Tales from Brookgreen Page 7

  BAM! BAM! BAM!

  “No Mister Man! No Mister Man!”

  BAM! BAM! BAM!

  “It was Brother Rabbit’s runt pup that caught your deer!”

  BAM! BAM! BAM!

  Hearing the racket, Brother Rabbit, who had started to skin out the deer, stood stock-still. He listened to the yelling and the beating as it came closer and closer. In a flash he grabbed up his runt pup and tucked it under his arm.

  Then, at the top of his lungs, Brother Rabbit began yelling, “It sure wasn’t my runt pup that caught that deer! How could a runt pup catch a deer?” Then he added, “It was Brother Frog’s fine hunting dog that caught that deer for sure!” as he took off running for home.

  When Brother Rabbit had disappeared into the trees, Brother Frog lay down his stick, came out of the woods, and finished skinning out the deer. Then he gathered up his meat, called to his fine hunting dog, and hopped slowly on home, smiling and swallowing all the way.

  “Brother Frog”

  Finally, Miss Genevieve told me how Brother Rabbit, always trying to play the trickster, was once more out-tricked, this time by Brother Guinea Fowl …

  One day Brother Rabbit and Brother Guinea were walking together in the woods when they came upon a cow grazing in a clearing. They could find no brand or mark on the cow so, clearly, this cow now belonged to them. After some discussion they agreed to butcher the cow and split the meat evenly. So they did.

  When the meat was divided up equally into two piles Brother Rabbit remarked, “All that work made me so hungry! I can’t wait for a meal of this good cow meat. Brother Guinea, why don’t you fly up there in the sky and grab a piece of that orange fire. Bring it back here while I gather up some wood. We’ll make a nice fire and cook a piece of this meat to eat right now.”

  Brother Guinea wasn’t too sure about that plan, but at Brother Rabbit’s urging he started flying toward the orange ball of fire in the sky. He flew and he flew but he never seemed to get any closer to it. Finally he was so worn out that he had to turn back.

  When Brother Guinea at last returned to where he and Brother Rabbit had butchered the cow, all he saw was Brother Rabbit sitting by a pile of sticks at the edge of the clearing. The meat was all gone expect for the scrawny cow tail.

  “Where’s all our meat?” demanded Brother Guinea!

  “I don’t know,” replied Brother Rabbit. “You were gone so long that I lay down to take a nap after I gathered this wood. When I woke up the meat was gone except for this scrawny tail here. Somebody must have stolen our meat!”

  Brother Guinea studied this for a while, then grumbled, “Well, I am so tired and hungry that I have got to have something to eat. At least I can pick at this scrawny tail.” And he did.

  As Brother Guinea finished the last little scrap of meat on the scrawny tail he began to flop around, squawking and gasping.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Brother Rabbit in alarm!

  “I’m poisoned! I’m poisoned!” shouted Brother Guinea.

  With that, he flopped over on his back in the middle of the clearing … wings outstretched … dead.

  “Oh no! Oh no!” cried Brother Rabbit, wringing his hands. “That meat was poisoned! What shall I do? I’ve got to get it back from my kinfolks! I don’t want my whole family to die!”

  Brother Rabbit raced around to all his many kinfolk, gathering up the meat that he had secretly carried off and distributed to them while Brother Guinea was gone. He brought it all back, piece by piece, and piled it up in the middle of the clearing.

  As Brother Rabbit arrived with the last piece of meat, Brother Guinea jumped up, suddenly resurrected from the dead!

  Brother Rabbit stared in astonishment. Brother Guinea shook his wing at Brother Rabbit declaring, “You thought you could fool me any time you wanted! You fooled me about the fire but you can’t fool me all the time! Now we are going to share this meat evenly!”

  And they did.

