Cumberland, the largest and most southerly of the Sea Islands, stretches north from St. Marys Inlet to St. Andrew Sound. It is eighteen miles long and three miles across at its widest. There are no paved roads, no bridges, no stores. The double dunes of the barrier beach, the mudflats and maritime forest of oak, pine, and palmetto, are home to loggerhead sea turtles, armadillos, white-tailed deer, bobcats, feral horses and hogs, and more than 277 species of land and sea birds whose bones litter the sand.
Arrowheads and oyster middens attest to the presence of the Timucua people, who called the island Missoe. French corsairs landed there, British and Spanish flags flew over forts on the north and south ends of the island, and James Oglethorpe, founder of the new colony of Georgia, established a hunting lodge he called Dungeness near the Indian burial grounds at the south end. In 1803, the widow of Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene built another Dungeness close by. Within its thick walls, Light-Horse Harry Lee died, and legend has it that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin there. In antebellum times, Cumberland, with its temperate climate and marsh-fed soil, thrived. The harvest of timber, indigo, figs, cotton, and sugarcane made the plantation owners rich. After the Civil War, the island’s mansions were burned and abandoned, and the freed slaves who remained built a community on the north end near Half Moon Bluff called the Settlement.
But it is the Carnegie legacy that looms largest. Through a stone and iron gate at the end of a wide sandy road, you can still see the crumbling façade of the Gilded Age mansion. In 1959, after years of neglect, it was set on fire by a poacher after a hunting dispute. Wild turkeys scurry about the rubble, and crows gather on the spire of a skeletal brick wall. But it was not always so.
In 1882, at the site of the old Greene mansion, steel magnate Thomas M. Carnegie began construction of a winter retreat for his family. In its heyday, this Dungeness—visited by Astors, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers—rivaled the fabled mansions of Newport and Southampton. A turreted Victorian affair, it boasted fifty-nine rooms, a carriage house, an indoor swimming pool, squash courts, manicured gardens, a golf course, a working farm, and accommodations for a staff of two hundred. After Thomas’s death, his wife, Lucy, went on to acquire 90 percent of the island and built homes for her children, notably the Cottage, Plum Orchard, Stafford House, and Greyfield, now an inn run by her descendants.
In the 1960s, in an effort to protect the island from development, family members began selling tracts to the U.S. government, and in 1972 Cumberland became part of the National Seashore, with parts of the north end later designated as a Wilderness Area. So unless you know someone who lives there or come with tent in hand, Greyfield Inn is where you stay.
The air was thick and salted when we landed. Someone from the inn met us at the dock. Bearded, he had a smile like Bacchus, deeply tanned feet in worn sandals, and black curls that fell over a wide, seaworthy face. “Hey, I’m Pat,” he greeted us in a Coastal drawl, then threw our bags in the back of a jeep.
“Where’s the inn?” John asked. “Can we walk?” After an hour and twenty minutes on the slow ferry, he was itching to move.
Pat cocked his head to the right. Amid looping dirt paths and horses nibbling at the scrub of what was once a grand lawn, Greyfield rose like Tara through a stand of live oak trees shrouded in silver moss.
Built in 1900 as a wedding gift for Margaret Ricketson by her mother, Lucy Coleman Carnegie, Greyfield has white columns, a red tin roof, gabled attic windows, and a large front veranda with potted ferns and a cushioned porch swing on each end. The steps that lead up to the main entrance are low and wide—“for long skirts,” we were told later. In the style of many old southern houses, the kitchen and dining room are situated on the ground floor because of the summer heat. On the main floor, there is a library, a drawing room, and a small self-service bar. A ledge near the ceiling in the bar is lined with every size and color of sea bottle, and a sign above the mixers reads, HONEST JOHN SYSTEM. In the dark-paneled drawing room, a chesterfield sofa done in velvet, wingback chairs, and a red leather bench are arranged by the stone fireplace. On two of the walls, portraits of women who lived here long ago face each other—one a waif in white, the other a warrior in a head scarf and dagger, both sad-eyed and beguiling. There are tattered globes and Audubon prints, a child’s rocker, whale bones and sea turtle shells, and a tiny pair of wedding slippers, as thin as parchment, enshrined in a tall china cabinet. Nearby is a black-and-white photograph of a dashing man in a loincloth—part Errol Flynn, part Ernest Hemingway—his rifle gracefully poised to shoot into the surf. It is a house filled with stories.
