LITTLE ST. SIMON'S ISLAND: 48 HOURS OF WONDER

I supposed I was getting too old to be surprised, but my daughter showed me that this was not the case. Late in 2022 she bestowed on me the belated birthday gift of time alone with her in a setting that was made-to-order for this unrepentant tree-hugger, wildlife lover and worshipper of silence and tranquillity: she booked us into the small lodge on Little St. Simons Island, Georgia, an unspoiled barrier island rimming the Atlantic Ocean. 

Having arrived there after a long boat ride from the main St. Simons Island, in the course of which Lily spotted an ebullient dolphin swimming in the waters of the Hampton River, we checked into our 100 year-old guest house. At the oyster roast that followed, we got to know the twenty other guests with whom we'd be sharing the 11,000 acre island for the weekend. As she and I were leaving the lodge at twilight to make our way to the guest house I heard a scuffling sound in the cabbage palms that bordered the deck. I waited to see if the possum or raccoon would emerge, but was confused when the animal's scuffling was accompanied by a scraping sound against the deck, as if it were dragging metal trowels in its wake. When I saw the thing emerge on the wooden plank I shrieked - not out of fear but with excitement -"It's an armadillo!" My first. 

Our first full day on the island was filled with many more surprising 'firsts.' Riding with a naturalist out the northernmost track, we feasted our eyes on a small flock of roseate spoonbills: flamingo sized birds with feathers the color of birthday cake roses. (Roseates are the only American spoonbill out of 6 species worldwide.) We ooohed and ahhhed over the feathers adorning a tricolor heron as it fished in a shallow pond: a shimmering raiment of grayish blue, mauve and lilac. The herons didn't seem to mind the baby alligators sharing their pond, but all the birds gave a wide berth to the adult gators we spotted conserving their body heat by lying low in the freshwater marshes. 

Roseate spoonbills and egrets

I was curious about the island's history of interaction with humans, and learned that it was once owned by a pencil-manufacturing magnate who bought it because he believed, mistakenly, that the island was covered in yellow pine which he planned to make into pencils. The island was a private retreat for the Bergholzer family for seventy years spanning most of the 20th century; during that time vast ponds were excavated to attract ducks for hunting, and deer were imported for the same purpose. The deer are gone now, the living ones, at least. A score of stuffed deer heads hang from the walls of the lodge, testament to a time when trophy hunting was the rage. However, the ponds and salt marshes continue to attract over 334 species of birds who feed, nest or overwinter there. In 2015, the current owners of the island, Henry Paulson, former U. S. Secretary of the Treasury and his wife Wendy, donated a conservation easement to the Nature Conservancy. This ensures that the ecological integrity of LSSI will be preserved for future generations. 

In learning about the history of ownership and occupation of the island I was interested to hear that it had once been part of the Butler empire. I came across the fascinating story of the southern plantation owner, Pierce Butler, and his wife, British actress-turned-plantation-mistress Fanny Kemble, while I was doing research for my Civil War-era novel The Second Mrs. Hockaday (Algonquin, 2017.) The Kemble family's theatre troupe had fallen on hard times in London in 1832, and like so many British performers and authors (think Dickens) they had come to "that dreadful America," as Charles Kemble described it, to make money. Pierce witnessed Fanny performing with her father onstage at the beginning of their American tour and set his cap for her, determining to wear her down with his proposals.  

Fanny Kemble, by Thos. Sully

Pierce presented himself to Fanny as a wealthy Philadelphian, and indeed he was; his maternal grandfather owned large amounts of real estate in Rhode Island as well as Pennsylvania. What he failed to mention to her was that the Butler dynasty was built on prized Sea-Island cotton, sugar and rice farmed on plantations in Georgia by hundreds of slaves owned by their absentee masters. In 1822 when their grandfather died, Butler and his brother John inherited the Georgian tracts on the Altamaha River: Hampton Point at the northern end of St. Simons Island and Butler Island to the west. John died soon after inheriting and his younger brother Pierce was not able to replicate his grandfather's successes. Nor, having won Fanny over and married her in 1834, was he able to maintain a happy marriage. On a three-month-long trip the Butlers made to the southern properties in 1838, Fanny wrote in letters home to England that she planned to keep a diary chronicling this adventure. What she recorded on that sojourn was to prove influential in the outcome of the Civil War.