  “Brother Guinea”

  Chapter 6. Crab Boy’s Ghost

  (Why Cousin Corrie won’t catch stone crabs but Miss Genevieve will)

  Cousin Corrie loved ghost stories and anything related to the supernatural, from ancient Egyptian tales of the mystical powers of cats to present-day theories of ESP. She often entertained teenage cousins with “table turning,” an old-fashioned group activity designed to contact the spirit world. Like many in the Lowcountry, Cousin Corrie had grown up accepting the spirit world as just another aspect of reality, whether this spirit world was based on religious beliefs preached from the Sunday pulpit or on the folklore of haunts, hags, and plat-eyes that she learned from her Gullah family servants. The story of Crab Boy was one she heard as a child in her home at Woodlawn on the creek at Murrells Inlet. She especially liked telling it to children.

  “Low Tide”

  When I was a child we lived in a big wooden house right on the seashore at Murrells Inlet. Sometimes, early in the morning we would hear faint but urgent screams coming over and over from far down the creek toward Drunken Jack Island, behind what is now Huntington Beach. My mother, who didn’t stand for any such nonsense, always said it was just a peacock calling from a distant farmyard. But the Gullah women who helped my mother in the kitchen told us children that it was the ghost of Crab Boy crying for help. They called such spirits of children who had died unnatural deaths “drolls.”

  Saltwater creeks and marshes between sandy barrier islands like Huntington Beach and the mainland seashore are full of sea life. This sea life becomes delicious seafood for those who know how to catch it. As children, my brothers and sisters and I caught fish, raked oysters, and dug for clams. My father and brothers caught shrimp in hand thrown nets. We easily attracted blue crabs with a fish head tied to a length of twine as they swam in on the rising tide. Once a crab was feeding, we pulled the fish head in slowly until the crab was close enough to “swoop” it up with a dip net. Sometimes we would see crabs just resting along the water’s edge and could scoop them up without even needing fish heads.

  Oysters, blue crabs, and clams all make delicious eating but the greatest delicacy of the marsh is the stone crab, with sweet juicy meat in its giant claw. Catching stone crabs requires a very different technique than catching blue crabs however. Stone crabs do not swim in and out with the tide. They live deep in burrows in the mud banks along the creeks. The burrows are only exposed at low tide. Catching a stone crab requires a highly skilled technique and a lot of courage. That giant claw that is so delicious to eat can crush a finger with little effort.

  The best way to catch a stone crab is to wait for low tide, then walk along the edge of the creek looking for stone crab burrows. When you see one, which is just about as big around as your fist, you slowly slide your hand and arm way into it until you feel the crab with your fingers. Then you gently grab the crab “just the right way” and slip it out of the burrow and into your bucket. If the crab senses danger it will wedge itself in its hole with its legs and shell and attack with that giant claw.

  Now this method of catching stone crabs has been carefully explained to me, don’t you understand? I would never try it myself. Not after growing up hearing stories of Crab Boy!

  No one ever seemed to know what Crab Boy’s real name was. He wasn’t from around these parts. He came down to stay with relatives that lived here at Murrells Inlet near the shore behind Drunken Jack Island on land that is now part of Brookgreen Gardens. Before Freedom, Crab Boy’s uncles had been slaves here on the Waccamaw Neck on Brookgreen Plantation, or was it at The Oaks? Anyway, their job had been to provide all kinds of seafood for the planter’s table. After Freedom, they remained at Murrells Inlet living off the bounty of its creeks and marshes.

  Crab Boy’s uncles and cousins caught all manner of seafood that they sold to the people living in cottages from Magnolia Beach all the way to the north end of Murrells Inlet at Sunnyside. Stone crab claws brought the most money but stone crabs took patience and skill to catch.

  Crab
Boy’s relatives took him along as they gathered their harvest from the creeks. He learned to cast a shrimp net and to gather oysters carefully so as not to cut himself on their razor sharp shells. However his uncles warned him repeatedly, “Never go after stone crabs the way we do until you are much older.”

  Did he listen? Of course not!

  One day when the tide was just past its low point Crab Boy was exploring the maze of creeks by himself when he saw a perfect stone crab hole. He had seen his uncles pull crabs out so easily that he was sure he could do it too.

  The boy crouched down to the thick dark mud surrounding the hole and slowly reached in farther and farther until nearly his whole arm was extended into the burrow. Finally his fingers contacted the hard sharp creature. As he tried to slide his hand under the shell, the crab grabbed his finger with its crushing grip.