We left our bags in the hall by the grandfather clock with a moon sailing by on its face, and took off on bikes to find the beach before dinner. The fat tires of the rusted cruisers were slow on the main road, a sandy lane that stretches from Dungeness to the north end, but when we turned east by the sign TO GREYFIELD BEACH, they rolled faster. The branches of the live oaks on either side bent toward one another, canopying the narrow path of dirt, leaves, and crushed shells. All around was the hum of cicadas. Then we saw it—the rise where the dune began. And at the end of the tunnel of trees, a patch of blue appeared. John got there first and hollered to me. I dropped my bike and sprinted up the embankment. When I ran past him, he caught me, wrapping me in his arms and rocking me side to side.
Spread out before us was a beach unbroken for miles, as white and bleached as bone. In the distance, by the low-tide mark, stood a spotted stallion and his herd.
We fell easily into the rhythm of the island. Morning bike rides to the ruins or hiking the trails. Afternoons on the veranda with our books and pink lemonade. Cocktails before dinner. The days too hot, we swam at night, with the moon heavy on us—and searched the sand for the tracks of giant sea turtles, which pulled themselves ashore to lay their eggs in the dunes. We also spent time in the large, pine-paneled kitchen, scavenging for cookies and SunChips and hanging out with the inn staff rather than the other guests. There was an inviting camaraderie among those who lived on the island full-time, and you wanted to be around it. John had deemed Pat “especially cool.”
One morning after breakfast, we stopped by the kitchen to pick up tall, plaid thermoses of sweet tea and lunches packed in wicker hampers—supplies for our tour of the north end that day. Through the screen door, white sheets billowed on a line, and a man in Wayfarers and a faded pink button-down propped himself against a rusted jeep. The naturalist was on vacation, and Andy Ferguson, a great-great-grandson of Thomas Carnegie, would be our guide for the day. A few years older than us, he had a sly smile and a shock of white-blond hair that fell in his face. He didn’t look directly at you; he observed, as if there were a story he might or might not tell depending on his mood, as if there were a secret that hung on his lips. I liked him. He also had a great love and knowledge of the island, and he shared it with us that day. The next year, in the bloom of his youth, Andy would shoot himself with a rifle and be buried in the Carnegie plot near Dungeness.
We climbed into the open jeep and took off down the main road. I sat next to Andy, and John rode in back. We were going on a picnic, and I’d worn my picnic dress, or at least my idea of what that would be in the wilds of southern Georgia when you’re in love. The fiercer the sun got and the farther we went, the more I wished I’d worn long pants and a long-sleeved shirt, like Andy, and a wide-billed cap instead of the braided straw hat that rested on my knees.
We were quiet for a stretch as the jeep lumbered along the rutted road. On either side was a forest of loblolly pine, wax myrtle, red bay, and oak trees draped in the trailing vines of muscadine. Below the trees, thickets of skunk cabbage and fan palmetto grew low and sturdy.
“You sure picked the hottest time of the year to come,” Andy announced.
“Well, one of us wanted to go to Taos, but the other someone thought it wouldn’t be as hot here, and that somebody won out, didn’t they?” John reached around the seat and gave me a sharp pinch.
“O
h yeah?” Andy looked over to me, then back to the sandy road, slowing for a fawn that happened to cross in front of the jeep. “Next time, you might want to skip August.”
“Can we see an alligator?” John wanted to know. He’d been talking about it all morning.
“We’ll try. It might even be too hot for them.” He pointed to some frizzled brown growth in the crevice of an oak. “That’s resurrection fern. It’s an epiphyte. It looks dead now, but when it rains—and it will—that fern will burst into green.”
“What’s an epiphyte?” I asked.
“It lives off the air.”
At Stafford, after the road split and then joined again, the forest cleared and there was sky. On the right, across from where the plantation house once stood, was a field that served as an airstrip. “You have to buzz the horses a couple of times before you land,” Andy confided. “Even then they’re stubborn. They think it’s theirs.”