I bought a copy of Fanny's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39 at the Little St. Simons Lodge, and for two nights I read passages from it to my daughter. Kemble recounts making an excursion to LSSI from the plantation on St. Simons Island that turned out to be profoundly arduous, writing that she was "little imagining what manner of day's work was before me." (Kemble 333). In fact, that day's work fell mostly to the six enslaved men required to accompany her, her two small children and their Irish nursemaid. In the course of the day the men rowed the boat along an "intricate" course of sea swamps, creeks and channels to LSSI and then navigated the wagon through woods that were nearly impassable in order to fulfill Fanny's desire to view the sea on the other side. 

They chopped a track through the palmettos and live oaks with axes, and, at times, were forced to lift the wagon in the air in order for the party to get across ditches. Kemble writes: "The back of Israel's coat was covered so thick with mosquitoes that one could hardly see the cloth" and describes how she "partly jumped and was partly hauled over" another deep ditch in a salt marsh after she resisted the men's pleas to "let them lie down and make a bridge with their bodies for me to walk over."(334)

Track through the woods

Later, Fanny was horrified to be told by a neighbor that if she had only taken the boat at an optimal time for the tide, she might have sailed directly to the beach instead of struggling for hours through the mosquito-infested woods. In wondering why the enslaved men did not explain this, and subjected themselves to so much physical toil without a "syllable of remonstrance" "she answers her own question by recounting the conversation she had with Israel afterwards. She asked him why he and the other men did not protest, or even point out an alternative course they could have taken with the boat. He tells her: "Missis say so, so me do. Missis say me go through the wood, me no tell Missis go another way." (336)

Helen House at LSSI, with live oak & Spanish moss

Kemble's dawning recognition of the power wielded by wealthy white slaveowners and their overseers over enslaved black "servants" grew into barely contained outrage. She circulated some of her journal writings among friends in New England who urged her to publish them in support of abolition, but she was not free to do so. She and her husband became estranged as their views and values diverged, and Pierce Butler threatened her with divorce and the loss of her daughters if she persisted in sharing her writings. She acceded to his wishes but he sued for divorce in any case, winning custody of the girls in 1849. It would be another decade before the youngest child came of age and was free to be with Fanny, but by then, America was heading inexorably towards Civil War. Visiting England in 1862, Fanny was so alarmed by pro-Confederate sentiment there that she resolved to publish her Journal at last. In the spring of 1863 it was published in England as well as the U.S., and its influence in discouraging the British from aiding or supporting the Southern rebels, along with the impact of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, is credited with turning the tide for the Union.

Pierce Butler at far left. Fanny sits beside him.

I imagine that Little St. Simons Island as it looks today isn't vastly different from what Fanny experienced in 1838 (and, more to the point, what the six African-American men experienced on that day of back-breaking bush-hogging). The woods are so dense, so atmospherically spooky with dangling fronds of Spanish moss, thickets of palm, native holly and magnolia crowding the forest floor, that is hard to envision so much as cutting a path through the interior without the aid of a modern backhoe. On our second day on LSSI, I opted for a kayak trip with one other guest as well as our naturalist/guide, while my daughter elected to ride one of the lodge bicycles out to the ocean. It was ironic that while I spent 90 minutes rowing dreamily on Mosquito Creek, Lily was being bitten to distraction by clouds of mosquitoes and sandflies that followed her all the way to the beach and back. Later, I read aloud to her the passage in Kemble's book about Israel's shirt being covered so thickly in mosquitoes that the cloth was not visible, but my daughter was not amused. Thank goodness I thought to pack Benadryl bug bite remedy, which helped to redeem me, slightly.

The Lodge at dusk.

