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Posted on Wednesday, June 15, 2011 11:11 AM
I learned early on that a story needs some unifying characteristics that help emphasize the meaning of the story. My teacher was Carl Sandburg. I suspect most people think of Sandburg as a poet, but he also wrote one giant novel, over 1000 pages in fact, called Remembrance Rock. It is an epic journey through American history, one that begins with the first settlers and continues into the 20th century. Its theme -- the whole sense of what this story means -- is the unity, or perhaps the resilience, of the American experience.
But Sandburg does not hit us over the head with that message. Instead, it permeates the story in subtle ways. The setting of each chapter contains a specific rock on the New England coastline -- Remembrance Rock, of course. Every generation has its own war to fight. One child in each chapter is born with flaming red hair. And every chapter has its own yellow cat, usually named Mesopotamia, or Tamia for short. The reader comes to look for those markers as as a way to connect one episode with the next, and as reassurance of the continuation of the spirit that holds the country together. The device is simple. It exists without disrupting the flow of the story. And it is the vital element that holds the book together.
In Beyond All Price, I borrowed shamefully from Sandburg by turning Nellie Chase into a cat lover and introducing a cat into each crisis point in the story. For Nellie, the cats represented her need to have something or someone to love. And readers did catch on. One was even inspired to take Nellie's photograph and photoshop several cats into it.
In my current novel, The Road to Frogmore, the continuing theme is the persistence of Gullah culture among the newly-freed slaves of St. Helena Island. Its spokesperson is the narrator, the slave woman Rina. In order for my heroine, Laura Towne, to be successful in her own personal quest, she must come to understand and appreciate that culture.
The readers will have to undergo the same learning process. So to help matters along, I'm introducing a new feature in this blog -- Gullah Wednesdays. I'll be bringing you all sorts of snippets of Gullah culture as we progress, but for today, let's start with this video Introduction to "The Roots of Gullah Culture on St. Helena Island:
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Posted on Friday, April 29, 2011 9:10 AM
Just a mile or so down the road from the Brick Church, we found the ruins of another place of worship associated with the Gideonites and slaves of St. Helena Island. This Episcopal Church was built in 1748 to serve the white plantation owners of the island. Unike the Brick Church, it made no provision for the slaves to worship there, giving it the name of "The White Church." That policy also meant that when the church was abandoned in 1861, the black population made no attempt to re-open it.
The White Church had one feature, however, that drew the attention of some of the Gideonites. Its organ still worked, and the some of the missionaries began using the building as a social gathering place on Sunday afternoons, where they could listen to music or have a sing-along. Those gatherings lasted until a group of Union soldiers from the 24th Massachusetts regiment discovered the organ and carried it off to their camp.
By 1863, during a cantankerous debate among the missionaries over the meaning of communion, the church took on a more unfortunate function. While some of the Unitarian teachers, like Laura Towne, believed in "open communion" for black and white parishioners alike, others advocated a "closed communion." When communion was offered to the freedmen at the Brick Church, the closed communion group left the building and went to The White Church to hold their own sacrament. How ironic it might have seemed, had the advocates of abolition who came to the island to help the freed slaves realized that they were actually creating a tradition of segregation. (And I'll step off my soapbox, now!)
 There are other features of interest on the grounds of The Chapel of Ease. When the church burned during a forest fire in the late 19th century, its bricks and woodwork disappeared, but the tabby skeleton of the church stands strong, giving us a glimpse of the permanence of that construction material. Tabby is a mixture of convenience, combining lime and water with the ever-present supply of sand and oyster shells on the island. The result is a type of concrete that sparkles in the sun and remains impervious to wind and rain.
 The remains of a mausoleum are also located in the cemetery of The Chapel of Ease. The structure, erected in 1853, at one time contained the remains of three members of the Fripp family. Today, the door stands open and the tombs are empty. Local lore says that Union soldiers were also responsible for this destruction because they needed the slabs on top of the tombs to serve as operating tables for their wounded. I've not been able to verify that explanation, but I admit it sounds a bit better than simple vandalism.
We had a fantastic trip to Beaufort, and now that I've shared a few of the high-lights with you, it's time to get back to writing. The sights and sounds, the stink of pluff mud and the sting of "no-see-ums," the narrow streets and massive plantation houses, the gossip and the superstitions, the dangling Spanish moss, the looming oak trees, and the ever-changing tides will all find their way into my next book, as will the places we've just visited.
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Posted on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 9:48 AM
In 1855, the slaves who belonged to Baptist plantation owners on St. Helena Island built an elegant brick and mortar two-story church to serve as the island's center of worship. Here's a picture of it taken around 1865. Inside, a roomy sanctuary provided seating for the island's wealthy white population. Their slaves were allowed to occupy the second-story balcony, where they could attend the services without actually rubbing elbows with their owners. Outside were burial grounds for those planter families, including plots occupied by the family members of Daniel Pope, who owned the massive Oaks Plantation just across the river from Beaufort. The three tall obelisks in this recent photo are Pope memorials:
When Union forces captured Port Royal Sound and the surrounding islands, the white planters fled, leaving their slaves to inherit this church. Gideonite teachers and missionaries who occupied the abandoned Oaks Plantation joined them for services in the Brick Church, which would become the center of their social lives.
In 1862 Laura Towne and Ellen Murray began teaching a few slave children in the living room of the Oaks. But when the number of eager pupils swelled from 9 children to over 80 blacks of all ages, they moved the classes to the Brick Church. Laura describes the scene in the sanctuary, where some 200 freed men, women and children took part in lessons, a group in each corner of the room, all shouting their ABC's to make themselves heard over the other classes.
 Today the church looks much as it did 150 years ago. It still has an active congregation with services held every Sunday. The building has been refurbished but not fundamentally altered. Outside, along the sidewalks, bricks carved with the names of the descendants of the first slaves to worship here reveal the continuity that marks this community.
 The church stands just across Land's End Road (now renamed Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive) from The Penn Center, where a museum and conference center commemorate the work that Laura and Ellen did here. Over the years, the mission of the Penn Center expanded from teaching illiterate slaves to providing vocational training for their descendants. Now, no longer an active school, it concentrates on preserving and expanding our knowledge of the Gullah culture that developed among the African-American population on these islands.
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