Looking Back to the Future

The fish and hush puppies are frying hot, and in the kitchen of Cecelia Aris, a family discussion sizzles, too.

It is of the past. Not last year’s past, but the one reaching back farther than anyone in the room was alive to remember, the misty back-then when black folks like Aris’ ancestors worked as slaves along the Georgia coast, then became free and turned their labors to the building of a community.

The place was called Sandfly, a marshy speck named for a gnat, and the two dozen or so families who lived here more than a century ago are represented still: Luten, Golden, Jones, Kemp, Grant, among others. From lowly beginnings grew a tight enclave of carpenters, fishermen and maids. They raised backyard chickens and vegetables, hustled their children into church on Sundays and preached the value of school, even if a segregated one.

Sandfly developed sturdy, middle-class legs, with residents inhabiting tracts handed down since emancipation. They gave little thought to its history, which, given the slave origins, tended to be a hazy pursuit -- full of told tales and contradictions and shrugs.

But they are worrying now. Encroaching development, exemplified by plans for a parkway and a Wal-Mart shopping center, has stoked an outcry among residents over the future of Sandfly, and its village air.

Theirs is not a splashy struggle over a renowned landmark, for Sandfly has none. It instead centers on more amorphous notions -- such as community and a shared past -- in an out-of-the-way place that mattered only to the blacks who lived there.

There remains an old-style neighborly closeness, born of a long kinship, along Sandfly’s narrow streets, even among modern ranch homes and shiny SUVs. Nobody wondered why the church secretary was weeping during a recent Sunday service -- they all knew she had just lost her mother.

“Everybody knows everybody,” said Herbert Kemp, 71, who lives on land his family has held for 120 years. “They say it takes a village to raise a child. It’s been like that here for as long as I can remember.”

Residents have gone to court to turn back the projects, gaining a temporary halt in the building of a highway exchange that would serve the proposed shopping center. Some Sandfly families have been moved to make room for the road, called the Truman Parkway.

The proposed store would sit on a wooded 52-acre lot, seven miles south of downtown Savannah. Opponents fear it will spell a commercial takeover of Sandfly, which now has about 2,000 residents, two gas stations, a couple of restaurants and a Piggly Wiggly market in a small shopping center.

At stake, too, residents say, is the under-appreciated history of a tiny African American community -- a history they now hope to preserve. First they must collect it.

To that end, Sandfly residents are plumbing their memories, dredging up pictures and articles -- and trying to agree on the boundaries of the roughly 2-square-mile community. Most of it sits in unincorporated Chatham County, though a piece belongs to Savannah.

Beneath a canopy of live oaks and tired Spanish moss, Sandfly in places feels far removed from the world outside. Modest homes line streets bearing the names of the oldest families. The few churches are pocket-sized. Dogwoods and azaleas decorate an unpaved road, not far from where a pecan orchard once stood. The tidal marsh reminds that the ocean sits near, too.

But the slow spread of subdivisions and strip malls has already surrounded Sandfly, making it difficult to tell where it begins. Residents maintain that the two development projects would spell the demise of what’s left.

The quest for the past isn’t tidy, as was clear at the Aris home recently when she and an aunt noisily tried to sort out whether their ancestor, who settled in Sandfly, could have been a slave or the child of a slave. But they agreed on the need today to preserve Sandfly’s sense of itself.

“No one thought of Sandfly as being historical, as being an entity that you need to consider. When we say we want to preserve our history, we want to preserve not only what my great-grandmother did, we want to preserve it for our children and grandchildren,” said Aris, who is 40 and works for a human-resources firm.

“We fought for this community,” she said. The effort has yielded some success. Sandfly recently won recognition from the Georgia Historical Society, and a marker is to be erected here May 10. The marker doesn’t offer many tangible benefits, but shows that outsiders are acknowledging Sandfly’s history. The community plans a celebration.

Residents are also hoping for some kind of national historic designation, a step that could mean stricter scrutiny of any future development. But Sandfly represents the difficulties in preserving many black communities, where little effort went into safeguarding buildings or putting down on paper what went on. That has left preservationists without much to measure, at least by the usual yardsticks of historical importance, said Melissa Jest, neighborhood coordinator for the Historic Savannah Foundation.

“African American resources, the bricks and mortar and the letters and all that, often don’t exist,” she said. “Our communities were not valued, so they were not protected. It leaves us in the preservation movement -- white or black or other -- in a quandary as to how to preserve or to promote our resources.”

