Wandering in Strange Lands

by Morgan Jerkins

  “No minutes. I did a freedom-of-information request. They said they weren’t obligated to take any minutes to this meeting . . . because it wasn’t an official public meeting.”

  “Oh, OK. So once it was discussed, it wasn’t open to the public.”

  “They had a closed door meeting . . .”

  “. . . that they didn’t invite you to.”

  “. . . about my establishment.”

  Upon further research, Tai found that at one time, members of the Gullah community owned all kinds of businesses, like a seamstress shop, gas stations, and fishing co-ops. If an establishment like Ruby Lee’s—a Gullah-owned restaurant that was once in the community but moved to the South End near the vacationers’ stomping grounds—is in a plaza, the people do not own the land itself. What has happened to Tai and his business has caused a shock wave among the native islanders, since Tai spread the word about what’s going on. Some elders have encouraged him to stop pressing the local government to make things right. Others’ hopes are dashed for any economic mobility.

  Tai says, “We have people in the back right now. They’re in the back of their houses doing the cooking or whatever, and they’re afraid to come out. It’s like . . . we should not be afraid thinking that the town’s gonna come and shut us down.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Now, when you say they’re in the back, what do you mean?”

  “When I say they’re in the back, that means they’re not publicly letting people know that they’re open for business.”

  “Why? What are they afraid of?”

  “The town shutting them down. Because they live in an area that’s zoned residential, but they want to do some type of commercial establishment. See, at one time, we owned a piece of property. We had our business in the front, and we lived in the back. So what has happened to me, a lot of people are saying, ‘No, we don’t even try. Here it is. Tai with the paper route trying to do it, and they’re stopping him and they won’t even answer him.’” His persistence has come with a cost. He fears for his wife and children. In 2017, a white pickup truck often circled around his home. Banana trees that grew on his property were dug up, and the security camera on his Marshland lot was smashed.

  Though Scott purchased 15 Marshland Road back in 1997 as a single-family residence and commercial business, he’s still mindful of those whose land is considered heirs property and as a real estate agent tries to help them make the best decisions. He’s one of only a handful of black real estate agents on the island. Ideally, Scott would like Gullah people to keep their heirs property but if they cannot and are forced to sell, he wants them to get the best offer available. Hilton Head is continuing to develop, and therefore the property taxes are going to steadily rise. He said to me, “I had one client—seventeen thousand dollars a year in taxes. I mean how can they afford to keep that? So they’re forced to sell it.”

  To give me a more well-rounded sense of this divided place, Tai took me on a tour around the island. Within a half hour or so, I was able to distinguish between Gullah land, with its mobile park homes and weeds growing wildly on the lawns, and the plantations—or gated communities—where a pass is required for entry and we could only see an entrance sign with a long trail to the security booth behind it. Today the word plantation is code for luxury, and gated communities have caused the natives to become purposely displaced. These homes are in the plantation communities, whose names are Hilton Head, Indigo Run, Long Cove, Palmetto Dunes/Shelter Cove, Palmetto Hall, Port Royal, Sea Pines, Shipyard Plantation, Spanish Wells, Wexford, and Windmill Harbour. In 2016, 77 percent of the Hilton Head population was white and under 7 percent was black. Over 10 percent of the population was in poverty, but of those in poverty, 30.6 percent were black, whereas only 5.4 percent were white.7

  The way the plantation system works down here is that the people within it literally reside in a world apart. On Hilton Head Plantation, two patrols are on duty twenty-four hours a day. They provide home checks when residents are away, medical assistance, and alarm response. In other words, when something happens behind those gates, residents don’t call the county; they have their own policing inside.8 Gated communities like those on Hilton Head exist nationwide and are set up to quell white people’s anxieties about having contact with what transpires beyond their neighborhoods. In the 1860s, there were twenty-four plantations on Hilton Head Island.9 In a New York Times op-ed, contributor Rich Benjamin writes, “No matter the label, the product is the same: self-contained, conservative and overzealous in its demands for ‘safety.’ Gated communities churn a vicious cycle by attracting like-minded residents who seek shelter from outsiders and whose physical seclusion then worsens paranoid groupthink against outsiders.”10 The rebranding of plantations as gated communities also appeals to the white imagination. An adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, Melissa Hargrove wrote in her PhD dissertation on this spatial segregation. “For the Gullah, this practice has translated into a reinvention of history that denies the collective memories intimately linking them to these recently appropriated spaces.”11

  One of these collective memories is of the way the Gullah people honor the dead. Alex Brown, chairman of the Hilton Head Town Planning Commission, whose family has been in Hilton Head for eight generations, knows of Gullah burial grounds within three plantations: Hilton Head, Sea Pines, and Indigo Run. About five years ago, one of Brown’s closest friends passed away and was set to be buried in Indigo Run. Because that friend was a motorcyclist, Brown and his social circle decided to ride motorcycles to the funeral in his honor. However, the bikes weren’t allowed. Brown isn’t sure whether this restriction was discriminatory, but demonstrates that the gated communities make rules independent of the town. Whereas the Butler Island Plantation slaves were underwater, Taiwan’s family is buried underneath a prestigious golf course. His ancestors and countless others are buried in Harbor Town Cemetery on Sea Pines Plantation where South Carolina’s only annual RBC Heritage PGA tournament is held, a renowned event that Taiwan aches to see. He’s even been a part of protests during this event to call attention to Gullah displacement.12 With regard to preservation, the state of South Carolina, SC Code of Laws 27–43–210 states:

