Southern Sanctuary

From the front porch of the Wallow Lodge we looked out on a manicured lawn edged by wild tidal marsh. Turkey vultures wheeled in the summer twilight, and an owl hooted softly. The only other sounds were the high-pitched drone of mosquitoes and the occasional thump-thump-thump of a dog’s tail on the wood-plank porch.

Whiffs of salt and decay blended with the fragrance of fresh-mowed grass as the shadows deepened around us. It was our first evening in Hog Hammock. The sleepy community of tin-roofed bungalows on the south end of Sapelo Island is one of the last enclaves of the Gullah-Geechee people--slave descendants who have kept African traditions alive. This unique black culture is found in tiny tidewater communities scattered among the Sea Islands, a chain of barrier islands hugging the coast from South Carolina to northern Florida. The best known of the Sea Islands may be the resort destination of Hilton Head, S.C. But the chain includes other undeveloped and more difficult-to-reach hideaways visited by people willing to leave the beaten track to glimpse an endangered wood stork or to fish from a deserted beach.

Sapelo Island, eight miles off the Atlantic Coast, is one of the least accessible of these islands, which made it even more alluring to me.

I first heard about it from fellow travelers while I was exploring the wild beauty of nearby Cumberland Island, which entered the national spotlight when John F. Kennedy Jr. chose it as the setting for his wedding to Carolyn Bessette.

My curiosity was aroused by the descriptions of a disappearing way of life on Sapelo, a place steeped in African lore as well as American history. Known as Gullah in South Carolina but called Geechee in Georgia, these people are descendants of slaves who were brought to the Sea Islands by plantation owners during the 18th and 19th centuries. They have preserved so many of their African traditions that they may be the nation’s most “authentic” African American community.

Access to the island is tightly controlled. Visitors must join a state-sponsored half-day tour or have a reservation at one of the family-run lodgings in Hog Hammock in order to visit. My boyfriend, Don, and I booked two nights at the Wallow Lodge last August.

Now, as we sat on the porch, we could hear the rumble of an aging Chevy Blazer on the sand road, signaling that our hosts were coming home. Julius Bailey had left the island earlier in the day, taking the 30-minute passenger-ferry ride to the landing at Meridian, Ga., then getting in the second vehicle he keeps on the mainland and traveling 60 miles north to the airport in Savannah to fetch his wife, Cornelia, the unofficial ambassador and storyteller of Sapelo Island. She had gone to Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., to lecture on Gullah-Geechee culture.

The thump of the dog’s tail picked up its pace as the couple got out of the Chevy.

“Ooman! Get off that porch and leave those people alone!” Julian scolded the scruffy black Labrador. I told Julius that the dog, whose name comes from the Gullah word for woman, was not bothering us--we enjoyed her laid-back company.

We exchanged introductions with Cornelia. A substantial woman who carries herself with confidence, she looked formidable despite a hint of road weariness. “Are ya’ll comfortable?” she asked.

We assured her we were and complimented her on the six-room lodge. We occupied the “Seven Sisters” room, named for the daughters of Bilali, a West African Muslim brought to Sapelo Island around 1802 to toil in the sugar cane, rice and cotton fields and the earliest of Cornelia Bailey’s ancestors whom she can name. Rose-printed wallpaper and a wardrobe topped with the kind of hats my grandmother used to wear to church gave the room a homey feel.

“Everywhere I went, people were always asking me if there was a place they could stay in Hog Hammock, so I got the idea for this lodge,” Cornelia said. “But I tell everyone, ‘If you don’t enjoy nature and history, please don’t come.’ People hear ‘island’ and they conjure up a resort atmosphere, with bikini-clad people on beaches and shops, restaurants and so forth. Sapelo is different.”

That was an understatement. Most of Sapelo Island, outside of approximately 400 acres that make up Hog Hammock, is owned by the state of Georgia, which maintains it as a wildlife refuge and a center for marine research. The island’s deserted beaches, maritime forests and salt marshes are sprinkled with historic relics. Guale Indians, Spanish missionaries, English pirates and French noblemen fleeing the revolution all occupied Sapelo before it became one of the South’s most productive antebellum plantations.

The island has no restaurants and only one small store, B.J. Confectionary, which keeps irregular hours. Hog Hammock resident Lulu Walker will prepare the regional seafood specialty--a spicy stew known as a low-country boil--for visitors. Unfortunately, Lulu wasn’t available. Nancy Banks also prepares home-cooked meals, but her table was full that evening with a fishing party.

Don and I wound up in the communal kitchen of the Wallow Lodge with the other guests--two schoolteachers from Atlanta--sharing the spaghetti and wine we had brought and trading local gossip.

