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Sapelo's People: A Long Walk into Freedom
"A searing metaphorical X-ray of a people battling to find space where they can become themselves. . . . I am deeply grateful for McFeely's magnificent effort of thought, empathy, scholarship and imagination." ―Roger Wilkins, Los Angeles Times Book Review (front-page review) In this moving and original work, William S. McFeely, one of this country's most distinguished historians, retells the history―and enters into the current-day lives―of the people who inhabit Sapelo's Island off the coast of Georgia, descendants of slaves who once worked its huge cotton plantations. It is at once a richly detailed work of historical reconstruction, a sensitive portrait of the lives of black Americans in this particular place and in our own time, and a moving meditation on race by a writer who has made its painful dilemmas his life's work as a historian.
200 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 29, 2015
Much evidence outside this book suggests that the author is an accomplished historian, a sensitive humanist, and absolutely on the right side of history when it comes to race relations in America. However, this book is terrible.
The history of the black community of Sapelo Island, a coastal island off Georgia, is unquestionably riveting. Along with African-Americans who've lived for generations on the coastal islands of Georgia and South Carolina, they are considered part of the Gullah or Geechee community, whose relative isolation from main-land plantations left them with a distinct pattern of language and a specific set of cultural practices that seem to have been preserved largely intact from their African heritage. The Gullah community in the last thirty years has been increasingly fetishized as authentically African even at the same time that their continued cultural coherence has come under attack. Their long presence on coastal islands (which led to their unique culture) was made possible because not very many white people wanted to live there. Now that Atlanta has risen and air-conditioning has been invented, developers are eager to buy up their land to build ocean-side condos and golf courses, with a voracity that exploits the fact that Gullah titles to land often derive uncertainly from the mixed-up aftermath of the Civil War.
McFeely implies in the first chapter that his aim is to free Sapelo from some of its fetishization as "authentic" by writing a history which shows how they've interacted with the larger sweep of American history. He makes snide remarks about readers whose knowledge of Gullah culture comes solely from the Sunday lifestyle section of the newspaper, and sniffs about how many dead cars litter the island. But his own research confirms rather than overturns the continuities Sapelo’s people have with their very distant African past. A slave brought to the island plantation at the start of the nineteenth century really did practice a northern-African form of Islam, and left a handwritten book of elegant Arabic behind him, in order to pass the religion to his descendants. McFeely explains the process the Spaldings, owners of the nineteenth-century Sapelo plantation, used to incorporate newly arrived, traumatized slaves into small platoons of slaves already on the island, creating bonds that would prevent them from running away. The Spaldings relied on those bonds when they marched every able-bodied slave off the island (leaving behind half a dozen elderly slaves to fend for themselves) as the Union navy approached the island. They didn't want their property taken away. McFeely also shows how the bonds among the slaves pulled them back to the island, and back toward one another, as the antebellum south collapsed.
The most harrowing part of the book details the obscene series of promises made by the Union to freed slaves after the civil war, and then broken. General Sherman, concerned that large crowds of freed slaves would continue to follow the Union army wherever it went, made a declaration that every freedman could lay claim to a tract of land on which to support himself. In fact, he declared that the coastal islands of Georgia, and twenty miles inland from the coast, were open only to freed slaves, and that any non-military white man found in the territory would be punished for trespassing. Freed slaves came back to Sapelo, and with the guidance of black self-help groups from the North, began to cultivate their own land. Congress, however, had other ideas. Within 12 months, that land (neatly plowed and planted already) was back in the hands of the former plantation owners. The Federal Bureau that had been designed by Union generals to help re-settle freed slaves had been gutted, and would be entirely disbanded within a dozen years.
That's pretty much where McFeely's narrative leaves off. He tells us that Sapelo Island never fell into the pattern of sharecropping that impoverished and oppressed the bulk of the African-American population in the American south, but he doesn't mention if that makes them exceptional, or if all Gullah communities were similarly resistant. Given how central land rights are to the current Gullah struggles, this seems like a massive omission. McFeely mentions the effects of two nineteenth-century hurricanes, but barely covers twentieth-century historical developments of any stripe ,only noting very briefly that the heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune spent much of the 1950s and 60s buying out land from under Sapelo inhabitants, so that he could turn the island into his own private game preserve.