The forest grew denser the farther north we went. Andy took us to the Chimneys, the charred ruins of the slave quarters at Stafford; to Plum Orchard, a Georgian revival mansion, where we peered into huge windows at the wide, vacant rooms; and to an old hunting lodge, the wood grayed and overcome by giant sand dunes. We waited without luck by a marshy creek for alligators, but spotted ospreys and ibises near Lake Whitney. We rambled over trails with names like Roller Coaster, Duck House, and North Cut. And when we reached the tip of the island near Christmas Creek, we saw the giant shell mounds where, a thousand years before, the Timucua had held their banquets. Then, through a tangle of trees and winding paths, we came to the Settlement—the abandoned homes of ex-slaves near Half Moon Bluff. There was an old church there that Andy wanted to show us after we had our picnic in the graveyard nearby.
It was during that lunch, perhaps, as we sat in the shadows of the trees feasting on chicken salad, oatmeal cookies, and sweet tea, that John brought up one of the hypotheticals he’d sometimes play with: If you could choose—excluding being old and happy and in your own bed—how would you want to go? He said he wanted it to be quick. I disagreed. I didn’t want illness, I told him, but at least it had consciousness. You knew what was going on. Being hit by a car, you’re just gone. Boom. Exactly, he said blithely.
The small, clapboard chapel that Andy took us to after lunch stood by a grove of longleaf pines. Pale grass snuck from the edges of the stone foundation, and I remember that the paint on the sills of the First African Baptist Church where he would one day marry was a worn, flaking red.
John and I went inside, but Andy did not. He waited for us by a barbed wire fence, arms crossed, one leg hitched over the other. Behind the wooden doors, the chapel had a musty, shut-in smell. There was a dirty green runner and eleven pews—five pairs and one on its own. In the center of the room was a stand with an open Bible. We sat in a back pew and said a prayer, and before we left, John placed a pinecone on the makeshift altar.
We took the beach route back, a straight shot of packed sand all the way. I sat in the back of the jeep next to the empty wicker baskets, a stray thermos rattling at my feet, while John rode up front with Andy. They were compadres—eyes narrowed by the glare and wind on their young faces.
“Hold on!” Andy shouted as he gunned the engine.
“Faster!” John rallied him. With one hand braced against the dashboard, he stood up and let out a war cry. He almost fell but, laughing, steadied himself. Andy floored it, and we zigzagged in and out of the waves. John turned back to me, alive from the speed. He put out his hand.
“You try!” The sound of his voice was lost to the wind and the roar of the engine. I shook my head vehemently—I didn’t need to do this, the things he did—and I gripped the back of the seat. But he wouldn’t give up.
“Don’t be afraid. I’ve got you!” he yelled to me. I began to stand up, shaky at first, without commitment, one hand still glued to the seat, the other clutching his wrist on my waist. I believed in his hands. He stayed on me until I yelled back, until he saw on my face the same exhilaration he felt and knew that my fear was gone. I’ve got you!
Andy dropped us at the beach near Stafford and took off. We would walk back. By then, the sun was blinding. I tossed my hat on the sand. John doffed his clothes, leaped into the flat water, and swam out as far as he could. I tied the long skirt of my dress on one hip and waded in, thigh-high, to wash off the dust of the day. The water was clear and there was no wind. I turned back to the land. There was no one there, and I could almost see the whole island, end to end—from Christmas Creek in the north to the jetties near the Pelican Banks in the south. Behind me, I could hear his strong, even strokes cutting the water, a sound of safety, of constancy. “This is the widest beach I’ve ever seen,” I said aloud. It was low tide, and the sand was bare, dressed only by coquinas, slipper shells, and bits of jellyfish—a string of tiny cabochon moonstones laid out like a necklace on the broad lip of the shore.
John came back and dressed, drying himself with his T-shirt.
“Brown as a berry.” He kissed my shoulders. “Let’s make it back for cocktails.”
I laughed. “More like a salmon.” I knew I was getting burned.
“Look.” He pointed up as we walked. From the west, a bank of black clouds raced toward us. Then—a deafening rumble.
“What do we do?”
“What do you mean what do we do? We keep walking.”
