Illustration by Harry Tennant
We pulled into the RV park at night and woke to the sound of rain. The wet morning allowed us time to linger on St. Helena Island near Beaufort, South Carolina, before heading across the bridge to our campsite at Hunting Island State Park, where my husband and our four children have returned for years. We borrowed an RV so that my mother-in-law, our children’s nana, could join us without roughing it in a tent. As much as I love swimming in the ocean, combing for sand dollars, watching pelicans drift along the coast, and eating ice cream by the lighthouse, I was glad for the rain. It slowed us down enough to explore parts of St. Helena’s history.
My nana, my paternal grandmother, collected hundreds of books by and about Black people. Raised by her grandmother, who had been born into slavery, Nana took my siblings and me to museums, plantations, and historical sites, even if we would have preferred more beach time. Is that a scowl on my face in a photo of me by a roadside marker or just the sun in my eyes? After her death, my father gave me many of Nana’s books. One was Face of an Island, a collection of black-and-white photos taken by Leigh Richmond Miner in the early 1900s of African American life on St. Helena. The book, printed in 1970, offers tender, candid portraits of people whose eyes remembered slavery; some remembered Africa. The teachers, midwives, fisherman, basket makers, and builders in the photos are long gone, but some of their descendants and buildings in the photos remain.
We started with the ruins of the Chapel of Ease. Built in the 1740s, it was abandoned by white worshipers during the Civil War and used by a free Black congregation in the 1860s until a fire destroyed it. We stood in the mist and ran our hands over the blackened bones of its scratchy oyster shell tabby construction. While our son shimmied barefoot up slick trees, our daughters stood in empty window frames for perfectly lit photos with their nana. We walked the graves, rubbing our fingers across weather-worn names and epitaphs.
We stopped at the Penn Center, established as a school for newly emancipated people and the site of many of Miner’s photos. In the 1960s Martin Luther King Jr. retreated in a small cabin on a quiet corner of the campus. I picture him breathing the damp salt air, writing under oaks and Spanish moss. King returned there five times between 1964 and 1967. In 1968, after his assassination, Penn Center staff found pieces of his “I Have a Dream” speech in the cabin. The small museum held seagrass baskets, much like one I inherited from Nana, and a guide to Gullah, the West African–influenced language of the Sea Islands. I could have spent the whole day there, but the clouds grew thin— along with my children’s patience.
Tucked in Nana’s copy of Face of an Island is a thin paper from the now defunct Wilkops White Hall Inn on Lady’s Island in nearby Beaufort. My grandparents were wealthy in their old age and loved to stay and dine in fancy places. They were often the only Black patrons at upscale establishments like this one must have been. Nana did not share my love for camping. But she loved the salt air, and she loved history. And I felt her close that day, maybe as I asked my girls to stand for a photo by a historical marker.
Josina Guess is a contributor to the award-winning anthology Bigger Than Bravery: Black Resilience and Reclamation in a Time of Pandemic, and she has written for Atlanta magazine, Oxford American, and Bitter Southerner. She is associate editor for Sojourners magazine and lives in Comer, Georgia, with her family.
This article appears in the Winter 2025 issue of Southbound.
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