It's easy to see why Fanny Kemble's Journal had such an impact when it appeared during the Civil War, with an entire nation suffering terrible losses in the violent conflict over slavery. But by modern standards, I found it difficult to continue reading Kemble's book because of the writer's own complicated perceptions of African Americans. She deplores the terrible conditions in which the slaves lived, and describes the shocking ways they were denied justice for the crimes committed against them. And yet, in countless anecdotes of encounters with "negroes" she reveals quite openly her biases and her deep-seated sense of supremacy. For example, in describing the trip she made with Pierce and her babies to the southern properties in 1838, traveling at various times by coach or railcars through Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina, she writes: "Here I encountered the first slaves I ever saw...they were poorly clothed; looked horribly dirty, and had a lazy recklessness in their air and manner as they sauntered along, which naturally belongs to creatures without one of the responsibilities which are the honorable burthen of rational humanity."(17)

Even taking into account the long-ago times in which she wrote, it becomes dispiriting to read page after page of commentary in that tone, knowing that racism as deeply ingrained as Mrs. Butler possessed is our country's lamentable legacy. And she was an abolitionist! If only we could move beyond our own history...

As a footnote to the Butler/St Simons story, I heard the tail-end of a news story on television one night after we'd been back from Georgia for a week or two. It concerned the controversy over a proposed expanded memorial site outside Savannah which would mark "The Weeping Time." This was a sad event held in 1859 on the site of a race course, being the largest sale of enslaved black people ever held in Georgia. 436 men, women and children were auctioned off in the rain to settle the debts of a plantation owner not named by the news correspondent. The wails of the powerless blacks being wrenched from their homes and carted away by their new owners was said to have haunted spectators for years afterward. 

Seeking more information, I researched The Weeping Time online. Surprise, surprise: the slave owner holding the sale was Pierce Butler, Franny Kemble's ex-husband. By 1859 he had run the Butler estate into the ground despite the efforts of a group of trustees who did their best to rein in his speculations and expenses. For the sake of barely $300,000 in profits, which he burned through in a few short years, ending up drunk and destitute, Butler sold off slave families that went back generations on Butler Island and Hampton Point, back to the time of Pierce's grandfather. In most cases those were the only homes they had ever known.

Marker at the site of The Weeping Time

Now the city of Savannah was expressing reluctance at constructing, on the site of the former racecourse, a larger monument than the plaque which marks it currently. If I lived in Savannah, I'd say: build a goddamn temple on that site! Acknowledge this grim history or forever be a prisoner of it!

But all this information came to light for me later. I'm glad I didn't have enough time to become fully immersed in the Butler tragedies while we were on the island. The best part about the 48 hours I was privileged to spend on LSSI was not learning about the history of the place, but living in the present extraordinary moment with my grown child. I had not been able to spend more than a couple of hours alone with Lily since she had gone off to college, followed by marriage and law school and a busy adult life of her own, so the experience was priceless.

There is a strange relationship between the St. Simons landscape and memory. For weeks afterward, images from the island, the effects of light and shadow, certain saturated colors (such as the infinitely deep color of the sky at twilight) and the sounds of water in motion,  have been haunting my waking hours. They have even found their way into my dreams. This helps me to appreciate why so many of the Butler and Hampton Point enslaved people eventually made their way back to the islands when the Civil War ended and all were emancipated. If you had spent your life in this place and it was taken from you, it strikes me that it might be impossible to expunge the imprint of all those twisted live oaks from your heart. 

I only spent two days on Little St. Simons Island, but the flights of snowy egrets will be forever traced across the salt marsh of my spirit.

Lily on the banks of the Hampton River, looking west to the mainland

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For information on visiting Little St. Simons Island, access the website:

https://www.littlestsimonsisland.com

SOURCES:

Kemble, Frances Anne. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39. Athens, Georgia. The University of Georgia Press, 1984. Print.

DeGraft-Hanson, Kwesi. "Unearthing the Weeping Time: Savannah's Ten Broeck Race Course and 1859 Slave Sale." https://southernspaces.org 18 February 2010. Web.