The Long Way Home

Editor’s note: Ocracoke Islanders Tom and Carol Pahl are on a trek around the United States (following 70-degree weather) and will report back from time to time their reflections. This is their first dispatch.

By Tom Pahl

As we are traveling around the country on our year-long adventure, we find ourselves staying for a few days on Skidaway Island, east of Savannah, Georgia.  It is an interesting and tragic place, reflective of the bigger history of our America. 

To get to Skidaway, you come across a causeway and then a bridge over Moon River.  Yes, it’s that Moon River.  Well, sort of.  The river of song was an imaginary place made of Johnny Mercer’s childhood reminiscence of Savannah.  Mercer wrote the lyrics for the 1961 movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”  This river, the river we cross to get to Skidaway Island, was named after the song, not the other way around.

Anyway, when you cross Moon River and arrive at Skidaway, you quickly come to an intersection where you can go left, right or straight.  Left takes you into a shopping area.  Right and straight take you to guard houses and gates.  And, in fact, the road to the left does the same after you pass through the shopping, another guard house and another gate. 

So, besides the state park where we are staying in our camper, and a small Georgia State campus for marine research, the entire island is one big, gated community.  On our first day here, I ignored multiple threats to prosecute those who trespass and rode my bicycle past the guardhouse nearest the campground.  I found myself in a paradise of huge, beautiful homes scattered around a golf course that seemingly went on forever.  I bicycled on a golf cart pathway for a full 10 miles and saw only the smallest part of the place. 

I guessed there must be an association rule against parked cars, as the whole time of my tour, I saw only two parked cars; presumably the others were put away in garages, out of sight.  I saw just three people who appeared to be residents, walking dogs.

There was, however, a small army of people tending the landscape, mowing the already neatly trimmed grass, blowing leaves away to be sucked up and hauled away, working along the sides of sand traps and walkways to assure a perfect edge.  After a while, I began to get a queasy feeling about the whole thing and biked back out the gate I came in, thankful that I live in a small community with sensible rules and neighbors who will let you know that the water’s been running in your garden all morning, just in case you didn’t know.

On doing a little research, I found that Skidaway wasn’t always an exclusive community.  Pre-Civil War, it had been plantation land, probably rice plantations.  As the Civil war drew to a close, Union General William Sherman prepared what came to be known as Special Field Order 15.  He drafted this order after consulting with 20 Black ministers and community leaders in Savannah following his “march to the sea,” which precipitated the ultimate outcome of the war.

Special Field Order 15 set aside 400,000 acres of sea front and marsh land, along the eastern seaboard of the Confederate states, to be distributed in 40-acre plots to freed slaves.  Not long after the order was issued, Savannah Baptist Minister Ulysses L. Houston, who was one of those who met with Sherman, led nearly 1,000 freed Blacks to Skidaway Island, where they established a self-governing community, providing their own security and livelihood.

Unfortunately, the promise of land and self-sufficiency that was contained in Special Order 15 died along with Abraham Lincoln when he was assassinated in April of 1865.  His successor, Andrew Johnson, an avowed white supremacist, quickly reversed the order when he took office, and over time the Freedmen of Skidaway Island were driven off the land, losing forever the wealth and security that was promised.

Much of the land was re-occupied by the plantation owners. Though, without slaves, their operations quickly failed and fell into decades of disuse, neglect and foreclosure. 

In 1941 the bulk of the land was bought up by a Pennsylvania paper company and became a source of pulpwood for a Savannah-based mill.  By the 1960s, with the tree resources declining, Union Bag and Paper Corporation partnered with the City of Savannah to build the bridge that now connects Skidaway to the mainland.  In fact, the land that was to become the state park where we are now camping was the paper company’s payment, in kind, for their share of the bridge over Moon River.

With new, easy access to the island, Skidaway suddenly became valuable as development land. Union Bag and Paper struck a deal with a Chicago based developer and by 1972 construction of the gated community that would close off Skidaway Island to all but the wealthy and privileged (and to the occasional bold trespasser) had begun.  The Landings, as the community is now known, is a place where only one percent of residents identify as black and where the real story of the island is glossed over in the development’s official history.

And yet they persisted. Or, as the storyteller Paul Harvey might have said: And now for the rest of the story:

Going back across Moon River to the mainland and back into the outskirts of Savannah, we find a little community known as Pin Point.  Pin Point boasts the Pin Point Heritage Museum, which showcases the lives and history of Pin Point residents going back to 1896 when the community was first settled by freed slaves, some of whom had been driven from Skidaway by the failure of reconstruction and the reemergence of white supremacy.

The language spoken by coastal enslaved people, a Creole-type mix of African languages, English and invented vocabulary came to be known as Gullah Geechee.  The use of Gullah Geechee along the coastal mid-south helped to unify the formerly enslaved for decades after the Civil War, and its history is featured at the Pin Point Heritage Museum.

Here, in Pin Point, in 1896, they built a community around their church, first called the Hinder Me Not Baptist Church and then re-founded as the Sweetfield of Eden Baptist Church, which remains at the community’s center to this day.  I was struck by both names: “Hinder Me Not” and “Sweetfield of Eden,” each so positive in its own unique way; each looking beyond the burdens of a very tough everyday life. 

Pin Point residents worked hard for themselves, mostly making a living from the saltwater bounty nearby. They fished, crabbed, tonged for oysters, grew gardens and built a community.  Their personal industriousness brought industry to the community. 

A succession of seafood processing plants, looking to take advantage of a dependable workforce, settled in Pin Point, most notably A.S. Varn and Sons, which operated from 1926 until 1985, employing most of the working age residents of Pin Point, which could have included older folks in their 70s and 80s, as well as their great grandchildren as young as 10 years old. 

But times change and education and opportunity eventually came to Pin Point.  The processing plant has closed and now houses the Heritage Museum.  Pin Point residents have spread all across the area and the world, bringing their energy and history and hope to others. Among Pin Point residents to have an impact beyond the confines of the community is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who was reared as a child in Pin Point. 

When we left the museum and drove through Pin Point, I was struck by the vibrance of the community and by the layout of the houses and roads. 

People were out working in their yards, cars were parked on the streets, some guys were standing around, beer in hand, working on a car or talking about working on a car.  There were gardens and chicken coops between the houses.  There was the church, of course, and a cemetery. 

The landscape was teeming, people were laughing, the place was alive.  The contrast with The Landings gated community was stark and sad. Which is why I’d so much rather live in a place like this, than on the other side of Moon River in Skidaway.