Free Low Country by Anne Rivers Siddons Page A

skeleton of the osprey
    someone had found on Hunting Island, with the skel-
    eton of the great fish still caught in its claws.
    “They never let go,” he said. “That fish was so big it
    pulled that old osprey right under, and he still wouldn’t
    let go. Drowned him.”
    “God,” Clay breathed, as if he was hearing stories
    of the Holy Grail, and my own eyes pricked with tears.
    I could not have said why.
    He talked of the pirates who had dodged in and out
    of the Sea Islands, and of Captain John Peacock and
    his ignominious career, and of the great rice and indigo
    and Sea Island cotton plantations that flourished on
    the islands from Georgetown to Daufuskie Island, and
    of the plantation society and economy that had shaped
    a slow, graceful, symmetrical, and totally doomed way
    of life. He talked about the Gullahs and how they came
    over the Middle Passage from Gold Coast West Africa
    in chains to work the fertile lowland fields, specially
    catalogue-ordered by the American planters, from
    Senegal, Angola, Gambia, and Sierra Leone for the
    agricultural skills and the strong sense of family and
    commu

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    nity that helped ensure that they would not try to run
    away and leave their people. He told of the strange,
    rich old songs he had heard in the pray houses of the
    islands, and of the shouts that are songs, and of the
    dancing of ring plays and the knitting of circular nets
    and the weaving of sweet-grass baskets and the cooking
    of fish, yams, and okra; of the tales of trickster rabbits,
    vain crows, and sly foxes, and the darker, more terrible
    things that preyed in the nights on the unwary: the
    duppy and the plateye and their prowling succubus
    kin. He told of the language that was unique on earth,
    and sounded in the ear like music.
    “Do you know any of it?” Clay asked, and my
    grandfather closed his eyes and sang softly, in his rusty
    tenor: “‘ A wohkoh, mu mohne; kambei ya le; li leei
    tohmbe. Ha sa wuli nggo, sihan; hpangga li lee .’”
    I had never heard him sing or speak Gullah before
    and simply stared.
    “What does it mean?” Clay Venable said.
    “It means, ‘Come quickly, let us struggle; the grave
    is not yet finished; his heart is not yet perfectly cool.
    Sudden death has sharp ears.’”
    We said nothing. The words curled out into the
    night and rose and vanished.
    “It’s a funeral song, probably for a warrior,” my
    grandfather said. “They were maybe the most important
    of the tribal songs, because the West

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    African people had such reverence for their dead, for
    their ancestors.”
    “Where did you learn that?” I said.
    “My daddy used to bring me over here hunting with
    him when I was little,” my grandfather said. “He had
    a friend, Ol’ Scrape Jackson, who was a hunting guide
    for the rich Yankee who owned this place. Scrape used
    to sing that. He taught it to me and told me what it
    meant. I don’t know why I’ve remembered it all these
    years.”
    “It’s beautiful,” I said softly.
    “It is that,” my grandfather said.
    “Your people didn’t always own the island, then?”
    Clay asked.
    “God, no.” My grandfather laughed. “Rich Yankee
    industrialist who had a plantation over on Edisto
    bought it off one of the old planter families down on
    their luck back around 1900, for a hunting lodge. Lu-
    cius Bullock, owned some steel mills, if my memory
    serves. My daddy and Scrape Jackson were his guides,
    and then his son’s, and when I was old enough and
    my daddy died, I took over for the son. Jimmy, that
    was. It was good work, seasonal, as they say, and
    Jimmy paid me good to do my guidin’ and to look in
    on the property once or twice a month when it wasn’t
    hunting season. There’s not much about this island I
    didn’t end up knowing. You could have knocked me
    over with a feather when old Lucius died and left the
    island to me, the whole

    76 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    damned shooting match. Of course, it’s