Can Anything Beat White?: A Black Family's Letters

Chapter 9: A Lark a Flyin’

Chapter 9 A LARK A FLYIN’ S The Penn School began at the Oaks Plantation on the island of St. Helena in 1862, shortly after the Union Army landed on Hilton Head and swept north on its way to Beaufort, South Carolina. With the arrival of the federal troops, the plantation owners fled, torching their houses. They left behind the descendants of Africans who had lived in an isolation unknown elsewhere in the United States. They preserved many traditions from their native land that slave owners elsewhere had successfully suppressed. St. Helena and the other Sea Islands form a barrier reef from South Carolina to northern Florida. The climate resembles that of the Mano River region of western Africa. Captains of the slavers prized captives from that region because they knew how to cultivate rice and indigo and could command top prices in the slave markets. Thousands of men, women, and children were kidnapped and arrived in chains to populate the Sea Islands and the mainland area around Beaufort. The Negroes of the island developed their own language, called Gullah, a word itself most likely derived from “Angolan.” The language included vocabulary and syntax from Ewe, Mandinka, Igbo, Twi, and Yoruba. Helen said the local people asked her, “Is you a dove a-settin’ or a lark a-flyin’?” meaning “Are you married or single?” Helen’s letters arrived postmarked from Frogmore, South Carolina, where school 165 buildings had been erected on a fifty-acre parcel. The school moved there after it outgrew its home at the Brick Baptist Church. The Frogmore name came from a spicy gumbo (a Gullah word) of shrimp, crab, sausage, potatoes and corn-on-the-cob—but no frogs. When she arrived in the fall of 1906, between six thousand and seven thousand Negroes shared the island with fifty whites. The mainland was only five miles away, but the former slaves had virtually no contact with the outside world until the construction of the first bridge in 1927. As Helen told Louise, “Life here and isolation are synonymous terms. You can not imagine it. In some of my letters I will try to make you realize what it is like.” She soon discovered that island life in South Carolina could be more primitive, and more of a threat to health, than island life in Hawaii. Yellow fever raged, and the Penn School’s board of trustees delayed opening the school for a week to quell the epidemic. She did find much to admire. “St. Helena is a beautiful wilderness, with many interesting paths leading all over the Island. These I love to follow, wandering on into the unknown. Much of the weather, too, is ideal.” Culture shock, particularly in religious matters, upset Helen as well. The “shout,” or ring shout, epitomized the problems of the island, Helen believed. Residents gathered on Saturday evenings in prayer houses that dotted the island. With hands clapping and feet stomping, they sang spirituals. The shouters—men, women and children—circled the crowd until many achieved a trance state. People stopped occasionally to eat and drink, but the singing and shouting continued until dawn. Helen found the practice barbaric and cited it as an example of the urgent need for the civilizing influence of the Penn School in a report she wrote for Hampton’s Southern Workman. Other aspects of island life thrilled her, however. “They do make the most beautiful baskets here that I ever saw. The school ships a hamper for Three Dollars, the purchaser paying the express. I never in my life so such beautiful ones. The order has to be in weeks or better months before hand. The waste baskets too, are lovely. They sell for a dollar and a half.” Weavers constructed the baskets from marsh grass or rush and used saw palmetto to bind the tops and sides. 166 A Lark a Flyin’ Helen may have attended and taught at schools that stressed manual labor, but she preferred to live the Atlanta University ideal. “My writing materials are on the front verandah, where I am employing them talking to you, while a girl is cleaning up my room,” she wrote to Louise. “Sometimes I fear that the independence of my life makes me lazy. Perhaps it would be good for me to have to do what she is doing, instead of reading and studying so much.” Laziness did not describe her condition...