Fighting Against the Tide

This is a place of great stillness, where the wind cuts across the open marsh and swirls up into the palmetto trees, stirring the leaves together and making a sound like rain.

Here a few old people still sit on the beach and weave swamp grass baskets the same way their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. They reach for reeds like the ones that grew in Africa, they speak a musical dialect belonging to a different time.

These are the Sea Islands, off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, one of the most remote areas in the South and the last refuge of an African-based culture dating back to the era of slaves.

But the refuge is going, going the way of the once-rich seas.

Hotels, higher taxes, pollution and time are closing in on the few remaining native islanders and invading their wild, open spaces. The old people are fading away. The younger ones are moving.

Two women who have sunk themselves into their land like stakes are fighting back. Yvonne Wilson and Sandy West don’t know each other. They’ve never met. They live on different islands, 30 miles of marsh between them and a world apart.

Wilson sleeps in a trailer, West in a mansion with a stuffed lion on the wall. Wilson is black, West is white. Wilson grades roads for a living. West lives off the last vapors of a family fortune.

But the two share a powerful connection--a passion to keep the Sea Islands from getting ruined.

“We’re fighting the same tremendous fight,” West said. “And people not so long from now will be thanking us, if we win.”

Yvonne Wilson’s trailer is crowded with animals and children. It smells like Ajax. A goat, Jack, is tied up outside. “Come here, boy, come here,” she says as Jack steps toward her, hesitates and then bolts behind a swing set.

Wilson is a short, vital, 48-year-old woman who wears combat boots, drives a steam roller and supports a family of six on $14,800 a year. She’s a Gullah, one of 23 remaining on Daufuskie, a 5-by-2-mile island of swamp and beach across the water from the fancy resorts of Hilton Head.

The Gullahs are descendants of slaves brought to the Sea Islands 250 years ago from West Africa to pick cotton and rice. The isolation of the islands enabled Gullahs to retain bits of African culture that tended to disappear within a generation or two on the mainland.

Even today, they still do things a little differently, racing through words in a lilting accent, leaving old water pitchers on graves with a whisper of a magic spell (because the dead get thirsty, too) and milking venom from snakes to sell to pharmaceutical companies for $3,000 a jar.

Wilson is a modern Gullah, someone who doesn’t regularly use the traditional dialect but understands it, someone who works a mainstream job Monday through Friday but might spend a weekend at a Gullah reunion banging on a goatskin drum and singing African songs. The Gullahs are the most African of African Americans, scholars say, the missing link to a motherland culture that has all but disappeared.

Their language is an English dialect leavened with Caribbean-sounding pronunciations. It has kept alive some African words, like “oonuh” for you and the term “day clean” for sunrise. The word “Gullah” is thought to come from Gola, the name of a West African tribe. The dialect was once widely spoken along the two dozen Sea Islands that stretch from Charleston, S.C., to Jacksonville, Fla., and today is thought to be understood by 500,000 people.

Whether Gullah culture will continue on Daufuskie is a big question. The island has a history of leveling its traditions. The first residents, the Yemassee Indians, were driven to the sea to make way for European farmers, farmers were then cleared out to make way for slaves and not so long ago, tombstones of slaves were ripped up to make way for golf courses. “They threw bones in the water, bones,” Wilson said.

Even worse, she said, developers and resort residents made Gullahs feel poor.

“We used to think we had a lot,” she said. “But when you see people building big houses and wearing beautiful clothes and having nothing else to do but lie around in the sun, you start to say to yourself, ‘Gee, I’ve been fooling myself all this time.’”

The modern world crashed into Daufuskie around 1950, when the surrounding area began to industrialize. Very quickly, raw sewage and pollution from paper factories along the nearby Savannah River fouled the waters and killed the oyster and fish business, driving away families who had made their living from the sea.

“It was difficult for people who had never been a part of the modern economy to survive--and preserve their culture,” said Emory Campbell, director of the Penn Center, a South Carolina research and cultural institute studying Gullah ways.

Though the area has eluded modernity for so long, it has captured literary imaginations. Pat Conroy and Anne Rivers Siddons, for example, set several books in South Carolina’s low country (the coast), and Daufuskie’s neglected grammar school was the subject of Conroy’s first successful novel, “The Water Is Wide.”

By the early ‘80s, International Paper Corp. was buying tracts of land on Daufuskie for a members-only resort. Soon the empty marshes were carved into fairways and putting greens. In 1984, a second developer, Melrose Co., built a welcome center on a Gullah graveyard, where some of the graves were thought to be 200 years old. Construction workers tossed headstones and bones into the water, many locals said.