What he gives us instead – at great length – are meandering and entirely clichéd reflections as he visits the island, meets its inhabitants, and attends its Baptist church’s 125th anniversary, and wanders its landscape. “Why am I not a stranger here? My skin color is too light; by island standards I’m rich, have a fancy education, and sound funny when I talk. Of course I’m an outsider . . . and yet I feel almost at home” (156).
Look, dude. It’s called white guilt. Lots of white people have it and lots of white people talk about it. So much so that sometimes when white people talk about their white guilt, they forget to give any air-time to actual black experience. And that’s pretty much what’s happened here. I bought the book to find out more about, you know, _Sapelo’s People_ and instead I get baggy paragraphs where McFeely compares himself to Jimmy Carter (a previous white visitor to Sapelo’s First African Baptist Church); walks out on the sermon there because it seems interminable; memorializes a young man from the island who was shot and killed with the completely odd comment, “I had thought anyone with a body like that deserved the world” (167). And he never lets you forget exactly how awkward he feels doing all of it, although he comes to the conclusion (multiple times, in multiple paragraphs) that in the end, some bridge has been crossed, some understanding has been reached between Sapelo’s people and himself. Who cares?
The history of the black community of Sapelo Island, a coastal island off Georgia, is unquestionably riveting. Along with African-Americans who've lived for generations on the coastal islands of Georgia and South Carolina, they are considered part of the Gullah or Geechee community, whose relative isolation from main-land plantations left them with a distinct pattern of language and a specific set of cultural practices that seem to have been preserved largely intact from their African heritage. The Gullah community in the last thirty years has been increasingly fetishized as authentically African even at the same time that their continued cultural coherence has come under attack. Their long presence on coastal islands (which led to their unique culture) was made possible because not very many white people wanted to live there. Now that Atlanta has risen and air-conditioning has been invented, developers are eager to buy up their land to build ocean-side condos and golf courses, with a voracity that exploits the fact that Gullah titles to land often derive uncertainly from the mixed-up aftermath of the Civil War.
McFeely implies in the first chapter that his aim is to free Sapelo from some of its fetishization as "authentic" by writing a history which shows how they've interacted with the larger sweep of American history. He makes snide remarks about readers whose knowledge of Gullah culture comes solely from the Sunday lifestyle section of the newspaper, and sniffs about how many dead cars litter the island. But his own research confirms rather than overturns the continuities Sapelo’s people have with their very distant African past. A slave brought to the island plantation at the start of the nineteenth century really did practice a northern-African form of Islam, and left a handwritten book of elegant Arabic behind him, in order to pass the religion to his descendants. McFeely explains the process the Spaldings, owners of the nineteenth-century Sapelo plantation, used to incorporate newly arrived, traumatized slaves into small platoons of slaves already on the island, creating bonds that would prevent them from running away. The Spaldings relied on those bonds when they marched every able-bodied slave off the island (leaving behind half a dozen elderly slaves to fend for themselves) as the Union navy approached the island. They didn't want their property taken away. McFeely also shows how the bonds among the slaves pulled them back to the island, and back toward one another, as the antebellum south collapsed.
The most harrowing part of the book details the obscene series of promises made by the Union to freed slaves after the civil war, and then broken. General Sherman, concerned that large crowds of freed slaves would continue to follow the Union army wherever it went, made a declaration that every freedman could lay claim to a tract of land on which to support himself. In fact, he declared that the coastal islands of Georgia, and twenty miles inland from the coast, were open only to freed slaves, and that any non-military white man found in the territory would be punished for trespassing. Freed slaves came back to Sapelo, and with the guidance of black self-help groups from the North, began to cultivate their own land. Congress, however, had other ideas. Within 12 months, that land (neatly plowed and planted already) was back in the hands of the former plantation owners. The Federal Bureau that had been designed by Union generals to help re-settle freed slaves had been gutted, and would be entirely disbanded within a dozen years.
That's pretty much where McFeely's narrative leaves off. He tells us that Sapelo Island never fell into the pattern of sharecropping that impoverished and oppressed the bulk of the African-American population in the American south, but he doesn't mention if that makes them exceptional, or if all Gullah communities were similarly resistant. Given how central land rights are to the current Gullah struggles, this seems like a massive omission. McFeely mentions the effects of two nineteenth-century hurricanes, but barely covers twentieth-century historical developments of any stripe ,only noting very briefly that the heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune spent much of the 1950s and 60s buying out land from under Sapelo inhabitants, so that he could turn the island into his own private game preserve.