A 2001 report on the future of Georgia’s historic preservation efforts by the state Department of Natural Resources noted, for example, that properties in African American communities are underrepresented on the rolls of historic places, in part because of shortcomings in past surveys.

“It is clear that African American historic properties are not identified in the numbers suggested by historic population counts and housing censuses,” the report said.

Sandfly residents hope their cultural past can carry the day. The community, whose namesake gnat is mentioned in a song sung by slave boatmen called “Sandfly Bite Me,” sits on a tidal marsh that has served as a baptism pool and source of blue crab, shrimp and oysters. Sandfly and two neighboring communities -- Montgomery and Pin Point -- remain largely black pockets amid mostly white, upscale settlements in the waterfront communities south of Savannah. (Pin Point is the birthplace of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.)

Sandfly is believed to have been settled as early as the 1700s by slaves assigned to farm cotton, rice and mulberry on the Wormsloe and Modena plantations nearby, after early Georgia colonists reversed their initial prohibition on slavery. Jest says an 1815 lithograph shows a slave settlement on the spot where two main avenues now meet in modern Sandfly, down the street from the proposed development site.

After the Civil War, the freed men bought tracts amid the live oaks and pines. They fished and caught crabs in the Herb River, became skilled carpenters and plasterers. “There is nothing unusual or outstanding about the sleepy little settlement; its 300 inhabitants appear to lead a placid, uneventful existence,” a visitor to Sandfly would write in 1940.

Sandfly residents built each other’s houses, in the communal style of barn-raisings, using clapboard, imitation brick and tin. They bequeathed chunks of land to their children, who became draftsmen and counselors and teachers.

Herbert Kemp’s great-grandfather, Thomas Kemp, was a slave in 1850, according to the records the younger Kemp has found. In 1883, Thomas Kemp paid $100 for six acres in Sandfly -- land that remains in the hands of Kemp descendants.

Herbert Kemp, a retired architectural draftsman, keeps a hickory pole that was carved by his grandfather, a carpenter. It was used to measure the depth of the water for baptisms in the nearby tributary. His grandmother, a midwife, helped in the birth of Clarence Thomas, said Kemp, who serves as Sandfly’s unofficial historian.

Kemp recalled a youth spent hunting rabbits and deer and pulling fish out of the salt-water channel nearby. The pickings are slim now, Kemp said quietly, and there’s no hunting to speak of.

Not far from Kemp’s home sits a tiny, 140-year-old cemetery whose gravestones amount to a roster of Sandfly’s oldest families. It was set up as a burial ground for slaves, but is used even today. “It’s a long line,” said Alexander S. Luten Sr., a retired school principal with about 20 family members buried there.

His grandfather, Ben Luten, lived at Wormsloe Plantation and bought land on what is now Sandfly’s main drag, Skidaway Road. The elder Luten was a porter for the trolley, which shuttled people and goods from downtown Savannah to Isle of Hope from the 1870s through at least the 1940s. It stopped in Sandfly to unload groceries and building supplies, then rolled onward. Mischievous Sandfly children liked to pelt the passengers with acorns.

Alexander Luten, now 70, was among five children, out of nine in his family, to finish college. Most became teachers. Like others in Sandfly, he attended the historically black Savannah State College, which is now called university. “You had to go to school,” said Luten, a wiry man who speaks as deliberately as if explaining a classroom lesson. “Education was a must.”

The Luten family land and some other Sandfly properties have been deemed eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places, but none has yet been added. Residents have gotten some money from a local foundation to help pay for turning their scrapbooks and memories into a history of their community, perhaps a book. But they concede their effort to take stock of what is historically valuable came late.

“Nobody can take the blame for that. We have to take the blame,” Kemp said.

Along Sandfly’s narrow streets, the dilemma is how to press the case for the past while not being blind to the future. Not all Sandfly residents are against the idea of a Wal-Mart store. And, despite initial resistance, they have managed for nearly two decades to coexist with the small shopping center that holds the Piggly Wiggly.

Nonetheless, hard feelings linger over a street-widening project that meant digging up 33 ancestral graves from a second Civil War-era cemetery in 1989. It is a symptom, some Sandfly residents say, of a continuing lack of regard for the community.

“If we don’t protect what our ancestors handed down to us, the historical aspect of this community will be lost to development,” said Luten. “It is our responsibility.”

From the front window of his well-appointed home, it is possible to watch the tour buses carrying sightseers from Savannah to Wormsloe. The old plantation is now a state historic site. The tours pass through regularly. They never stop in Sandfly.