Illustration by Harry Tennant
We pulled into the RV park at evening and woke to the sound of rain. The moist morning allowed us time to linger on St. Helena Island close to Beaufort, South Carolina, earlier than heading throughout the bridge to our campsite at Looking Island State Park, the place my husband and our 4 kids have returned for years. We borrowed an RV in order that my mother-in-law, our youngsters’s nana, might be a part of us with out roughing it in a tent. As a lot as I like swimming within the ocean, combing for sand {dollars}, watching pelicans drift alongside the coast, and consuming ice cream by the lighthouse, I used to be glad for the rain. It slowed us down sufficient to discover components of St. Helena’s historical past.
My nana, my paternal grandmother, collected tons of of books by and about Black individuals. Raised by her grandmother, who had been born into slavery, Nana took my siblings and me to museums, plantations, and historic websites, even when we might have most well-liked extra seaside time. Is {that a} scowl on my face in a photograph of me by a roadside marker or simply the solar in my eyes? After her demise, my father gave me lots of Nana’s books. One was Face of an Island, a group of black-and-white pictures taken by Leigh Richmond Miner within the early 1900s of African American life on St. Helena. The ebook, printed in 1970, presents tender, candid portraits of individuals whose eyes remembered slavery; some remembered Africa. The academics, midwives, fisherman, basket makers, and builders within the pictures are lengthy gone, however a few of their descendants and buildings within the pictures stay.
We began with the ruins of the Chapel of Ease. Constructed within the 1740s, it was deserted by white worshipers throughout the Civil Warfare and utilized by a free Black congregation within the 1860s till a fireplace destroyed it. We stood within the mist and ran our arms over the blackened bones of its scratchy oyster shell tabby building. Whereas our son shimmied barefoot up slick bushes, our daughters stood in empty window frames for completely lit pictures with their nana. We walked the graves, rubbing our fingers throughout weather-worn names and epitaphs.
We stopped on the Penn Heart, established as a faculty for newly emancipated individuals and the location of lots of Miner’s pictures. Within the Sixties Martin Luther King Jr. retreated in a small cabin on a quiet nook of the campus. I image him respiratory the damp salt air, writing below oaks and Spanish moss. King returned there 5 instances between 1964 and 1967. In 1968, after his assassination, Penn Heart workers discovered items of his “I Have a Dream” speech within the cabin. The small museum held seagrass baskets, very like one I inherited from Nana, and a information to Gullah, the West African–influenced language of the Sea Islands. I might have spent the entire day there, however the clouds grew skinny— together with my kids’s persistence.
Tucked in Nana’s copy of Face of an Island is a skinny paper from the now defunct Wilkops White Corridor Inn on Woman’s Island in close by Beaufort. My grandparents have been rich of their previous age and liked to remain and dine in fancy locations. They have been typically the one Black patrons at upscale institutions like this one will need to have been. Nana didn’t share my love for tenting. However she liked the salt air, and she or he liked historical past. And I felt her shut that day, perhaps as I requested my women to face for a photograph by a historic marker.
Josina Guess is a contributor to the award-winning anthology Greater Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, and she or he has written for Atlanta journal, Oxford American, and Bitter Southerner. She is affiliate editor for Sojourners journal and lives in Comer, Georgia, together with her household.
This text seems within the Winter 2025 problem of Southbound.
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