Cheesy Grits: "The Black Kings of Edisto Island"—A Collision of Worlds

Edisto Island near Botany Bay
Taken by GCM, May 2012

When I first met Nick Lindsay, I had no idea that some forty years later, I would be sitting with him and his wife Dubose in their house on Edisto Island, forty-odd miles southwest of Charleston, talking about one of the two "Black Kings of Edisto Island." I wonder, too, if he ever imagined he would meet a great-great-grandniece of one of those two black kings of Edisto Island, which would of course be my wife, Jane. A descendant of Amish Mennonite bishop Jacob Hertzler, a relative of Edisto royalty, and the Bard of Edisto and his wife, chatting in the living room while Spring freshens up her frock outdoors on a March afternoon on Edisto. Talk about a collision of worlds.


Nick is an American original and the son of an American original, poet Vachel Lindsay. Nick has continued his father's notion of poetry as public performance. That was the greater part of why he was invited to Eastern Mennonite sometime around 1974: to give a reading or two and to talk about poetry. He was at the time teaching poetry at our sister school in Indiana, Goshen College, where he would go on to mentor poets Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Jeff Gundy.

His performances were part carny barker, part hell-fire and brimstone preacher and all poetry. Having labored to understand the allusions, ironies, and navel-lint-picking of many of the moderns, I found Nick's performances to be an unforgettable change of pace.

How could I have known that I would run into him again while researching Jane's family history? As it turned out, Nick's wife Dubose is from South Carolina and they settled on Edisto Island in 1955 and raised ten children there. Nick made financial ends meet on Edisto by being a shipwright and general handyman/contractor and by teaching Mennonites about poetry at Goshen College. (His Hoosier father had some contacts with Mennonites, but I don't know the specifics of how Nick came to teach at Goshen.)

But it must have been just serendipity or maybe the Spirit herself that led me to Nick's transcribed oral history of Edisto Island. It's entitled And I'm Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island and consists mostly of transcriptions of Lindsay's conversations with two old African-American Edistonians, Bubberson Brown and Sam Gadsden, interspersed with his commentary and sharp-eyed observations.

And I'm Glad is brim full of the feel of Edisto and of Nick: how Edistonians lived and talked not so long ago. When Nick and Dubose first came, Edisto was almost 100% African-American, and almost 100% descended from the slaves who had worked Edisto's plantations and remained after slavery was done. The geographic isolation of Edisto, along with the other Sea Islands stretching from North Carolina all the way down to the Georgia/Florida border, meant that the old African ways survived much longer. "Gullah" or "Geechee" is how we name the remnants of those old ways of talking, thinking and living now. Nick has lived on Edisto long enough that the locals trusted him with their stories, and he has in turn made a gift of them to us.

Here is a passage that is full of both Nick and Edisto:

"During the late 1960s, while we were still eating acorns, I started gathering testimony about the phospate mines at the town called Red Top, about half way to Charleston from Edisto when you go by water. It was a wild place and had we got a tenth of the stories people had to tell, it would have been a regular encyclopedia of hilarious ferocity. Tony Deas introduced me to several people during this search. One day he told me we should visit A. B., a lady from the Baptist church who had personal experience of the Red Top Rock Mines.

"We got to her house by footpath. Only foot and hoof traffic came there, which was not unusual. Sam and Rachel Gadsden's house was like that some years. It was mid-morning, a hot day in December. She was doing the wash in the backyard, working over two large galvanized tubs, scrubbing, rinsing, hanging things on the line. She had a cotton skirt, bare breast* and feet—a costume likely for such heat. She was probably in her mid-sixties. The two old people exchanged conversation about what was going on in the church, what crops were likely to provide some income over the coming season, topics of this sort. I did not yet exist, since I had not yet been properly introduced.

"The black community on Edisto is formal, aristocratic, and hierarchical, more than the white. If you violate the propriety of formal grace, you're making a grave blunder. I must wait for a formal introduction, which came presently. 'This is Mr. Lindsay. He is looking for stories about the Rock Mine.'

"She looked at me then for the first time, shook her hands dry, wiped them on her skirt, turned on her heel without a word, and went in the house. She came back out in a moment with a large knife, she pressed it forcefully into my forearm—a large, dull knife, yes. 'D'you see this knife? He cut that white flesh just as easy as he cut this black!' Her eyes were furious. She was pressing her forearm tight against mine now and pressing the blade into her own, holding my eyes with hers. 'And the blood run just as red from both.' This was her first greeting to me that morning.

'Just as red as Jesus' blood that saved us both,' says I. This is the way we began our conversation concerning the Rock Mine at Red Top...." (pp. 30-31)

There's something going on here that I'm too civilized to get, but it still stirs my blood enough to make the hair stand up on the back of my neck. I don't know what I would do if I saw a mid-sixty-ish black woman with no shirt on coming at me with a butcher knife in her hand and a fury in her eyes.


Source: Nick Lindsay (photographs by Julia Cart), And I'm Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island (Arcadia Publishing: 2000)


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*Lindsay notes elsewhere that Edisto's African-American women didn't consistently bother with blouses/tops until the 1970s.