  This law grants family members and descendants limited access to graves on private property. It requires owners of cemeteries on private property to provide reasonable access to family members and descendants of those buried in the cemetery. The law requires the person wanting access to the cemetery to submit a written request to the property owner.13

  Descendants of someone who’s buried in a cemetery on private property must rely on the goodwill of a property owner and petition said person, whether they’re natives or visitors, to pay respects to their own people. Furthermore, one may have to pay a fee, as is the case with Sea Pines Plantation. There is a three-dollar fee, like the entrance fee to a state park, for locals to visit their deceased relatives. That alongside having to explain themselves to security guards makes it hard for the Gullah people to maintain their connection to the land.14

  Tish Lynn is director of communications and outreach for the Center for Heirs Property Preservation, a Charleston-based nonprofit organization working to help heirs retain their land. In a phone interview, she said, “All of these developments that have become gated communities on both Hilton Head and along the coast of South Carolina have cut them [the Gullah Geechee] off from their traditions, their culture, and their way of life. It’s more than losing land. It’s heritage and culture as we know it. It’s the loss of access to water as a means of transportation, to fish and oyster, and make a sustainable living.”

  I thought of my family and how suburbs were supposed to be the dream. If we could have been living in a gated community, that would have been even better than living in a house on a cul-de-sac in some hostile neighborhood. To us, a gate represented the highest echelon of residential living. But now I was seeing that the planning of gated communities, especially in the South,
was at the expense of black people, their ancestors’ bodies, and their customs. In the places we left behind, like Americus, what happened to our former neighbors? Did they get uprooted too? Did they stay and have to fight along the margins for what is rightfully theirs, like Tai Scott? That day I felt that the black North and the black South were in conversation. I, the Northerner, was face-to-face with a man who lived in the North but came back to the South to fight for his people. Both of us were effects of migration. Arguably, if more Gullah Geechee people had stayed in Hilton Head, Tai would not have faced so many challenges with his business venture, because there would have been more of them to claim their stakes in the land. Arguably, if my grandfather and his father had kept returning to Georgia with their children after moving up north, then maybe I would’ve never felt that my connection to the South had been severed. But this day felt like a meeting in the middle. No matter where we are along the coast, we are a vulnerable people, prone to cultural erasure and amnesia.

  “This is the hardest part right here,” Tai said with a smirk. Tai’s grandparents, Daniel and Geneva Burke, once owned the largest oceanfront tract of land on the eastern shore of the island. They had twenty-seven acres of land, which they sold for $3 million. The attorney who represented them had once represented Marriott, but that fact was never disclosed to his grandparents. Marriott now owns those twenty-seven acres. To give you a sense of the loss, Marriott paid $2 million for the next oceanfront lot that he pointed out to me, then flipped it, selling it for $5 million. The company then purchased the Burke family land—$3 million for those twenty-seven acres. When I asked Tai how much twenty-seven acres was, he replied, “The sale should have never happened.” It was the perfect example of the loss of generational wealth. The beach on this lot is named for the Burke family. Years ago, the now defunct Burke’s Hideaway was a famous nightclub that once hosted Ike and Tina Turner.15 According to Alex Brown, any resorts on the north end of the island, such as the Marriott, Westin, and Sonesta, were once Gullah-owned.

  Michelle Aiken is a member of one of the first families of Hilton Head. The Aiken family lived in Mitchelville after emancipation and remained in the north end to the present day.16 A street not too far from Marshland Road in Hilton Head bears their name. When Michelle’s grandfather, William Aiken, passed away, he had acres upon acres of land, though she can’t give an exact number. He left his children and grandchildren land as a way to remember him. Michelle is the youngest of nine siblings, and though most of them have remained in Hilton Head or in neighboring counties, her brother Marian chose to leave for California back in the eighties for better job opportunities. The decision is one that Michelle teases Marian about to this day. Still, jobs on the island are few and far between, especially outside the tourism business, and even then, discrimination is blatant. When Michelle interviewed for a job at the Marriott Surfwatch in the early aughts, her prospective employers asked her if she wanted to be a housekeeper, though she’d applied to be a child-care coordinator. “For black people . . . they always want us to do housekeeping. They always like to put us in the back area,” Aiken says. “Many of us black people, when we work in these places, we would be in the corner and the white people would be in the front.”

  Still, Michelle doesn’t want to leave and encourages her daughter to stay on the island as well. She feels lucky. Her family with one accord agreed to keep the property and had the money to do so. Over two hundred members of the Aiken line descended on Hilton Head for the annual family reunion, and Michelle emphasizes that they always have a place to come back to.

