot of it. Four golf courses, 70 tennis courts, five public and over 150 private swimming pools, fifteen restaurants, some 2,200 houses, and 1,600 condominiums, referred to as villas.
• • •
Few men are more aware of the situation on Hilton Head than Charles Cauthen, forty-three-year-old graduate of The Citadel, resident of Sea Pines, real estate salesman, and organizer of the group that soon will develop Daufuskie.
“The reason I went to Daufuskie in the first place was looking for property for me personally,” he said one morning, sitting in his office in the Professional Building on Hilton Head. “Not as a development, but for an acre or two where I could get away from Hilton Head, which is bordering on being ridiculous.”
Cauthen is a sturdy man with a short beard, strong hands, an intense way of talking, and lots of energy. He is also a man with a vision, and that vision resides on Daufuskie Island.
“We are thinking of a very exclusive, very low-density development,” he said, stressing that he was discussing pure concepts at that point, with nothing on paper. “Houses, one, two, or three acres each. Maybe a few apartments, but mostly large houses. Bakery, a general store, but very little commercial.”
That was in February 1981, eight months after the announced purchase of the land from the George H. Bostwick family by a group headed by Cauthen and his partner, Daniel Camejo of Venezuela. It was Bostwick land that the State of South Carolina had sought for a park in 1978, but the transaction had never materialized.
“I am committed to no vehicular traffic,” said Cauthen. “We are not going to be able to compete in the marketplace if we do another Sea Pines or another Kiawah. We’ve got to do something unique enough to be acceptable, but not so unique it’s not.”
He started talking about his own vision, a development without paved streets, using oyster shells and sand, and never building a bridge. That would destroy the uniqueness of the island. He interrupted himself:
“This isn’t going to be for everyone,” he said. “We’re looking for the man, possibly from Savannah, who, rather than driving fifteen miles on the interstate, would ride his bike down to River Street, put the bike on a ferry, dictate two more letters and have a highball, and when he got home his blood pressure would be way down. I think people are going to gravitate to that from major metropolitan areas to live in the style of a hundred fifty years ago.
“All we want to do is do what was done back then, and that was people living on a working plantation, where they did it all, everything from making barrels to making their own clothes.”
He turned around in his chair and fished for something in the cabinet behind him. Then he began to read from a photocopy of a magazine article that had excerpted a Savannah man’s journal dated April 12, 1878:
“We left the wharf, foot of Drayton Street, at 9:15 A.M., arrived at Daufuskie at 11:15. Visited that place, Mr. Stoddard, Mrs. Habersham and myself and my gardener going in a carriage with me to Melrose for the rwo hours, the rest remaining at Bloody Point.... We crossed to Tybee, lunching en route on boned turkey, sandwiches, rolls, crab salad, chicken salad, orange sherbet, strawberries and ice cream, snowball pound cake, six bottles of champagne, two of sherry, rwo of whiskey, lots of ice.”
Cauthen put the pages down.
“Now am I going to change Daufuskie or put it back the way it was?”
He talked about other possibilities for the island, a golf course and tennis courts, and a sophisticated health spa, a kind of longevity center where a person could maintain his emotional and physical health. He talked about a mansion, or “big house,” conceivably duplicating the one that once was the glory of the old Melrose Plantation.
Then he turned to how the development would benefit the current residents of Daufuskie.
“The idea of some of the people who used to live on Daufuskie and grew up on Daufuskie coming back and having something to do is a very key issue. It’s a key issue both from the standpoint of generating positions and jobs for these folks, and at the same time supplying a labor market that’s not there at the moment.
“I’ve gone over there and asked those people sincerely, ‘What would you rather have, a state park, or would you rather have a private, low-key, low-density development?’ There’s so many people that grew up on Daufuskie that would like to come back. They can’t. There’s nothing to do.”
He paused for a second, then went ahead:
“People say, once you develop, life’s never going to be the same. Well, it’s not going to be the same whether we go over there or not. Somebody’s going to develop that island. It’s going to happen. We believe we can do it with less disruption and with a better final result than anybody else. I believe that and I’ve gone over there and told those people that.”
Cauthen has done just that. He has his own boat, and goes back and forth regularly to the island-about a fifteen-minute ride from Harbour Town to his dock on the north end of Daufuskie. The week before one of my visits to the island he had attended services at the Baptist Church. There is a point each Sunday in that service when the pastor welcomes strangers and offers them a chance to introduce themselves and, if they choose, to speak to the congregation. At that point Cauthen read a brief prayer about the beauty of the island and how pleased he was to be there. At other times, in community meetings in that same church, he has told the people about his plans and that development is something they should welcome.
Most believe him. They welcome an offer that contains some hope of returning the island to its former prosperity. Walking along the narrow roads, reminders of those days are everywhere. Many of the wooden houses are abandoned; others have collapsed or been reclaimed by the forest. Captain Sam Stevens’ Club, where tourists from Savannah once came to eat the famous Daufuskie deviled crabs, is shut up tight. The Soul Club, for a time the island’s night spot, stands faded and alone, its jukebox disassembled in the backyard beside the refrigerator and the Coca-Cola cooler, its pool table still in the middle of the floor. The old oyster factory, which once stood near the government dock, has only recently been torn down. The island is full of skeletons, like the old cars that adorn most of the yards, left to rust where they stopped running.
• • •
It is a situation that saddens the older residents and frustrates the few younger people who are left.
Jeanette Robinson is twenty-six years old and lives in a house owned by her stepfather, just beyond the line where the new development soon will be starting. She has four young children to care for, and while she lives virtually rent-free in the house--she pays the taxes--there is no work.
“If something don’t happen, I don’t know what I’m gonna do,” she said to me. “I like livin’ here, but I need work. I got a family, and I need a job. Cook, maid, bus girl, anything. But I need money to support my kids.”
She was sitting in the living room of the small house, holding Samantha, her youngest child. When the three-year-old began to squirm, she put her down and watched her scamper out the door.
“This is a good place to raise children,” she said, walking to the door and watching her family at play in the large front yard. “It’s peaceful, and it’s quiet, and it’s safe. You don’t have to worry about them. But there’s no work.
“They told us we could get a job when the development starts, and that’s good, bring more income into the house. I have a good many friends here, and they all want something to happen. They can’t look back on this island. They got to leave and go someplace else, to Savannah and Hilton Head.”
She sat down on her front step, and helped Samantha climb up beside her.
“The older people stay, and the younger ones leave. People want to have their home and live like a family. This way’s no good for nobody. Everybody figure, with development, people will start comin’ back.
“It’s nice here, but real quiet. Real quiet.”
There are not many people Jeanette Robinson’s age on Daufuskie. Fewer than a dozen. Mostly the island belongs to the old people. And for them, development as a firm reality is hard to accept. Even though they have been to the meetings and listened to Charles Cauthen, even though there have been articles in the Charleston, Savannah, and Hilton Head papers, it’s hard to believe. They’ve heard it all before. Over the years, ever since the oyster factory closed, somebody has talked about development coming, just as on Hilton Head. And, so far, it has never come.
But when they get together and talk--Hamp Bryan and his sister, Geneva Wiley, who lives down the road, Bertha Robinson, one of the great cooks of the island, and her husband, Thomas Stafford, a fisherman and expert net· maker--and the subject of development comes up, nobody views it as anything but a blessing.
“Use’ta be lots of work on this island,” says Hamp Bryan, “but there’s no work now. Few government jobs, but not for us. Road crew don’t even work but ten days a month.
“Most people in favor of what they say they gonna do. Maybe this time they do it. If they bring jobs, it be more better for the island. And so long as it stays on its own end, it can’t hurt us.”
The general feeling on Daufuskie is that life is not so good on the island as it once was. If development will fix what’s wrong--and not make anything worse--then development is welcome.
The only group on the island that doesn’t agree is the white community, which accounts for about twelve to eighteen people, depending on who is on the island when you are counting. None was born there, but many have lived there a very long time.
There is, among that group, much more security than among the black residents. The few young whites have jobs off the island, and most of the older whites are retired. And even for them, there is work. The government jobs to which Hamp Bryan referred, county and federal jobs involved with the basic functioning of Daufuskie, are held mostly by white residents. Ruby Smith picks up and delivers people for the boat, twice each Monday and Friday; her husband, Ben, heads the six-man road crew. Billie Burn is the postmaster and drives the school bus; her husband, Lance, picks up the mail from Savannah and runs the road grader. Geraldine Wheelihan drives the ambulance. Jim Alberto is principal of the elementary school, and he and his wife, Carol, are its teachers.
They all are pretty much satisfied with the island as it is and are concerned with what will happen if the north end is developed.
“This is the last frontier on this coast,” says Billie Burn, who lives in a lovely house on the southwestern end of the island, overlooking New River. Her association with the island dates back to 1934. The Burns have had their house since 1947, and have lived there full-time since 1959.
“You bring in that development, and it’s going to change everything,” she says. “We’re one big happy family now. These trees, this serenity, it’s a blessing for everyone on this island, black and white. And it’s all going to change.”
While the situations of the white residents and the black residents are different, they share an immense love for their island, and a desire to celebrate its uniqueness. Hamp Bryan is head of the island improvement club. Jim and Carol Alberto, who have been teaching school there since 1974, have worked to help their students write and illustrate the Daufuskie Kids’ Magazine, which proudly explores the island’s history and personality. Billie Burn is the official historian. She has saved old photos, gathered memorabilia such as desks from the old school and the carriage of Sarah Grant, the island’s longtime midwife, and collected some of the more unusual local recipes. Herman Blake’s social and cultural work is already seven years in preparation, and, he suggests, could take seven years more.
Even among those welcoming development, nobody wants much to change. A few more jobs. Daily boat service off the island, instead of just Mondays and Fridays. Some kind of regular transportation on the island. Maybe some blacktop for the few main roads. And pest control, especially of the mosquitoes in the spring and fall, when they are particularly bad. Little things, to improve the quality of the people’s lives. But nothing to change the personality of the island. Nothing so drastic that they and their island become forever lost.
• • •
That concern is valid. How much help is enough, and how much is too much? There are lessons to be learned from Hilton Head. While the advantages to the resident black population from the thriving development there are real and significant, they did not come without costs.
Emory Campbell was a young resident of Hilton Head during those early years of development. He was nine years old in 1950, when the project was still in the planning stage, before the first bulldozer showed up. Today he is head of Penn Center, a private institution with roots in Civil War times and which is dedicated to the intellectual, spiritual, and cultural betterment of blacks.
“I remember Hilton Head as an island populated mostly by black people,” Campbell reminisced one day at Penn Center on St. Helena Island, not quite an hour’s drive from Hilton Head. “There was a lot of wilderness where we could roam whenever we wanted to hunt, a free and wonderful place to live.
“As development came and the years passed, it became clear those areas were going to be closed to us, or they were going to disappear. It was also clear who got the paved roads and the services. To this day we have no sewage system, no water, no garbage collection.”
Campbell had just finished high school in 1960 when the development was getting rolling. He went away to Savannah State College, but wanted very much to return to his home to work.
“It was clear from the beginning that jobs would be made available to the residents,” he said. “I think that’s only true at a specific level. There were plenty of management jobs available on Hilton Head within the development, but when I returned home with my B.S. degree, the only job offered me was digging ditches.”
Campbell is a tall, lean man with a friendly manner that can turn on a single question. When he talks about his heritage as a black native of Hilton Head he points with pride to his accent (which remains despite the time spent earning his graduate degree at Tufts, outside Boston) and to his home, which he built himself in a black neighborhood of the island. When the subject shifts to what has happened to that island since development, his tone becomes stern:
“I personally, selfishly, don’t think we’re better off. We pushed much harder before development came. We thought we could use education to improve our life, to reach a plateau above the servant level.
“Now there’s no reason for a kid to get educated beyond the sixth grade, because at age thirteen he can wait on a table, he can bus down a table, he can mow grass. He’s got a job, so why knock himself out learning biology.”
Campbell sighed, an expression of helplessness on his face.
“I think there’s sadness in that,” he said. “The affluence around us has deferred our dreams.”
If anyone is in a position to look at Hilton Head as the model and to project the impending problems for Daufuskie under development, it is Emory Campbell. Not only has he lived through the evolution of his own island, he knows its neighbor well. For eight years he worked for Comprehensive Health Services of Beaufort and Jasper counties, where one of his responsibilities was helping the people of Daufuskie cope with the world and their island.
“Unless they get some sound assistance--technical assistance politically, economically, and socially--they’re going to be scrambling just like us on Hilton Head,” he warned. “Developments have a way of coming in and ignoring the original population, ignoring life-styles, bringing in whole new life-styles.”
• • •
Unfortunately—tragically—there is no one with the power to stand up for Daufuskie, no native to whom the people look as leader, no legislator concerned enough about what will soon happen.