Wilson, a young mother at the time with a job stacking lumber, marched into the resorts’ offices to meet with executives. Nobody listened. She was fired from her job and banned from the developer-owned boats that service the island, which essentially left her stranded and unemployed.

Some of the remaining Gullah families turned on her, frightened that protests would jeopardize promised jobs. And then, after she gave birth in 1991 to twins whose father is white, she was shunned. “At that point in my life, I didn’t think I had a friend in the world,” she said. “Especially on Daufuskie.”

Wilson turned to the NAACP legal defense fund, and the lawyers took up her case.

According to them, public officials were pushing Gullahs off Daufuskie by sharply raising property assessments, from $5,000 an acre in the early 1980s to $30,000 an acre 10 years later.

Daufuskie was no longer a tranquil refuge for families of former slaves. It was an emerging high-class resort, complete with pastel cottages, rising property values and rich white people swinging in hammocks.

Many Gullah families were pressured to sell family-owned plots, and though they cashed out at high prices, speculators made even more when they turned the land over to developers.

“A lot of people got taken advantage of,” said Bernice Wright, property assessor for Beaufort County, which includes Daufuskie. “Speculators drove up prices, and many of the indigenous people weren’t well informed.”

By threatening to sue on behalf of displaced residents, Wilson hammered out a settlement with developers that moved the welcome center. New tax laws were passed to protect older homeowners. To minimize gentrification, Wilson pushed successfully for a historic district to limit development in the Gullah part of the island, shrunk to a swath of forest far from the beach.

Beaufort County officials then created a job for Wilson, maintaining the few roads on the island driving a steamroller--”to quiet me down,” she said. She’s the only female road grader in South Carolina, officials said. After nine years, she makes $284 a week. Often, she relies on the generosity of others, and on a recent day she got a bag of day-old doughnuts from one person and a dented case of Coke that rolled off a truck.

A few Gullahs have been hired at the resorts. But for the most part, the promised service jobs never materialized. At the Daufuskie Island Inn, a $290-a night hotel, it is young Jamaicans who scrape plates and cut grass.

“It’s great,” said Jack Bickart, vice president of sales for the Daufuskie Island Resort. “We’re an island destination. What could be better than a Caribbean workforce?”

Development has also brought a new social order. Any local driving on a resort, or “plantation,” as they are called, needs a pass even to visit one of the six Gullah graveyards on the island, all located within plantation grounds.

“Hey! Where the hell are you going?” shouted a security guard to Jesse Williams, Wilson’s ex-boyfriend, during a recent graveyard tour.

Once in, Williams was careful to pull off the road every time a golf cart approached. It’s a rule, to prevent guests from getting dusty, he was told.

“It might make sense to me,” Williams said, staring at the slab of asphalt, “if the road was dirt.”

Thirty miles south on Ossabaw Island, Sandy West eyes a darkening sky, strokes her pet donkey Mary Helen and whispers, as if bent over a cradle, “It’s OK, honey, the storm will pass. It’s OK.”

The braying donkey and a woolly pig named Lucky are her closest friends. At 88, she lives alone on a 25,000-acre island, one of the largest slices of undeveloped land along the East Coast. It’s fringed by 13 miles of wide, flat beach, unbroken by even a fence post.

The storm doesn’t pass and instead pounds her crumbling, leaky mansion, soaking the Persian carpets and knocking the power out.

But West says she’ll never leave.

“What do I need out there?” she asked. “Traffic? Crowds of Homo sapiens? Yay-who [Yahoo] or whatever you call it? I have my animals and enough food. And I have this,” she said, turning her gaze toward a window overlooking acres and acres of dark, wet nothingness.

Until recently, Ossabaw was one of the last privately owned islands in the South. West’s parents bought it in 1924 and built a spectacular Spanish-style villa with 40-foot ceilings and a great room lined with animal trophies on the wall. They called it a “summer home,” one of those luxuries of the Great Gatsby era when several rich families owned entire islands off the Georgia coast. The money came from West’s mother, whose family made millions in the glass business.

The Wests threw lavish parties for tycoon friends, bathed in salty tides and hunted deer, duck, wild pig and alligator in the miles of primeval forest that carpet the island.

After her parents died, Sandy West became the heir in charge.

She eventually turned Ossabaw into a year-round home and sponsored intellectual retreats for poets, painters, botanists and writers to draw inspiration from a place so beautiful and raw.

But owning an island is an expensive hobby. There is no bridge to Ossabaw; all supplies and workmen have to be ferried in. By the mid-1970s, development of nearby Hilton Head had pushed taxes up to $125,000 a year. For the first time in her champagne-and-Chanel life, West was nearly broke.

