On Daufuskie Island

A photo essay on the place where 'the water is wide'

A 500-year-old oak tree towers over the roof of a home deep in the woods of Daufuskie Island, S.C.

A couple of weeks ago, our 10-year-old had a few days off from school, so he, my wife and I piled in our car and traveled about six hours to the coast of South Carolina, where we spent a few days on Hilton Head Island.

On our first day, we made our way out to the beach. The sun was shining, the tide was low, and the seagulls swirled in the air just above our heads. (Thanks to my son throwing goldfish crackers to them every couple of minutes!)

But the water I imagined we’d find as we drove all those hours to get there was a little colder than I expected; when I looked it up later, the temperature reading for the ocean at our location was 57 degrees! So, we said to ourselves, let’s see what else we can explore.

If you’re not familiar with it, Hilton Head is easy to find on a map; it’s the largest of a string of barrier islands along the Carolina coast — and also the most fully developed, with miles of highways and loads of apartments, homes, restaurants, shopping centers, and the like.

But just off its shores are dozens of smaller islands, some of which don’t even have names, and are accessible only by boat.

The largest of them, an island called Daufuskie, has been inhabited for more than two thousand years; for the last couple hundred of those, primarily by the Gullah-Geechee people, descendants of slaves who were brought in bondage from western and central Africa to work the rice, cotton and indigo plantations on the sea islands here.

We were vaguely aware that you could take a tour of the island; after a couple of calls, we had a spot on a small tour boat leaving the next morning. And so when morning came, off we went.

The two-room Mary Fields Elementary School, where Pat Conroy taught the students he would later write about in 1972’s The Water Is Wide.

When I say the boat was small, I’m not kidding: on the drive to the marina, in my mind I had a picture of a ferry boat like the ones you can ride in New York Harbor, which take you to see the Statue of Liberty.

But this boat? Only a handful of people — maybe ten? — could board before it was full. And the sea was rough thanks to the wind, which meant our hour-long ride to Daufuskie was going to be a little… adventurous.

Still, that was okay. Even though I’d never been there, I’d been fascinated with the island ever since I was a teenager, when I read Pat Conroy’s The Water Is Wide, his (slightly) fictionalized memoir of the year he spent teaching on Daufuskie from 1969 to 1970.

Then in his early twenties, Conroy — who would later go on to write some of the best-loved novels of the 70s and 80s, including The Great Santini and The Prince of Tides — came to its school after he’d already spent a couple of years teaching at Beaufort (S.C.) High School, back on the mainland where he lived.

He had applied for an assignment in the Peace Corps, but was turned down. Daufuskie’s school hired him only after realizing that the federal education funds it accepted that year required that it be integrated. All its students and its only teacher were Black; so Conroy, the only white applicant, got the job.

I’m paraphrasing, but I remember hearing Keith Richards tell an interviewer once that hearing Chuck Berry play guitar was when the world went from black-and-white to full technicolor. For me, that’s what reading The Water Is Wide was like too.

Conroy’s depictions of what life was like for the kids on the island — which had no electricity until the early 1950s, and no telephones until the early 1970s — moved me in a way no other book had.

“Brownie” came to the fence to greet us as we rode around Daufuskie on golf carts. His owners are two brothers from Conroy’s class back in the 1969-70 school year, who still live on the island today.

It took Conroy only a couple of days to realize how far behind his students, then in their early teenage years, really were after years (decades?) of neglect by the county school system, which provided only beaten-up old textbooks long after the white schools had discarded them.

Not only did they struggle to read and write; they didn’t know who the president was, or even the name of the ocean that washed up on their own shores. (They called the Atlantic “the big water.”)

Our tour guide, a man in his seventies who’d led tours of Daufuskie for more than thirty years, reminded me of all of this as he drove us around the island on a golf cart, sharing its history as he took us along its dirt roads, into homes and its church, built not long after the Civil War.

He showed us the places where the island’s Gullah people — which once numbered as high as 2,000 — lived, though only a few dozen remain on the island today; “there’s no work here now,” our guide told me. (And no Black students attend the island’s only school, either.)

I’ll stop the history lesson here, because I know that’s not what you signed up for when you subscribed to this newsletter! (And, you can read much more about Daufuskie here, or buy The Water Is Wide here.)

But the reason I’m sharing it with you now, I think, is that at 53, I’ve lived long enough to return to pieces of the past — my own past, and the collective past of the part of the world where I’m from, and still live — and see them in a new way.

Outside and inside Daufuskie's First African Union Baptist Church, where the Bibles are printed with both English and Gullah, side by side.

I’ve wondered often whether people in other parts of the U.S. feel the weight of the past in the way southerners do; nobody makes movies like Mississippi Burning about places like Iowa, after all.

But as much as I might have wanted not to be earlier in my life, I realize now I’m tied to this place in a way that can’t be undone. I probably never would’ve started scribbling words on a page if I’d never read Conroy’s book, which he never would have written if he hadn’t come here to teach, traveling across the water every week on a rickety little boat just like the one we rode.

Have you ever had a realization like this? What are the spaces and places you’re connected to, that become more a part of you over time? I’m not sure if that makes sense, completely, but it’s a question that just keeps getting more interesting to me with each passing year.

As always, I hope your running is going great and you’re getting out to enjoy what’s now (can you believe it?) spring weather — keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.

Your friend,

— Terrell

P.S.: If you can make it here in January, there’s a marathon you can run on Daufuskie too.