Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America and the Fight for Cumberland Island (12 page)

They headed into a small tributary, where curtains of cordgrass closed in quickly. Jesse cut the motor and drifted into a tidal pool ringed by oyster beds. He guided the boat over to the beds and chunked oysters into the boat. Then he rolled up his sleeves and climbed into the prow on his knees, plunged his bare arms over the side, and searched the silty creek bottom for clams. Like a blind man, he gathered them by touch, pulling black bivalves out of the sludge. He talked to the clams, cajoling them sweetly with feminine names, counting them by twos as they clanked the bottom of the boat.

“Never clean out a clam bed,” Jesse told Carol. “Only take a few. Remember, we just passin’ thru.”

Jesse poled upstream and tossed his cast net. Moments later, he dumped its catch of flopping mullet and white-bellied sea trout in the boat, atop the clams and oysters. He pushed the writhing fish into a pile with his foot. Carol enjoyed the sounds of the water lapping lazily against the skiff and the easy silence passing between her and Jesse.

Weighed down by the bounty, the boat worked hard against the ebb current on its way back to the Candler dock. Jesse tied up the boat while Carol loaded the catch into burlap sacks and hauled them ashore. As they shucked oysters together on the dock, Carol asked if they could venture out into the sound the next day.

“My boat can’t make it that far,” Jesse said.

“Why don’t we take the Candler boat?”

“Can’t. Ol’ man Candler says I is a drunk.”

Jesse’s drinking had indeed worsened. He constantly reeked of stale whiskey, and increasingly he skipped fishing trips to sleep off his hangover. The Candlers threatened to fire him if he didn’t remove all the liquor from his cabin by the end of the month.

“Here’s the deal, Bailey,” Carol said. “I’ll keep your liquor for you and dole it out each morning. One glass only—enough to keep you buzzed but not wobbly. In exchange, you keep me in seafood.”

There was a long silence. Carol started to wonder if he had heard her. He shucked one oyster, then another. Finally, he said: “I can live wit’ dat. I ain’t gonna clean them fish, though. I catch ’em. You clean ’em.”

Every morning, Jesse showed up at Carol’s cottage at first light, awaiting his daily splash of liquor. John was usually still asleep, so Carol sat on the porch and drank holly tea while Jesse sipped his bourbon. Jesse didn’t talk much at first, but it wasn’t because he was scared or shy. He was Gullah and spoke with a distinct dialect—a long, lilting creole with a slow, tidal cadence.

“Folks say I talk funny. So I don’t say much, cept to folks who wanna listen,” he told Carol.

Carol doled out two drinks on Jesse’s fifty-seventh birthday. She started cutting his matted gray hair and washing his clothes. During his haircuts, he began telling Carol about his Gullah heritage.

“Most Gullah is ashamed. Can’t get no job talkin’ Gullah. Folks can’t unduhstand what we’s sayin. It don’t bother me none, tho. I is proud a be Gullah.”

Jesse was born in one of the world’s last remaining traditional Gullah communities, just thirty miles north of Cumberland. For centuries, Gullah lived mostly in small farming and fishing communities, often on isolated islands. In one-room praise houses, they danced ring shouts to improvised African drumbeats, stomping and clapping in a circle (American jazz and blues likely grew out of the Gullah ring shout). Gullah women wore head wraps and wove baskets from the marshes’ sweetgrass, and they enjoyed a rich cuisine based primarily on rice.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, rice fields blanketed most of the Georgia and South Carolina coast. American colonists had discovered that rice would grow well in coastal Georgia’s moist, semitropical climate, but they didn’t know how to grow it. So they purchased Gullah slaves from the traditional rice-growing region of Africa.

Gullahs were the largest group of slaves imported to the Deep South. They were also the only group of slaves to retain most of their traditional African culture. One major reason, ironically, was disease. When the Gullah arrived on slave ships in the seventeenth century, they brought with them malaria and yellow fever, which thrived on the swampy coastal islands and especially around waterlogged rice plantations. The Gullah slaves had already developed resistance to these tropical diseases, but their white masters were extremely vulnerable. Fearful plantation owners moved away from the rice fields and left their farms altogether during the rainy summer months when disease was rampant. The plantations were often run by trusted Gullah overseers. By the early 1700s, there were more Gullahs than whites in Georgia and South Carolina. European visitor Samuel Dyssli remarked in 1737 that the Southern coast “looks more like a negro country than like a country settled by white people.”