The rain started, lightly at first, in patches, as we moved south to the break in the dunes at Greyfield. But then the sky darkened, the rain kicked in, and, as hot as it had been minutes ago, I was suddenly shivering, my hat bedraggled and my flowered dress soaked through.
Out of nowhere, a red truck appeared. It was Pat. He reached over and rolled down the passenger’s side window. “You folks want a ride?”
His devil grin was a welcome sight. Relieved, I moved toward the truck.
“Thanks, I’m gonna walk,” I heard John say behind me.
“Why?”
“It’s just rain.”
I was stumped. Why would anyone choose a downpour over a dry truck? When my efforts at persuasion fell flat and it was clear this was a nonnegotiable, I knew I had to choose—John or the truck. I didn’t want to get any wetter than I already was and I hated the rain, but the truth was, at that moment, twenty minutes away from him seemed unbearable to me.
I hemmed and hawed. Pat revved the engine.
“For Christ’s sake, make up your mind!” John barked. “It’s only rain.”
The pickup won, and I jumped in. I was not, to my dismay, the girl who walked in the rain. I was the girl who chose the truck. I smiled at Pat, a little embarrassed that he knew this. As he smiled back, my hat slid to the truck floor, and I saw that my dress was stuck to my thighs. I began to shake it. “Don’t worry, you’ll be warm soon,” Pat said, turning on the heater. Just then, the sky lit up. The storm hit full-tilt, and the rain came down in a crackling roar. Instinctively, I ducked.
When I lifted my head. I could barely see out the window. “They don’t call it a barrier beach for nothing,” I said.
“What?”
“I said, they don’t call it a barrier beach for nothing!”
Whether he heard me or not, Pat nodded. Windshield wipers beating furiously, we made our way up the roll of the double dune. Maybe John had changed his mind. Maybe he was running to the truck. I looked back. The glass was fogged, but I saw him. He was walking slowly—head down, hands deep in the pockets of his windbreaker. I was safe, out of the rain, but he was infinitely cooler; he was getting drenched, and he was happy.
The night before we left, we went to a party in a small A-frame in the woods—a roof raising for Mouse McDowell, one of Andy’s cousins. We danced barefoot in the small hours to Little Feat and the Band with the inn staff and various Carnegie descendants—McDowells, Fergusons, Fosters. The virgin house throbbed to the beat and reeked of bourbon, weed, and sawdust. The heavy night air wafted through the glassless windows, and when Prince’s Dirty Mind came
on, John pulled me in, mouthing the words on the back of my neck. We danced like there was no one else in the room, his arms over my shoulders, mine on his back.
On our way back to the inn through an open field, with horses and armadillos rustling unseen in the dark, he told me he loved me for the first time, though I already knew. And as the night began to deepen, we made love on one of the porch swings at Greyfield, a fan overhead ticking time.
Afterward, I thought I heard someone. “There’s no one there,” he said. But moments later, below the high porch, Andy walked by, his blond head aglow in the darkness.
That fall, John switched apartments and began law school. He left the shared two-bedroom in a doorman building off West End Avenue where he’d lived for almost two years and moved to the top floor of a renovated town house on West Ninety-first Street. The building, more spruced up than those on the rest of the block, had a red door with globe lighting. Steps from the entrance was a community mural depicting people of all races in harmony, but if you left your bike outside overnight or neglected to pop the car radio, it was likely to be stolen. The apartment was a block from the park, around the corner from a D’Agostino market, and across from the PS 84 schoolyard, and afternoons, the sounds of children playing fell lightly over the street.
Before our trip to Cumberland Island, he took me to see the apartment, and we walked through the empty rooms on a summer night. We stood in the largest one discussing the pros and cons. “What do you think?” He spoke softly, leaning in to nudge me. “Should I take it?” He wasn’t sure; there was another place closer to NYU. If there was a choice of trails up a mountain or where to set up camp for the night, instinct served him, but with less corporeal decisions, he’d check himself and weigh what others thought. Maurice thinks this, he’d tell me, or Mummy and Caroline said that. As the amber light deepened in the room, I saw, in a way I hadn’t before, how much he trusted my counsel, desired my guidance, and, more than simply wanting my approval, needed me to be happy here, too.
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