  Crab Boy shrieked in pain! He tried to yank his arm out of the hole but it wouldn’t budge! The crab had wedged itself solidly in the burrow and would not release its grip on the boy’s finger.

  Crab Boy screamed louder and louder for help. His uncles heard the cries and began searching for him but in the maze of creeks and marshes his calls seemed to come from every direction! His frantic relatives searched and searched until the rising tide stilled his voice. They found Crab Boy’s lifeless body at the next low tide, his arm still trapped in the stone crab’s burrow.

  As a child I always wondered how they ever got his arm out so they could bury Crab Boy. Nobody ever answered that question for me. But whenever we children went out into the marsh they always reminded us to leave stone crabs alone. And whenever we heard the droll shrieking from down toward Drunken Jack Island they told us the story of Crab Boy.

  Now even though these stories frightened us, they probably served a useful purpose: to keep us children from fooling around in the mud and putting our hands where they didn’t belong. And they certainly worked for me! To this day I won’t reach my hand into any hole in the creek bank.

  The local people say Mrs. Chandler, here, is the only white woman in Murrells Inlet who can catch stone crabs. She can, too! I think it’s because she didn’t live here at the Inlet when she was little so she didn’t hear the stories about Crab Boy until she was older. Those of us who did are just too scared to try!

  Chapter 7. The Wachesaw Ghosts

  (Do spirits haunt Miss Genevieve’s beads?)

  On the top shelf inside the postcard display cases over by the front door of the Brookgreen Gardens Museum lay a string of small, dull-colored, blue, tan, and red beads carelessly strung on what looked like an old piece of frayed twine. The beads never looked like much to me. I paid them little attention until a visitor asked about them one morning. Then Miss Genevieve produced the most spine-tingling story in her repertoire–at least to my young ears. After that, I never entered or left the Museum without warily eyeing that strand of beads and wondering just what went on in the Museum after we had all gone home for the night.

  “The Beads”

  “I won’t die for a few teeth and arrowheads!” muttered James determinedly as he placed a bundle wrapped in a croaker sack uneasily on the ground. Glancing up at the archeologist supervising the dig, the haunted-looking laborer continued more loudly but in a voice filled with remorse, “Boss, I’ve come to confess.”

  The archeological dig where James worked had caused a lot of excitement around here that summer but had really come about by accident. My father bought Wachesaw Plantation, just up the Waccamaw Neck from Brookgreen Gardens, in the early part of this century. Like most plantations on the Waccamaw Neck, Wachesaw stretched in a narrow east-west band from Wachesaw Landing on the Waccamaw River to the seashore there at Murrells Inlet and then on across the marsh to the ocean at Flagg’s Landing, now called Garden City Beach.

  Of course, by the time we moved here the days of vast rice fields and great plantation mansions were long gone. My family moved into the Hermitage, Dr. Allard Belin Flagg’s old home on the edge of the creeks and marshes at Murrells Inlet. We raised chickens for our own use and grew vegetables and flowers in the gardens around the house but Papa made his living as a traveling salesman. Later, financial demands forced him to sell the main body of the plantation around Wachesaw Landing on the Waccamaw River, and the beach property at Flagg’s Landing. He kept only the small portion of seashore at Murrells Inlet around the Hermitage where we continued to live.

  A wealthy sportsman from New York named William Kimbel bought the main part of Wachesaw Plantation around Wachesaw Landing to use as a vacation retreat and a duck hunting preserve. Thousands of ducks rested and fed in the old rice fields every year during their spring and fall migrations. You would not believe how thick the sky was with them! My husband, Tom Chandler, went to work for Mr. Kimbel as caretaker and manager of the plantation.

  Now, I don’t know if Dr. Allard had ever built a real plantation mansion on Wachesaw. If he did, I never saw evidence of it. But Mr. Kimbel decided that he wanted a hunting lodge at Wachesaw Landing to use when he and his friends came South for the duck hunting. He asked my husband to supervise the construction.