The Gullahs also benefited from geographical isolation, living on remote sea islands accessible only by boat. When the islands’ rice economy collapsed after the Civil War due to competition with larger rice plantations farther west in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas, most white farmers abandoned the islands entirely. The Gullah were left behind in areas of meager commercial importance and of little interest to the outside world, enabling them to maintain their own independent communities and traditions.

As a result, Gullah have been among the most fiercely resistant fighters in American history. Gullah have led mutinies and fomented insurrections. Many Gullah were able to escape slavery entirely by fleeing to Spanish-controlled Florida, which in the eighteenth century was a vast tropical jungle. Gullahs established their own free settlements in the Florida wilderness and built friendly relations with refugee Indians hiding out in the swamps. In time, the two groups came to view themselves as parts of the same loosely organized tribe—the Seminoles.

Seminole comes from the Spanish word
cimarron
, meaning “runaway,” and it applied equally to the Gullah and the Indians. Both had fled from American colonialism, and for nearly a century, the biracial alliance of renegades lived free in the Florida wilds. Nearly a quarter of Seminoles were Gullah, and they became known as the Black Seminoles. The Black Seminoles flourished and reared several generations of children in freedom along with the Indians.

In the early 1800s, the Seminole Wars erupted when American armies advanced into Florida. Gullahs and Indians fought side-by-side to stop the American advance, but eventually they were driven south into the more remote Everglades. There they continued resisting American forces through full-scale guerilla warfare, fleeing deeper into the wetlands’ cover.

After thirty years and thousands of American casualties, the Army finally captured most of the Seminoles by 1842, though a small band of holdouts never surrendered and remained ensconced in the Everglades.

American generals didn’t know what to do with the Black Seminoles: return these fugitive slaves to their owners or relocate them to reservations? Fearing the rebellious Gullahs might incite more insurrections back on the plantations, the military marched them west to Oklahoma.

Not surprisingly, the Black Seminoles did not stay put on the reservation. Some escaped south across Texas to the deserts of Mexico, where they established another free settlement. Heavily armed bands of Texas Rangers rode into Mexico to destroy the settlement, but the Gullahs defeated them. Later, a handful of Black Seminoles were invited by the U.S. Cavalry to join the army. Three of them won Congressional Medals of Honor—America’s highest military decoration.

But many remained resistant to American rule. Today, there are still small Black Seminole communities scattered across North America and the West Indies. They live on Andros Island in the Bahamas; in rural Seminole County, Oklahoma, where they are still official members of the Seminole Indian Nation; and in the dusty desert town of Nacimiento in northern Mexico. Elders in these far-flung communities still speak Gullah.

The largest traditional Gullah community was located on Georgia’s Sapelo Island, where Jesse Bailey was born in 1916. No bridges connected Sapelo to the mainland. An hour-long boat ride through narrow, gator-infested tidal creeks was the only way to reach the island. Jesse’s family grew bountiful gardens in the fertile black soil, hunted and trapped wildlife, and fished the fecund waters. At an early age, Jesse learned how to cast for shrimp, trap crabs, and gather shellfish from the marshes.

Then in 1934, tobacco titan R. J. Reynolds Jr., purchased over half of Sapelo Island. The Gullah were forcibly concentrated into a 434-acre tract called Hog Hammock on the island’s south end. Many Gullahs began leaving the island for education and jobs, and others sold their land to developers. Today, only forty-one Gullah remain on Sapelo.

Jesse was one of the last to leave. When he was eighteen, he fell in love with a girl, and she with him. But their families said they were too young and forbade them to marry. Heartbroken, Jesse struck out on his own. He served in World War II and worked in a yacht yard before eventually landing a job gathering fish and bait for the Candlers. The spell of Cumberland came over him, and Christmas Creek became his new mistress.