What he gives us instead – at great length – are meandering and entirely clichéd reflections as he visits the island, meets its inhabitants, and attends its Baptist church’s 125th anniversary, and wanders its landscape. “Why am I not a stranger here? My skin color is too light; by island standards I’m rich, have a fancy education, and sound funny when I talk. Of course I’m an outsider . . . and yet I feel almost at home” (156).
Look, dude. It’s called white guilt. Lots of white people have it and lots of white people talk about it. So much so that sometimes when white people talk about their white guilt, they forget to give any air-time to actual black experience. And that’s pretty much what’s happened here. I bought the book to find out more about, you know, _Sapelo’s People_ and instead I get baggy paragraphs where McFeely compares himself to Jimmy Carter (a previous white visitor to Sapelo’s First African Baptist Church); walks out on the sermon there because it seems interminable; memorializes a young man from the island who was shot and killed with the completely odd comment, “I had thought anyone with a body like that deserved the world” (167). And he never lets you forget exactly how awkward he feels doing all of it, although he comes to the conclusion (multiple times, in multiple paragraphs) that in the end, some bridge has been crossed, some understanding has been reached between Sapelo’s people and himself. Who cares?
June 11, 2009
Wasn't really into McFeely's self-reflective narrative style, but the story of the island and its people is quite amazing. McFeely tries to explore the ethics of historical storytelling and the role of the historian/documentarian, but I think smart explorations of these issues can be found elsewhere.
September 21, 2017
After spending a week on the island, I really wanted to learn more about the history of the people living there because it seemed like the plantation days were so close I could feel them. This book helped reveal some of the history hiding in plain sight, so for me, this book was invaluable. That being said, I can see it wouldn't be quite as thrilling to someone if they hadn't been touched by the area, but the stories of real people tied to the historical trails of enslavement and economic hardship are still very compelling. It was amazing to connect the long-standing family names in the book to people I actually met on the island, and I would read it again the next time I go back. The book served as a living reminder that history is not just in the past.
March 3, 2021
I found this on the shelf of our host on the historic, and protected barrier Island called Sapelo. Since this historian (pulitzer for his bio on Frederick Douglass) published this particular meditative inquiry in 1994, he is not tainted by the current shaming or mindless brow beating that is being thrust into anyone's honest desire to understand back history or the failings of the reconstruction after the Civil War. Wm.S. McFeely spent good time on this Island and with its people. He spent a lifetime in this arena of discovery, and is a very good writer aiming to understand with compassion. Here's a quote "...debt not guilt; no word has done less useful service to the relations between those in America who have been forced to categorize ourselves as Black and White" p.168
August 31, 2021
A book of historical facts and conjecture of inhabitants who lived, slaved, worked, and died on the small island Sapelo. Also facts on the descendants, how land was taken, maneuvered away from the original freedmen. The book felt disconnected, mundane, and like reading a term paper in school. I love history, genealogy and appreciate the author's historical research, interviews, and intent to provide a history of the island's people, the civil war’s ïmpact, and the ensuing race relations. However, I felt that it could have been better if ït was written to be more engaging. 3.5 stars rounded up
May 23, 2021
This sweet book is a short survey of important stories about Sapelo, by the late UGA scholar McFeely.
There must be support for traditional Gullah and Geechee life of the Sea Islands, particularly this old Sapelo.
Discuss.
There must be support for traditional Gullah and Geechee life of the Sea Islands, particularly this old Sapelo.
Discuss.
May 9, 2020
An interesting story that has a lot of holes in it. It basically wets your interest for more information and details.
December 27, 2024
This is such a GEM, honestly one of the best books I’ve read this year. It’s such an incredible history and focus on a wonderful place and its people!
October 25, 2018
I expected history, including interviews with some of the people living in Sapelo, but the actual history and interviews were a small part of the book. At the end, the author said the book was meant to be more of a meditation on race, and I thought - oh, then I wouldn't have bought the book. I kept wanting to know more about the history of the island and the people who lived and still live on it, and I wanted to know less about how the author felt about the island and its inhabitants.
August 30, 2011
This would be primarily of interest to readers who know the families of Sapelo; secondarily of interest to those who have visited Sapelo. Greatest insight was the the strong Muslim heritage and continued faith of the earliest involuntary residents.
May 30, 2012
I read this for research but found myself totally involved with the prose. Excellent read about a beautiful island and its people.
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December 6, 2015feel
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews