Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  I have made a compromise between what I grew up with and what I witnessed on my trip. My grandmother’s anointing olive oil still rests on my kitchen counter near my door. I bought a bottle of Florida Water, often used by hoodoo practitioners for home protection and energy cleansing. Florida Water, or Agua de Florida, smells wonderful. The aroma is light, based on citrus flowers, often with bergamot, cinnamon, or other scents. Before starting a writing session, I pray—as I’ve always done before my travels—then I spray Florida Water around my office for good measure. The ritual is very small, but it’s my own way of realigning the past and the present, my Southern and Northern roots.

  4

  AFTER I SPOKE with Victoria Smalls, her words lingered in my mind: “We forget how much memory the water and land hold.” I had learned something about how water and roots function in African American life, but now it was time to focus on the land itself and ask my grandfather the most critical question: “Why did you all leave?” I wanted to know more about the difference between what happened to those who stayed, like Victoria Smalls and Griffin Lotson, and what happened to those who left. I wanted to study the rupture of community and what it does to memory.

  “I guess I can tell the story now,” my grandfather said in a measured tone.

  My maternal family’s trajectory began with my great-grandfather, whose name was Fred Andrew Jerkins I. Five generations of men in my family bear his name. He was born in Americus, Georgia, and he married Gladys Wiggins of Andersonville, Georgia. The Wigginses were a well-to-do black family who owned a plantation near Sumter County; the Jerkins family were sharecroppers at first, before they were able to afford to buy their own land. Gladys bore sixteen children, but three did not survive into adulthood. From what my mother told me, she had a child every year; she passed in her fifties. There is about a twenty-five-year age difference between her eldest and youngest child, who is only a year older than one of their grandchildren, my aunt Sharene. Life was idyllic until the accident happened.

  Fred was driving a car one night and hit a white man. No one in my family can confirm if that man survived. Fred jumped out of his vehicle and made a run for it through the woods where some of his relatives lived. Those relatives told him that he had to leave town or else he would be killed. News had spread fast. Fred I was no stranger to the threat of a noose. From 1877–1950, Georgia was second only to Mississippi in the number of lynchings.1 As a teenager, he would hear other black people being lynched—their screams, their pleas for mercy—and he knew that there was nothing he could say to absolve him of hurting a white person, even if it was an accident. The white overseer of the cotton plantation was fond of my great-grandfather’s productivity and hid Fred in the trunk to drive him as far as he could, while a mob was screaming Fred’s name and vowing to string him up. The overseer drove him until the path was blocked by a body of water. Fred crossed that water by himself, traveled some ways, and found refuge with a relative near the border of Georgia and Florida. No one knows how long he was gone, but the coast was clear after another black man’s body was found floating in the water near Americus. White people thought Fred had died—maybe some other whites got to him first, or maybe he just drowned. Either way, he was gone.

  Fred returned to Americus and tried to continue his life as though nothing had happened. He worked in the cotton fields as he had before the accident. However, as soon as word got out that Fred I was very much alive, a white mob showed up at the plantation where he worked. His “employer,” who my grandfather said was a mean man, invited the mob to kill him but then said whoever took the first step would get shot with his Winchester rifle. No one harmed him. Fred I stayed in Americus, settled down with my great-grandmother, and had children, but in the back of his mind, he was always worried that someone would find him hanging from a tree branch. Fred saved his money, and the Jerkins family left Georgia while my grandfather was still a baby, taking the railroad to Philadelphia, where over two hundred thousand black refugees, primarily from Virginia, South Carolina, Maryland, and Georgia, had already called the City of Brotherly Love their new home. Had my great-grandfather not fled from Americus, he might well have been murdered. My grandfather would have never been born, and therefore I would not be alive. The first time he fled was for self-preservation. The second time was for the preservation of his entire family.

  The Jerkins family, which by that time was my great-grandparents and a few of their children, spent only two weeks in Philadelphia before they moved to Newtonville, New Jersey. There, Fred I taught his sons how to drive a tractor and fish for catfish, halibut, and bass. Their mother preserved watermelon rinds, peaches, and apples in a nearby cellar. If there was no food in the house, Fred I would tell Gladys to make the gravy and biscuits and he’d be right back. He’d take his shotgun, and after one pop, he’d come back with a bloodied blackbird in his hand. They grew all kinds of vegetables. “Anything you can think of,” my uncles Curtis and Sam rhapsodized. Fred I trapped ’coons and possums, and he and his wife made wine and moonshine, an extra hustle that landed him in jail for a short period of time. “That’s the thing about young people today,” Uncle Curtis continued. “If something happened, they would not know how to fend for themselves. They wouldn’t know what to do.” Back then, the Jerkins family was self-sustaining. I asked my mother, Sybil, if she knew how to trap animals. She yelled, “No! Why in the world would I wanna do that?” My grandfather said that was mostly for the boys.

  For two years, my grandfather lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, with an aunt while he went to high school there, but then he returned around the age of sixteen to wash dishes at an Atlantic City hotel right off Illinois Avenue. At the age of twenty-one, he got into construction work, went to a church service at Morning Star Baptist in Pleasantville, seven miles outside of Atlantic City, and immediately became besotted with my grandmother, sixteen-year-old Sylvia Lucas. They married soon after and lived on Bacharach Boulevard, where my aunt Sharene and my mother, Sybil, were born within nineteen months of each other.

  My grandmother was a housekeeper for a wealthy white family in Margate, another community along the Jersey Shore, where racial covenants barred black families from buying or renting homes. Sylvia would frequently dress her children in the finest clothes, and it wasn’t until years later that my mother realized that these were hand-me-downs from the Mitsons, one of the white families my grandmother worked for. My grandfather owned a Buick even though they lived in the projects. They worried about the safety of their family. Atlantic City was very dangerous at that time, so they decided to move outside of the city and into a quieter and whiter suburb in Atlantic County. At the time, lenders were charging black people 13 or 14 percent interest on loans to dissuade them from moving into two-level homes in residential communities. My grandparents were not dissuaded. My grandfather—who refused to take my grandmother’s earnings from housekeeping—pooled his resources from construction work and savings, got two loans from two different companies, and paid close to five times more than their white neighbors to move into Pomona, the second black family on the block. The local KKK chapter got word of the new arrivals and burned crosses in their backyard. White kids threw mangled cats at my sister and mother. To this day, my mother harbors a fear of cats due to the trauma. To protect his children, my grandfather drove them to the bus stop to make sure they at least made it to school unscathed. But beyond that, my mother recalls that her parents did nothing else. “We were just scared,” my mother says. And like her grandfather’s fear in Americus, their fear was constant. It persisted in spite of their continuing to live in the place a long time, because their presence was not welcome. The fear became familiar, normal, and finally innate.

  The middle-class lifestyle was what my family dreamed of back on Bacharach Boulevard. There were better schools, more stable residential communities, and greater safety in Pomona—or so we thought. The move was supposed to be a physical and psychic reset. Though Sharene and Sybil were taught to cook, t
hey were not taught to hunt, fish, or make fruit preserves. They never traveled to Americus, Georgia.

  It was only through the creation of this book that my mother, who is in her fifties, found out that her father wasn’t even born in New Jersey. I’ll never forget how my mother looked when she realized this. Her face sank. Her jaw went slack. Ironically, at the moment when our family history was being recovered, she was at a loss for words. She hardly blinked as we sat, stunned within the silence between us. I wondered if she felt disappointed in herself as a parent or in her own parents for not having passed these stories down in conversations over dinner or by a fireplace, before they would be presented to a wider audience in a book.

  My grandfather had been to Americus only once, when he was six or seven. His parents brought him to the cotton fields, but he cannot recall anything else from his experiences there. Neither I, my sister, nor any of my cousins has ever been to Sumter County. We don’t know what happened to the acres of land that my family was able to afford from their earnings as sharecroppers. All we know is that Fred Jerkins I was the last owner. I wanted to know more about the time when black land was vast and how the migration of blacks from the lands that they tilled led to an uphill battle for those who stayed put. In Gullah Geechee territory, I didn’t have to look too far.

  According to Leah Douglas of the Nation, “In the 45 years following the Civil War, freed slaves and their descendants accumulated roughly 15 million acres of land across the United States, most of it in the South.” What this land meant for freed slaves was a chance for intergenerational wealth and economic mobility. But in the twentieth century, about six hundred thousand black farmers lost their land. Some of the reasons: systemic racism by the United States Department of Agriculture, the attraction of black Southerners to work in Northern factories, and thus the Great Migration.2 My great-grandfather was one of those six hundred thousand. My great-great-grandfather was that sharecropper who worked within the forty-five years following the Civil War, and he was able to buy land so that my great-grandfather would own it outright. No one knows if Fred Jerkins I gave up the land willingly or involuntarily. All my grandfather and his siblings can tell me is that in 1944 or ’45, they boarded a train from Georgia to Philadelphia, where relatives awaited them, and that was that.

  In 1869 the Gullah Geechee people owned half of Beaufort County of South Carolina. Since then, they’ve lost fourteen million acres.3 The best example of the rapid marginalization of Gullah Geechee people is on Hilton Head Island, one of the most lucrative places in the South.

  In 2018, the Conde Nast Traveler ranked Hilton Head Island as the best island resort area in the United States for the second year in a row, and for good reason.4 The island is full of world-class resorts, delectable cuisine, and sandy beaches, and it generally has idyllic weather. But beyond the optics of a wonderful vacation spot, there’s a grim side. Although Gullah Geechee people are spread out all across the island, their biggest concentration is in the north end. Hilton Head Island was once one large plantation. After the Civil War, freed black people bought land from the United States government and settled into what was the first self-governed town of formerly enslaved black people in the country: Mitchelville. Other pieces of land were sold to (white) speculators or previous plantation owners, who settled on the south end. In 1956, Charles Fraser, the son of a well-off family who made their fortune in timber, started the “modern” era in Hilton Head by creating the first resort, Sea Pines Plantation, on the south end, constructing a bridge to connect to the mainland, and bringing air-conditioning to the island.5 But over time, developers wanted to expand to the north, as well, and were ultimately successful. The lack of legal protection for those who had heirs property, the rising land taxes, and the exodus of African Americans leaving the South in general as a part of the Great Migration, all allowed Fraser to succeed in converting most of Hilton Head into a prime resort community.

  Over 80 percent of “early black landowners” from the post–Civil War period and later did not have wills or clear titles. These landowners simply passed down their acres to their descendants or relatives as what is called heirs property. But families who have heirs property cannot get mortgages, do home repairs, apply for state or federal aid, get conservation funding, or take out loans available through the US Department of Agriculture.6 My grandfather doesn’t recall any kind of will or title that his father received from his father (my great-great-grandfather), so it is very likely that the land Fred Jerkins I inherited was heirs property.

  Heirs property is one of the biggest issues when it comes to black land preservation and cultural heritage on Hilton Head Island.

  I perused the internet to find Hilton Head locals who were outspoken about the effects of business expansion into predominantly Gullah Geechee communities, and found Taiwan Scott. Coincidentally, Taiwan—or Tai, for short—was born in New Jersey like me. But unlike me, Tai has traveled regularly to his grandmother’s birthplace in Hilton Head and decided as an adult to move there to help preserve Gullah Geechee heritage. Unlike any other person I’d met from the Lowcountry, Scott was a real estate agent and therefore was willing to divulge his personal and professional stakes in Hilton Head. At the time that I was scheduled to meet him, Scott was in the midst of an ongoing battle with the town to run a business on his own property, and he believed the local media was not adequately covering the story.

  I drove away from Savannah via I-95 North and then 278 through Jasper County and Bluffton to Hilton Head, and to this day, it is one of the most beautiful drives I’ve ever been on. The sun was shining, the trees flanked the streets, and I could see the glistening water from the bridges I crossed over to get to the island. But it was in Hilton Head where I soon learned how beautiful landscapes masked black carnage that was simplified and mocked at every turn. I saw the word plantation so much that I was starting to get a headache: Plantation Cafe & Grill, Plantation Cafe & Deli, Plantation Shopping Center, Paper & Party Plantation, Plantation Drive, Plantation Road, Plantation Club, Plantation Animal Hospital, Plantation Interiors, Plantation Cabinetry, Plantation Station Inc. . . . With every road I passed, there was another indication of a perverse symmetry between leisure and slavery. The Northerner in me was disoriented, to say the least. I had to keep focus and keep my hands steady on the wheel. I wanted to swerve my car into one of those stores, cut my eyes at an employee, and say, “There’s blood running all over this fuckin’ store. Tell your boss a nigga said that.” But this fantasy only showed how strange Hilton Head’s normal was, that a strip of land once worked, then owned and worked by Gullah Geechee people had now become a place where their kind was not welcome.

  On the island’s north end, I met Taiwan Scott on his property at 15 Marshland Road. We sat outside in the warm, muggy weather where Taiwan talked about himself and his family’s history. Tai has invested time poring over archaeological studies on the island to match the locations of praise houses and cemeteries to new buildings and developments. He was stunned that anyone got clearance to construct, because these places hold such cultural and spiritual significance. Meanwhile, Tai’s property sat languishing because there was what he believed to be miles of red tape for a Gullah-owned business to prosper or exist at all.

  Tai claims that his business would have been the first Gullah native-owned commercial retail establishment to open on the owner’s own land since the Town of Hilton Head Island was incorporated. The plan was to have a food-truck-style restaurant and a shop where fruit, vegetables, seafood, jewelry, and sweetgrass baskets would be sold. The food truck and kitchen were already DHEC (South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control) approved. Traditional Gullah food was to be served. Initially, he was told by the local government that they did not want food trucks on the island, but they wanted to see his development concept. His initial development concept would have cost around $50,000. After the town government’s less-than-enthusiastic response to his plan, the concept escalated to nearly twice that
amount because he was told that he was in a flood area and everything had to be elevated. He would also need to include a wraparound deck. With the comments from the town government in hand, Tai began to read their rules and regulations book, and found a section that would allow his food truck without any of the flood-elevation requirements. After sitting down with local officials, he was given the OK to proceed. During the design-review process, he was told that his building was too orange, despite the color being a cedar natural tone with a transparent stain. On a trip around town, he spotted a building within Shelter Cove Harbor, a newly developed upscale waterfront community, with bright orange awnings over the door and windows. Afterward, Tai consulted his white next-door neighbor, who owns a successful honey business. This neighbor showed up to a town meeting and went on record supporting Tai and his business plan. They even established a working relationship, because up to twenty cars at a time would be parked on Tai’s property, and those visitors could be potential patrons for the neighbor’s business too.

  “One week later, the town officials call this guy in to this meeting about my establishment. The guy comes back out of this meeting and says, ‘I don’t want anything to do with you or your property, and I don’t want to smell any Gullah fried chicken.’ I said, ‘What do you mean? What happened?’ He says, ‘Well, I just don’t want to be a part of this.’ I said, ‘What happened in the meeting?’ When I cut my grass, I used to cut this guy’s grass. Our daughters were on the same soccer team for three seasons.”

  I wondered why Scott didn’t know what happened in the town meeting; these kinds of meetings usually have someone recording what happens. “They didn’t have minutes?”