  Alex Brown, chairman of the Town Planning Commission, also considers himself fortunate to have stayed in Hilton Head. His family has two pieces of land, one of eight acres and the other of fifteen. The fifteen acres, however, is what Brown calls infiltrated. Heirs property is divided among siblings, and a few of Brown’s relatives were not keeping up with the payments for their parcels, which have been up for auction. Thankfully, they haven’t lost any property . . . yet.

  Alex’s father had nine brothers and sisters, many of whom migrated to cosmopolitan Southern cities, like Atlanta, or to places as far away as New York. “Missed opportunities” is what he calls their migration. They didn’t make the land work for them and so sought a home elsewhere. Growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, he had seen neighbors give up and move to other parts of the country for easier living, never to return, and this pattern convinced him to dig his heels deep into the soil and fight.

  Speaking of the black land loss in Hilton Head, Brown says, “It has been a devastating blow to our community. But we haven’t lost all. We’re trying to bring awareness to this issue.” That’s why Brown is a part of the Planning Commission and speaks regularly to publications, such as Hilton Head Monthly and The Nation. Such hope and persistence has enabled some, like Taiwan Scott, to finally win against the Town of Hilton Head. In March 2019, Beaufort County Judge Marvin Dukes III threw out a motion filed by the town government that would have forced Scott to move his buildings within a certain buffer zone if he wanted to designate one part of his property as residential and another as commercial.17 The people of the Gullah community, whether they stayed or left and came back, realize the stakes involved—their heritage on Hilton Head and in all of Beaufort County.

  I started to think about my family, whose lives in South Jersey began only because my great-grandfather left Americus. Even if that land in Americus had still been in the family name, I wasn’t going to pack all of my belongings and move there. I don’t know how to ride a horse. I don’t know how to grow cotton or any other crop. Did my family, in the words of Alex Brown, miss an opportunity to stay where they were planted, to persevere and band together with other black people to hold on to their community? What really is home for me? When my grandparents die, there will be no land in their name, passed down for generations. I don’t blame my late grandfather for the decisions he made. He was afraid to take his chances and stay. And maybe what pushes previous generations to leave is what paradoxically binds us African Americans together as we search for community and press forward to maintain our sense of identity, our culture, and our heritage. If he had stayed, I might now be in a hopeless, treacherous situation. How could I maintain a living if the taxes continue to rise and white people are circling my land, ready to snap it up if I miss any payments? In that situation, under constant racial intimidation, how would I maintain peace of mind?

  My grandparents worked in Atlantic City and saved up enough to move to the suburbs. That socioeconomic shift changed the course of all of our lives. Nevertheless, because Fred Jerkins I moved away, we, his descendants, have lost our familial networks. On this part of my trip, I was face-to-face with islanders who never left or left and came back. I was their opposite. My grandparents left and never returned. They didn’t bring my mother to their original homes, and therefore my mother never brought me there, either. I am the embodiment of that abandonment of land. I am the result of those who never went back. Before this moment, I thought gated communities were enviable places to live for any family. In Hilton Head, I saw them as a vulgar barrier between Gullah lands and Gullah people—a constant reminder of black land loss.

  The threat of displacement or forced removal by white people was a major impetus for the millions of African Americans who left the South, and I was able to see the effects in real time. As a woman raised by a woman who prided herself on continual movement, I had a change of heart. Maybe staying in one place does not mean stagnation. There can be opportunity for economic growth, though one will have to fight for it, as those on Hilton Head are, because whatever was once ours—whether as abstract as oral histories or as tangible as land—is worth saving. The land is everything, and without it, our culture is in peril. We once worked the land, we bought that land, and we prospered on that land. Although I feel quite unmoored that I have no ancestral home in the South, at least the name Americus can rest on my tongue, letting me know that New Jersey is neither the begi
nning nor necessarily the end of my family’s story. I learned that there is always a deeper story. No matter how many times one moves away from one’s original place, somehow one will be called back, as I was.

  Though I may not have been actually related to any of the people I met, in a sense all black people are related to Gullah Geechee people. They are our oldest African Americans, the source of so much of our history. We are related despite our differences, tied to one another in the midst of systemic and personal forces that may tear us apart as we try to survive. On this journey, I found the links between the reverence and the contempt for root work, found how water has both nourished and harmed us, and found the cause and effects of black land loss with respect to our sense of community. Our migrations from the South and subsequent adaptation to our new surroundings fermented these disparities, but there is room for reclamation and understanding.

  If we can meet each other in the middle, as I and my new acquaintances had done during this journey, then we can understand that distance is moot. Speaking about our lives and those of our deceased relatives, as my grandfather finally did, reminded me that I am much more connected to others than I ever could have imagined. Our people are powerful. I carried all of these stories, in journal entries, photographs, videos, and recordings, to immortalize them in some way. If I cannot pass down land, I can pass on words that will live on after I’m gone to remind other African Americans that they, too, are much more connected to the rest of us than they could have ever imagined. My maternal line stretches over 940 miles, and that makes me feel hopeful that there is more for me to uncover as long as I pose questions and listen.

  And that I was, for so far I had researched only one side of my family.

  Part II