  Tom and Mr. Kimbel chose a lovely spot for the lodge on a bluff overlooking the Waccamaw River. But when workers began digging the foundation for the lodge, the first things they came across were long buried skeletons, many of them belonging to children. The arrangement of the skeletons and the beads and axes and pottery jars buried with the bones indicated this land had been an Indian burial ground.

  Tom immediately halted work on the lodge and contacted the Charleston Museum to see if they were interested in excavating the site. With only a little delay, they sent one scientist, and then several others, and the construction site soon became an archeological dig site. We were all thrilled, I was anyway, to become a part of a real archeological dig!

  We had read all about the archeological treasures being discovered in Egypt: King Tut’s tomb and everything. I was excited to have a real “dig” in our own back yard. Of course, we didn’t expect to find gold statues and jewelry like Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon had discovered in King Tut’s tomb … but one never knows.

  Tom had other duties in managing the plantation but I was at the dig site almost every day. I watched the excavations and talked with the scientists as they directed local workers in their careful trenching and sifting for artifacts. I often jumped down in there with them, uncovering the ancient bones and pottery. It was exciting!

  The local workers, who were used to finding occasional arrowheads or broken pieces of pottery in the pinelands or along the beach, were not impressed with the finds at first. Their biggest concern appeared to be their uneasiness in digging up bones. Many would not work on the project because they believed that graves, whether white, black, or Indian, should never be disturbed.

  As with any unusual occurrence, rumors began to spread among the local people. Warnings of dire happenings were whispered from person to person. Stories circulated about loud wailings from Wachesaw Bluff echoing through the night. None of us ever heard any wailing, and I’m not sure what local people would have gotten close enough to the diggings at night to hear such wailings, but the stories grew. Every sickness and stubbed toe was blamed on our disturbing the dead.

  Then one of my daughters came down with diphtheria! In those times before antibiotics and modern treatments, diphtheria was a life threatening illness. I suffered through many fearful days and nights before she finally recovered. Thinking about it, it was kind of unusual. Normally with diphtheria there is an outbreak and the infection can be traced from person to person, often by contact or contaminated food, I believe. But this was just the one case, and everyone said it must have come from the graves of the Indian children who had probably died in an outbreak. Of course, by the time the stories got around we were having a sweeping epidemic of fatal disease caused by the curses of the dead in retribution for desecrating their graves.

  Feelings are pretty high and beliefs are pretty strong around here
about the sanctity of graves. Not so much anymore, but in past times, out in the small private graveyards back in the woods, you would see little objects left on graves, either on the headstones or on the graves themselves. They might include a cup or a bowl, a favorite knife or comb, or some small household object or tool that had belonged to the deceased. Sometimes these were used as containers to hold bunches of wild flowers but often the objects just sat on the graves. They were usually something meaningful to the deceased.

  Some say these objects were placed on graves, like flowers, in honor and remembrance of the dead. Others say that favorite objects were left on graves so that restless spirits of the deceased would come looking for them there and not in their former homes where the living carried on their lives. Local people often told stories of uneasy spirits who repeatedly returned to their earthly homes until the correct favorite object was placed on the grave. In fact, one of those restless spirits seems to be looking for her ring in my family home (but you already know about Alice).

  Whatever the reason for placing an object on the grave, these objects are usually left there undisturbed, sometimes for years. All know that dire consequences follow when any grave object is removed (but that’s still another story, actually several other stories).

  So it was only to be expected that when archeological excavations began, great distress arose among the local people that graves were being disturbed. Many would not help with the excavations. Those who did must have been less fearful of the supernatural world, or been in greater need of the excellent wages paid by the museum scientists.

  The men who did work soon caught the enthusiasm and excitement the archeologists displayed at each new discovery. The scientists’ excitement over a cache of small beads or a shell bracelet or a chipped stone ax quickly created awe among the workers for each seemingly plain object. There was much talk of how “valuable” each piece was. Of course, the scientists were referring to the value of knowledge about the past that each item imparted. No one realized workers had begun to believe that these items had great monetary value.