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The Spirits of the Gullahs
Location: South Carolina, U.S.
Extraordinary Islands > Islands of History > Myth & Legend
Airports: Hilton Head, South Carolina (1/2 hr. away).
Ship: 40 min. from Hilton Head: Calibogue Cruises ☎ 843/342-8687; www.daufuskiefreeport.com Palmetto Ferry Company ☎ 843/684-7819;
Hotels: Villas and condos ☎ 800/445-8664; www.daufuskievacation.com
Like its fellow Low Country sea islands, Daufuskie has a picturesque landscape that borders on steamy Southern Gothic. Live oaks wreathed in silvery Spanish moss frame dense woods, where unseen critters croak and twitter. Thick, salty air hangs in beams of sunlight, its perfume pungent and primeval. Tidal flats stretch long, bony fingers into the sea. It seems only natural that the island is rife with ghosts.
Daufuskie's rich black loam once grew cotton so silky it had its own name—Sea Island cotton—and in the years leading up to the Civil War, the island was the site of 12 prosperous cotton plantations. West African slaves were brought to this isolated place to work the cotton fields, and over the years they developed a unique culture that married African traditions with the customs of the New World. In the postwar period, after the slaves were freed and white plantation owners fled the island, its isolated position—with no causeways to the mainland—kept the old traditions alive. "Gullah" refers to the descendants of those slaves, their culture, and their language, a musical hybrid of English and West African.
Most of the old places on the island are haunted, it's said, including the 1883 lighthouse at Bloody Point, where Daufuskie legend Arthur Ashley "Papy" Burn once lived. Papy had four wives; he made wine from sweet scuppernong grapes, elderberries, and pears, and stored it in the Lamp Room that once housed the lighthouse's back range light. He called the little brick structure Silver Dew Winery, and it's still here. Other historic structures on the island include the white-frame First Union Baptist Church, built in 1864, and the two-room schoolhouse, the Mary Fields Elementary School, where a young Pat Conroy taught for a remarkable year, later immortalized in his autobiographical novel The Water Is Wide (made into a movie with Jon Voight called Conrack). As you travel around the island (golf carts are the favored mode of transportation), check out the old Gullah homes: You'll spot a peeling blue windowsill here, a faded blue roof there, even a whole house done up in brilliant sky blue, for the Gullahs believed that painting the window trim blue kept the evil spirits away.
Success seemed forever to elude Daufuskie. The boll weevil wiped out the cotton crop in 1921; another local treasure, the Daufuskie oyster, was doomed by environmental pollution, the oyster beds shut down in 1959. Mid-20th-century Daufuskie had a dwindling but tight-knit populace of Gullah-speaking African Americans eking out a meager island existence in peaceful isolation. But today, as old-timers die out and real-estate development creeps in (though at nowhere near the pace of Hilton Head), Gullah heritage tours have become a popular tourist activity. Big oaks that withstood hurricanes and bulldozers stand guard over sprawling "Low Country–style" homes and golf courses. The Daufuskie oyster is back, growing plump and creamy in newly pristine waters; the waters brim with fish, shrimp, crabs, and the occasional gator. The spirit of the Gullahs resides on Daufuskie still.
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