Offers to buy the island flooded in. She turned them all down. Even Aristotle Onassis called and asked her to name her price in millions. West never called him back.

“There’s no doubt she saved that island from becoming another resort,” said Jerry McCollum, a state biologist who worked on Ossabaw. “And unless you have sawdust in your veins, you know why she’s so in love with it.”

West had been holding out for an environmentally conscious steward to take over the island, and in 1978 she struck a deal with the state of Georgia. She’d give up Ossabaw for $8 million, half its appraised value, if state officials would turn it into a nature preserve. No tourism, no development, no exceptions--that was the deal.

At least, that was what West thought. The island was supposed to be set aside for educational purposes. The agreement worked fine for 20 years, and West was left more or less to herself.

But about three years ago, state officials began talking about limited tourism.

Then, last fall, they sent a young man named Chad to kill her pigs.

West shudders every time she hears a shotgun blast; another beloved pig off to the big wallow in the sky. “Horrible, horrible,” she says.

But state wildlife biologist John Bowers calls the feral pigs that roam the island “biological pollution.” Spanish missionaries brought them 400 years ago, and without any natural predators, the furry, tusked swine are wreaking havoc on the fragile island ecosystem, he said.

“They kill plants, they eat sea turtle eggs, they just don’t belong,” Bowers said.

Chad Hall, a 22-year-old intern for Georgia’s Department of Natural Resources, stalks the beaches at night with a flashlight and a shotgun. He’s killed 1,000 pigs so far. He’s got an additional 3,000 to go. Hall says he has tried to roast and eat as many as he can. The rest are left to rot in the woods, sinking back into the “biomass” they came from.

As she rumbles down a sandy road in her Dodge pickup, a pale woman with wet blue eyes and little white doll hands curled around the wheel, West rattles off the list of “issues” she has with the state: What’s truly natural on Ossabaw? Which animals belong here? What exactly does “educational” mean?

State officials say hunting can be educational (about nature and wildlife) and so can day trips. There’s a plan afoot to open the island to 1,500 visitors a year, an idea that drives West up a wall.

The public has been clamoring to visit the island, state officials said. “It’s been tough,” Bowers said. “On one side we have Mrs. West and her agreement. On the other side we have 8 million people in Georgia who the island belongs to. Trying to balance all that has been a real booger.”

West said the state is making a mockery of the original agreement. She’s still upset about the time five years ago that a state maintenance man accidentally bulldozed a mound made of oyster shells left by Indians thousands of years ago.

“There is no place in America like this left,” said West, who has hired a lawyer to explore her options. “The public will ruin this island if they are allowed on.

“As I’ve told you,” she added with a wink, “I don’t think Homo sapiens are anything I would have cared to have invented.”

A good part of West’s charm is her bluntness and Thoreau-esque independence. Despite a bout of vertigo that sent her tumbling down a staircase recently, she has remained robust enough to enjoy her solitude and keeps busy writing letters, reading, tending her menagerie and making things like a picture book about a stray pig that befriended a puppy (based on a true story).

Divorced, with four grown children living far away, she prefers the company of animals. Every morning she chews up dog biscuits and spits the pieces to peacocks squawking under her window. The birds love the biscuits, she said, but they’re too big for the peacocks to swallow.

“I’d rather have another kind of breakfast,” she joked. “But we can’t be choosy when our friends are hungry.”

There is an unmistakable sense of futility about the two lonely but parallel battles being waged by these women. The economic and political forces against them are powerful. Without the support of other Sea Islanders, it is unclear how long they can hold out.

Wilson is trying to find money to preserve the last of Daufuskie’s wooden praise houses, boxy little churches scattered in the forest. Slaves built them more than 150 years ago to hold “shouts”--their first prayer services.

She’s also trying to keep property assessments down and connect with the handful of Gullah groups on other islands to promote the remains of their culture.

“The hardest part is to get people to think of these islands as a home, not a business,” she said. “You start pushing down trees and tearing up the earth and trying to make them tourist traps, and something bad’s going to happen. I can feel it.”

West feels it, too.

“These big organizations,” she said, “they’re taking over everything.”

And just as the women share a kindred spirit, their islands share a feel that lingers long after the ferry back to the mainland has motored away.

There’s the same rustle of wind through old oak trees, the same emerald swamps, the same hawks soaring overhead with fish wriggling in their claws and the same putty gray sea that licks the beach’s edge and once kept the Sea Islands all to themselves.