Obituary | Salt marsh and sweet potatoes

Obituary: Cornelia Bailey died on October 15th

The matriarch of Sapelo Island, Georgia was 72

THEY had always grown red peas, so Cornelia Bailey thought nothing of it. She and her husband dropped the seed in the spring, Frank hoeing and she following. They planted on a growing moon, not a wasting one, and when the tide was coming in; if a pregnant woman could do the sowing, so much the better. They waited, too, until the pecan trees put out their blossom. It was safe then to plant what you liked. Nothing could fool the pecans.

Generally the peas were eaten up by the family, which included a crowd of adopted and foster children as well as her own. But one day a chef from Atlanta asked for some and paid her a cheque for them. Sapelo red peas, it turned out, were not only pretty to look at but a gourmet taste and rare. More customers came along, so she expanded the plot. She then thought she could make a business out of it, and that this might save her island.

For Sapelo was dying. Hog Hammock, where she lived, was the last community of Saltwater Geechee on the island, and the island the last undeveloped place in the chain of Sea Islands running down the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. The Geechee-Gullah people were direct descendants of African slaves brought over to work rice plantations in the 18th century; they had a hundred west African ways, as she did with her pea-planting. So many of the things she watched her father do—making long cast-nets, weaving baskets from sweet-grass, dancing arms-out like a circling buzzard while his friends beat the ground with sticks—had come from Africa. Much of the food she ate, the rice, okra, peanuts and vegetable stew, was African. And a whole African spirit-world surrounded her. “Hags” pinned her down in bed at night, dead relations called her name and tried to lure her into the woods, “root doctors” brewed up poisoned moonshine and could put a hex on neighbours, if you asked.

Her descent was from Bilali, a Muslim slave so imposing that he was the manager for a white plantation-owner. With her straight look and straight talk, she had inherited his forcefulness. The short form of Cornelia, “Nia”, meant “she who has a purpose”. Hers was to save Sapelo and, with it, everything that made up her life—the smell of the salt marsh, the taste of sweet potatoes dug out of hot ashes, the night chorus of crickets and frogs. In the 1950s developers “from off” began to descend on theisland’s miles of white beaches and forests of live oaks and palmetto, as they had on other islands. Any Geechee who farmed plots were slowly pushed out until Hog Hammock became their only refuge.

But buzzards were circling that place, too. In 1910 around 500 people lived there. By 2012 there were 50 or so. The two-room school she attended from 1951, in her best plaid dress, closed down. The Big Houses of white landowners went to the state and their land to a reserve, so jobs in “Massa fields” vanished. Meanwhile, those eager developers helped push property taxes sky-high. No wonder people left. When a baby was born on Sapelo, the afterbirth was always buried to tie it to the island. But Miss Katie, the last midwife who knew that piece of African magic, retired after delivering Greg Bailey, her fourth child, and no one followed. There was no more old-fashioned anything. Just a heavy loss.

Tourists could help, and she welcomed them, up to a point. She took over the old store and stocked it with cloth dolls and scuppernong jelly; she helped run Sapelo Days, when everyone dressed up nicely for the visitors, cooked their best foods and had their best manners. In the heart of Hog Hammock she and Frank built a six-bed inn “For Nature Lovers Only”. But she did not want outsiders to stay too long. Her eyes watered to think of no more cotton, no more sawmills; her community just things in a museum, to be poked at and stared at.

A visit to west Africa reinforced her purpose. There, in thriving villages, she found the same okra and smoked fish in the market, the same ways of carrying bundles on heads, even the buzzard dance, that she knew from home. By a miracle, these things had survived in her own tiny outpost on the coast of the United States. In a village in Sierra Leone a woman dressed her in gold fabric and made her a paramount chief. It gave her the deepest glow in her life, and made her even more of a fighter. As long as Geechee ways were racing in her mind, she had to talk about them.

The funeral bell

Hog Hammock also had to be a working entity, just as it used to be. A real “make-do” society, where people’s wealth was not money in the bank but a piece of land to pass on to their children. She would rather it was all-black, as it was back then; and if anyone thought that was racist, she did not give a hoot. Everybody was still kin, right from those Africans in the beginning.

Her hopes were set on the red-peas project and a second one, to bring back Purple Ribbon sugar cane. She imagined the wire-grass fields looking lush again, and jobs and people returning. Why not? At the age of three she had died, and was laid in a coffin, after getting a fever from eating unripe pears. The funeral bell had tolled for her from the First African Baptist church; Uncle Nero kept saying, “Bury the chile.” But an aunt had rubbed her hard with garlic all over, and she came round. Despite everything, surely Sapelo could, too.

This article appeared in the Obituary section of the print edition under the headline "Salt marsh and sweet potatoes"

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