Jesse’s girl from Sapelo eventually married another. Jesse occasionally cavorted with a Candler maid, but the island became his abiding love. On his adopted Cumberland homeland, he was one of the last traditional Gullah in coastal Georgia, a holdout living alone on ancestral island soil, fishing the tidal creeks, telling stories in his native tongue, walking in the footsteps of his forebears.

“Know bout Hush Yo Mouth?” Jesse asked Carol one afternoon as they hiked along the edge of the marsh gathering mussels. He led her through shoe-sucking mud and lime-green walls of cordgrass to a hidden island in the marsh called Hush Your Mouth. At high tide, the mini-island in the marsh was surrounded by a moat of tidal creeks. At low tide, Jesse and Carol could cross the creeks in one leap without getting their boots wet.

“Lotsa folks hid out here,” Jesse said. For centuries, the one-acre island had been a refuge for fugitives and outlaws. Pirates menaced the Georgia coast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and frequently holed up on Cumberland. Blackbeard was rumored to have buried his treasure somewhere along the Georgia coast. Buccaneers, squatters, and lawless bands of backwoodsmen escaped to tiny, tucked-away hammock islands like Hush Your Mouth. During the Civil War, fugitive Gullah slaves from Cumberland Island plantations sheltered temporarily on Hush Your Mouth, and after the war they formed freedmen settlements nearby. Thick palmetto shielded the island’s rim, and a canopy of pond pine and live oak screened Hush Your Mouth’s shaded interior, reducing access and visibility from the outside.

Carol and Jesse spent the afternoon on Hush Your Mouth, watching a storm roll in across the marsh. A line of thunderheads gathered over the water, staining the sky black. Lightning danced between the swollen anvils of cloud: first a warm glow in one, then a blinding flash in another. They sat front row center for the entire show, until a thick curtain of cloud descended after the final act.

“I’m glad such simple things make me happy,” she told Jesse.

Rain whipped sideways across the windswept marsh as they hiked toward home. Amid the pattering of the rain, they heard a horse whinnying. Ahead, a ragged mare was stuck chest-deep in the marsh mud. Her tawny skin sagged loosely over her bony frame. Maggots were already feasting on her rump. Blood pooled beneath her eyes.

“Dat mud done got her in its grip,” Jesse said. “She ain’t gonna budge.”

Carol ran back to the Candler garage and grabbed a shovel and some two-by-fours, along with rope from Jesse’s boat. She placed a platform of boards around the horse and began digging around her legs. The horse slurped water from rain puddles and tried to nibble at nearby clumps of marshgrass.

“She can’t eat no mo’,” Jesse said. “Look at ’em teeth. They is worn down to nubs.”

The cold rain lashed down, and the horse’s skin shook violently. After an hour of digging, Carol could reach down to the horse’s hocks but still couldn’t free her legs. So she looped the rope around the horse’s ribs and wrapped the other end around a nearby cedar tree as a fulcrum. Carol dug her heels in deep and pulled on the rope. The horse swung her head feebly from side to side and moaned.

The rain drizzled on. Carol, covered head-to-toe in marsh mud, her hands rope-burned and flayed, took a break to wring out the water from her flannel. Then she dug in deeper and pulled until her hamstrings quivered. Finally, she heard the mud begin to gurgle and hiss. The horse’s hooves slurped out. Jesse joined her in pulling, and the listless horse lurched out of the mud and onto her side. She lay heaving and twitching. Carol tried to coax her onto her feet, but the horse was too tired. Her tongue lolled, and she sputtered blood. The rain had finally stopped, and the darkening marsh was still and silent.

“It’s late,” Jesse said. “You done all you could. We’ll come back tomorrah to check on her.”

The next morning, Carol woke before sunrise and dashed out to the marsh. She brought another rope and a sack of feed. Stars still clung to the blushing sky as Carol slopped along the rim of the marsh.

She saw the silhouette of the horse ahead, lying on her side. Carol walked closer and saw something move. She dropped her feed sack and ran toward her.

The horse was dead. Vultures roosted atop the carcass and had already begun plucking at its flesh. She shooed them away and knelt beside the horse. “I should have stayed,” she whispered, her eyes bright and burning. “You didn’t deserve to die alone.” Then she unsheathed her knife and slowly cleaved slabs of leathery horseflesh. The vultures watched from the trees.