The biggest news was that a coffin had come over on the ferry that day. A 95-year-old Sapelo native had died in a hospital on the mainland and was returning for burial, the latest loss to the shrinking Gullah-Geechee population.

For decades, their isolation on the Sea Islands afforded the Gullah-Geechee the luxury of retaining many of the crafts, beliefs and social customs of West Africa, the origin of most of their ancestors. They also retained a lilting way of speech peppered with West African words, the same dialect spoken by Uncle Remus in Joel Chandler Harris’ Bre’r Rabbit tales. In his 1972 autobiographical book “The Water Is Wide,” author Pat Conroy recounted his yearlong experience teaching Gullah-Geechee children in South Carolina. The book was made into the 1974 movie “Conrack” with Jon Voight.

In recent years, the development of resorts and gated communities on the Sea Islands has squeezed out much of the Gullah-Geechee population.

Congress mandated the National Park Service in 1999 to study the Gullah-Geechee and determine whether the Park Service should play a role in preserving their culture. The study results are due by December.

While Sapelo Island does not have resorts to contend with, its Gullah-Geechee population has not escaped the march of time. The island had about 400 African American residents in 1950, spread over several settlements. But many have left in search of jobs, and today only 63 remain, all living in Hog Hammock. They are the only residents of Sapelo, aside from a handful of state workers and researchers.

The few children left in Hog Hammock are increasingly influenced by the outside world. They grow up watching television and must take the ferry to the mainland to attend school. Meanwhile, the oldest practitioners of Gullah-Geechee crafts, such as weaving West African-style baskets from sweetwater grass, are dying off.

The bookshelf in the lodge’s common room held a dogeared copy of “God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man,” Cornelia Bailey’s memoir about growing up on Sapelo. She describes a childhood devoid of material goods but rich with the bounty of the marsh and ocean and infused with the power of “root” magic brought from Africa.

“Our customs and traditions started fading in the mid-1950s when the outside world began crashing in,” writes Bailey, who was born in 1945.

Late that evening we followed the faint sound of rhythm and blues to a small shed on the grounds of the Wallow Lodge. A sign told us that we were entering the Trough, “Sapelo’s Only Bar: Cold Beer, Music, Good Times.” Inside, Al Green music blared on a stereo in a tiny room with dim fluorescent lighting and plywood walls. Julius stood behind a counter where a handful of locals, all men, sat drinking beer. Julius plunked a couple of Heinekens down in front of us, and one of the locals drew a chair up to our table. It was Stanley Walker, Cornelia Bailey’s oldest son and something of a storyteller himself. He told us how he had left the island briefly for the excitement of Chicago, before returning with his wife and children to Hog Hammock, where he earns money giving tours.

I asked him what his boyhood was like on the steamy, bug-infested island, where electricity was not available to everyone until the late 1960s.

“The heat and the bugs don’t bother me,” Stanley said. “My grandfather used to tell me, when I’d be working outside and mosquitoes were biting me, ‘Just brush ‘em off and get on with things. Don’t let ‘em run your life.’”

The conversation turned to President Jimmy Carter’s visit to Sapelo Island in 1979. The locals feted him with an oyster roast.

“It was just a normal day around here,” Stanley said. “He’s a regular guy. He has calluses on his hands like any other peanut farmer.”

Stanley attempted to teach us a bit of the Gullah-Geechee dialect.

“Can you guess what a landu is?” he asked.

I asked him to use it in a sentence.

“The landu lay in the sun all day.”

“Is it a tourist?” I asked. He shook his head.

“What does it wear?”

“Leather, a very expensive type of leather.”

“What does it eat?”

“Just about anything.”

“What does it do when it rains?”

“It goes underwater to keep from getting wet.”

Finally I got it--an alligator. I found the word later in a dictionary of terms from West Africa.

The following morning we woke to the soft blue of a cloudless sky.

People were already milling around St. Luke’s Baptist Church. All of Hog Hammock was wrapped up in preparations for the funeral.

Ooman, however, was available. The dog happily accompanied us as we hopped on a couple of the Wallow’s bicycles.

Sapelo--about 10 miles long and four miles across at its widest point--has only one main paved road. This deserted strip of blacktop, given the lofty moniker of Autobahn after the German superhighway, cuts straight through the dense woodland of cypress, live oak and saw palmetto. White ibis swooped through the treetops, and deer moved gracefully through the shadowy thicket below as we pedaled down the asphalt. Ooman was content to cavort with the occasional marsh hare or armadillo until she spotted a wild boar, which quickly crashed into the underbrush with the dog in hot pursuit.

We followed the Autobahn to the island’s south end, where Thomas Spalding, who established a plantation on Sapelo in the early 1800s, built a mansion of tabby--the local word for the mixture of oyster shells, sand and lime that was a primary building material for many of the island’s early structures. The house fell into ruin after the Civil War, but Hudson Motors executive Howard Coffin, who bought Sapelo in 1912, built another mansion atop the original foundation.

