This past summer my in-laws took us on a family vacation to a little island off the coast of South Carolina. My BAAW and her mother were looking for a place where we could poke around without a car—when you read about it online it’s all about bikes and golf carts: goofy but fun—and it seemed like a place of cultural richness, with an intact Gullah community, about which we didn’t really know anything but which sounded beautiful and important.
We flew into Savannah, got a ride to a dock on a brackish river where actual dolphins swim in from the Atlantic, and a genial very sunburned white guy whom people legit addressed as “Captain” ferried us to Daufuskie Island.
I don’t know the South. I’ve barely ever been to the South. My deepest experiences of the South are (not kidding) reading a lot of William Faulkner and listening to a lot of Goodie Mob. Going to the South feels to me like going to another country, a hyper-American tropical country. It’s also gorgeous. Have you ever seen anything like this shit?
We had a super-sweet time. We napped. Read. Ate good food. Walked on the beach. Played in the surf. Swam in the pool. Drove around in golf carts. Visited stuff. (The island is five miles by three miles. There’s not actually that much to visit.)
The promise of Gullah culture and community, though, was unfulfilled. There are a tiny handful of Black people on the island. Most have left for work elsewhere. The island, one guy told me, has been gentrified.
Meanwhile, because I am an idiot, it took a couple of days of being there for me to realize that this beautiful, magical, dreamy island was once a place of plantations.
And not, like, a couple of plantations: the whole damn island was JUST plantations.
Somewhere in the little lighthouse museum there’s a description of how, when the island was covered in cotton, you could stand at one end and see all the way across the island — it was just a sea of cotton, punctuated occasionally by the live oaks that surrounded the big plantation houses.
Forgive me for clutching my pearls with my little white-gloved hand, but fam I was shook. It was like, oh THIS is what people mean with all the clichés about how the South feels so haunted, I GET it now.
Anyway, at a certain point you feel a certain obligation to just go around and try to pay your quiet respects at the different Gullah cemeteries on the island. You’ve come and enjoyed the hell out of yourself; now have the decency to try be a respectful person, you know?
There are a couple of cemeteries that are harder to get to. The white docent at one of the little museums said I should only try to get to the Cooper River cemetery if I was wearing thick rubber boots, because of all the poisonous snakes. So that was a no.
The other is actually inside a ritzy golf course and housing development. The docent told me that if I drove up to the guardhouse at Bloody Point—yeah Ma I’m just golfing here at old Bloody Point golf course, NBD—and said I was there to visit the cemetery, they were “required” to let me in.
Really? I said.
It’s one of the band-aids, he said, in one of his many plainspoken remarks about the racial politics of the island.
So I went.
It’s very eerie and weird. You drive your little golf cart past these multimillion-dollar summer homes—you’re part of the problem too, there on your golf cart, don’t think you aren’t—and then you park right next to someone’s enormous house like you’re stopping in for dinner.
It’s right on the water. You walk over a wooden bridge and then you’re in this teeny-tiny graveyard. The Gullah people traditionally laid their dead to rest beside the Atlantic, for obvious and heartbreaking reasons. There’s only a handful of gravestones there.
Once you’re inside you see that…
a) except for the part that is directly facing the water, the entirety of the cemetery is fenced in by the golf course,
and
b) the golf course has posted signs all over that fence, facing inward at the graves, that say DO NOT ENTER DO NOT ENTER PRIVATE PROPERTY DO NOT ENTER.
As if the middle-aged Black woman visiting her great-grandmother’s grave is going to hop the fucking fence for a few stolen holes of golf.
The profound disrespect of buying up this land where the Gullah had been enslaved but managed through courage and ingenuity and heroism and heart to build a home, a culture, a language, a life—and then gradually hemming them in and hemming them in until even their dead are being screamed at in perpetuity by white America.
On one of the graves, in the grass, I found a golf ball, hit by one of the wealthy golfers who knows how long ago, and left there. It was one of the most disrespectful goddamn things I’ve ever seen in my life. I picked it up and brought it home.
Talk about inflation all you want. Talk about wokeness. Talk about the border. Talk about a new right-wing multiracial working-class coalition. Tell me all about it.
This election is a dirty old golf ball being hit again and again and again into a Gullah graveyard.
