"There are all kinds of gumptions on Edisto, big ones and little ones...Anytime you can't get a nail, you use a black locust peg instead and it lasts a hundred years—that's wood-peg gumption. Or, you chop your leg and you know it will take you a half a day at the very least to get to a doctor and the wound will have got cold and won't knit so you sew it up yourself—that's needle-and-thread gumption. You load your pulpwood truck so heavy that the front wheels rise up off the ground and you can't steer so you pile sand bags on the front bumper to bring them back down—that's sandbag gumption.
"When your old trawler, the Cap'n John, blows her head and leaves you adrift miles offshore, three Afro-American men, and not much food, and you rig a sail with mattresses and blankets out of the fo'csle and it takes three days, but you sail her home—that's a special kind of gumption called hungry gumption. When Miss Liddy Clark Murry and Kwibo Tom's Charles realized that the legislature was all wrong in forbidding anyone to teach the 'colored people'—American Indian, African, or Caribbean—to read and write and she started her school over on that side of the island, quite a risky business for him and for her and for anyone associated with it, but it worked just as well as that black locust peg and it's been more than a hundred years—that was alphabet gumption. When April Frazier, the new Ibo driver from St. Helena, saw the people at Seaside weren't going to make the place into an efficient money-making cotton farm and he beat so many to death trying to persuade them to join in achieving his ambitious vision, and in the tug-of-war between terror and greed that guides South Carolina history (greed was winning)—that was mean gumption. Their master, Marse Evan Edings, was gumption challenged not to have stopped or prevented it. When I spoke to my neighbor, Maria Frazier, perhaps a granddaughter of April, after the storm of 1959 (with recorded winds of 150 miles per hour out of the northeast), I asked 'How you come on, 'Riah? You have a happy hurricane?'
She answered, 'Yes, yes. The Lord been good to me. Ain't lose nothing but me house.' That was soul gumption. All kinds of gumption on Edisto. We hatch a new one every day." (pp. 18-19)
So I'm reading a little further down on p. 19 and see that Sam Gadsden talks about the "Kings of Edisto" who "...helped newly free black families to acquire land through the politics of Reconstruction." One was Jim Hutchinson, who Sam later on describes as a politician:
"He was Precinct Chairman for the Republican Party for this island. He had the Black people organized in the politics business here. He became the king of the bunch and what he said had to go. He ruled here in Reconstruction times. He got the people together and they put colored people in the legislature and had a colored magistrate here....
"Another thing he did was to get land for the poor people. After Peace was declared, he went around among the people and took up a little money here, a little money there and when he had gathered up enough, he would buy a plantation. Once the place was bought, he would divide it out to all the people who gave him money; the acreage each person got would be in proportion to how much money he had put in....he was a good man for what he knew. He didn't know much, but he did all he could for anybody in need. He helped them get straightened out and get their own homes. And his work has endured...
"Then one day they killed him....He was leading the colored people too much....[A] man from Wadmalaw came up there and started some kind of talk with him. Jim was a short-patienced man and he ordered the man off the place and the man shot him dead. He was a white man, but he came from Wadmalaw...If the people were Christian people and if they recognized justice, there should have been some consequence from that, but there was none. It must be they followed mercy in this case instead of justice, for they never did anything about the murderer. The same politics that made Jim into a big man and helped him spread abroad so far was the thing that protected the killer. But the man couldn't take the land back. The people had clear title and Jim's work has endured...." (pp. 63-4).
On the very next page in Sam Gadsden's story came some lines that stopped me in my tracks.
"There was another man who came here from Charleston during Reconstruction. He was half-Spanish, but he passed for a Black man. His name was Thorn...."A man who passed as Black and whose name was Thorn? From Charleston?! Say wha?!?
Source: Nick Lindsay (photographs by Julia Cart), And I'm Glad: An Oral History of Edisto Island (Arcadia Publishing: 2000).
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