The mansion and most of the rest of the island passed into the hands of tobacco heir R.J. Reynolds in 1934. He turned over the estate’s outbuildings to researchers. The renovated sugar mill and dairy barn now are headquarters for the University of Georgia Marine Institute and the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve.

Today the state of Georgia rents the 13-room Reynolds Mansion to groups of up to 29 people. A uniformed staff serves meals to the guests in the formal dining room, where presidents Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter once dined.

We pedaled north to Cabretta Beach, a wild and desolate stretch of sand backed by wind-sculpted dunes bristling with sea oats. After a lazy afternoon of gathering shells and watching the locals fish in the surf, we left the beach and headed for the uninhabited north end. The muddy track led us alongside drainage canals dug by slaves 200 years ago. We rode in silence past bogs where the eyes and snouts of small alligators floated just above the water line.

In Raccoon Bluff, an abandoned Gullah-Geechee settlement at the northernmost tip of the island, just one building remains: the First African Baptist Church. Although the area surrounding the church is now deserted, Hog Hammock residents view the tin-roofed, Gothic Revival building as an important symbol of their history, and they recently helped restore it for use on special occasions.

We entered the empty sanctuary and sat on a carved wooden pew. The original church was established in 1866--a year after the Civil War ended--but a hurricane destroyed it in 1898. The congregation rebuilt it in 1900. The church services incorporated remnants of the Muslim faith of some of the West African slaves, along with African, Native American and Southern Baptist traditions, according to a pamphlet we found. “As with other Gullah-Geechee communities,” the pamphlet went on, “one form of worship was the ‘shout,’ combining rhythmic music, vocalization and movement.”

We left the church and headed back toward the south end. The sun was melting into the horizon as we pedaled past the island’s airfield, where Charles Lindbergh landed his plane for a 1929 visit.

Our last stop was Behavior Cemetery. The scattered headstones stuck out at odd angles. The cemetery dates to slave times, but is still used. We did not pass through the iron gate. According to local tradition, the spirits must grant permission to anyone who wants to enter. Instead, we biked down the sandy trail leading back to Hog Hammock. Invisible spider webs brushed our faces. Branches clawed our sides. We pedaled faster and faster, eager to get back to the world of electricity and front-porch chatter as the night closed in.

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Guidebook: Island Bound

Getting there: Delta has direct service from LAX to Savannah; connecting service is available on American, Continental, Northwest, United and US Airways. Fares begin at $297.

It is also possible to fly into Jacksonville, Fla. Direct flights are available on US Airways; connecting flights are available on American, Continental, Delta, Northwest and Southwest.

Sapelo Island is a 30-minute ferry ride off the coast of Georgia’s MacIntosh County. The ferry runs three times daily, but advance reservations for a tour or overnight stay are necessary: (912) 437-3224.

To reach the island from Savannah, drive south on Interstate 95 about 60 miles. Take Exit 58 and turn left onto Highway 99, following the signs to the Meridian Ferry Dock and Sapelo Island Visitors Center.

The Visitors Center, managed by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, conducts half-day tours of the island on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8:30 a.m. The tour costs $10 for adults and $6 for children and includes the cost of the ferry service. Reservations are required. For information, contact the visitor center: Route 1, Box 1500, Darien, GA 31305; (912) 437-3224.

Where to stay/eat: Most visitors to Hog Hammock stay in a small, family-run lodge.

The Wallow Lodge, owned by Cornelia and Julius Bailey, offers private rooms for about $65 a night, as well as tours: (912) 485-2206, www.gacoast.com/geecheetour.

The Weekender, owned by Nancy and Ceaser Banks, offers rooms starting at about $45 a night. Nancy Banks will also prepare dinners of fried chicken ($8.50) or a seafood platter ($17.95); (912) 485-2277, e-mail weekend@darientel.net.

The state-owned Reynolds Mansion, located on the south end of Sapelo Island, offers group accommodations for a minimum of 16 people to a maximum of 29. The rate of $125 per person includes meals, bicycles, golf carts, transportation and meeting facilities. There is a two-night minimum; (912) 485-2299.

Upcoming events: The Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society will hold a beach party June 29 and a cultural day Oct. 19. Dates are subject to change. For information: (912) 485-2197, fax (912) 485-2263, www.sapelo island.org.

For more information: Georgia Department of Industry, Trade and Tourism, 285 Peachtree Center Ave. N.E., Suite 1000, Atlanta, GA 30303; (800) 847-4842 or (404) 656-3590, fax (404) 651-9462, www.georgiaonmymind.org.

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Carol Clark is a freelance writer in Atlanta.