When the changes come, they will begin in small but significant ways, as the island suddenly draws the outside scrutiny that its isolation has spared it. The people will have to hunt during the official season, instead of abstaining only when the animals are mating. Cows will have to be confined all year, instead of the current arrangement which permits their roaming wild except when the islanders are maintaining their gardens, the only time the cows are a problem. And they will have to start insuring and registering their automobiles, neither now the case. (You can always tell when a car came on island; it still has that year’s license plate.)
Soon the changes will be more than annoying. Land values began rising with the rumors of development, some property changing hands at twenty and thirty times the original price. Taxes followed, though at a slower rate, the annual bill on one six-acre lot and house jumping from $17 to $97 in three years. As the development grows, that will increase. Taxes on a similar piece of property on Hilton Head, far from the plantations, went from $5.20 in 1960 to $541.49 in 1980.
“Without help, a lot of people are going to find it hard to stay on Daufuskie,” says Campbell. “They’re going to have to be aware of encroachment, land titles, services demanded of them by the county government that they can’t provide--waste disposal, housing standards. And with no economic base, it’s going to be hard to keep up. It’s one of the problems we face on Hilton Head.”
And there is evidence that any development designed to be permanent could bring fundamental physical changes. Among the people concerned with those possibilities is the Georgia Conservancy, a private organization active in promoting the maintenance and improvement of the environment of Georgia. It focuses primarily on the preservation of natural areas, which includes barrier islands generally and Daufuskie specifically.
“While making sweeping statements about all barrier islands is risky, the one thing you can say is that they all change,” says Hans Neuhauser, director of the conservancy’s coastal office in Savannah. “There is erosion from one side, usually the oceanfront, and buildup on other faces. That is the nature of those islands.
“If you erect some kind of permanent structure too close to the beach and then insist on defending it, attempting to stabilize that rapidly fluctuating situation, you get into trouble in a hurry. Those stabilizing structures—seawalls and groins and jetties—are dangerous. You may protect that immediate area, but it results in further and more rapid degradation of the rest of the beach, and can even affect the next island.”
Neuhauser cautioned that some barrier islands, such as those off North Carolina, are highly unstable and should never be built on. Others—Daufuskie among them—can support developments, as long as they remain below the treeline, are built several hundred yards from the beach and marsh grass, and have carefully planned sanitation systems.
“Those estuaries between the island and the coastline are crucial to the natural ecosystem,” he said, explaining that they are where our fish come from, and where so many of our birds feed and live. “You endanger their productivity by filling in the marshland and installing poorly functioning septic tanks.”
“Ideally,” he added, “I would like to see no development on barrier islands. Since that is unrealistic, I can only stress extreme caution.”
The truly profound changes on Daufuskie most likely are going to be to its people as members of a struggling culture. Not that there haven’t been changes all along. There have been. There were changes when the oyster factory closed in 1959. There were changes when the first white teacher came to teach in the black school ten years later. There were changes with the first car and the first telephone, the coming of electricity and television.
But these have been slow in coming, creating their own natural evolution over the years, independent of mainland law and custom. Blacks and whites still are buried in separate cemeteries on Daufuskie, and no white child ever has attended class with a black child. The last white student on the island, some twenty-five years ago, had his own teacher and his own school.
What is about to begin on the north end is going to be radical in the true sense of the word--fast, sweeping, and penetrating. That is the pattern, established on Hilton Head and followed along the coast.
One could say there are enough Hilton Heads and Kiawahs and Seabrooks. The country certainly could stand one island’s being left alone to tiptoe its way from century to century, cautiously sampling of modem life, accepting and rejecting as its people see best for them.
But it doesn’t work that way. That Daufuskie has been left alone for so long is a fluke, a product of its isolation and its being part of a nonprogressive state. Had a bridge been practical, it would have been developed before. If South Carolina were more bold, it would have been treated the way Cumberland Island was, turned into a protected area, a living testament to its own uniqueness. But to insist that one is better than the other is to be as elitist as the people who live behind the guard houses. Each is better for somebody. Neither satisfies all.
In a way, Daufuskie has been fortunate. Its special set of circumstances has bought it time. They have been calling out its name for years, and when it hasn’t answered they have gone someplace else. Suddenly, they have run out of other islands. Now it is Daufuskie’s tum.
The time for this land, this space, is now. Only the quality of change remains undecided.