She shows me her filing system and then drops onto the chair behind the old wooden desk by the window. I sprawl on the floor, filing and organizing the papers by date. Every now and then I stop to read some of the words there. Descriptions of parties or hunting trips or dinners. Illnesses. Arguments. Love affairs. Children born and lost. The big and the small, the significant and the mundane. Pieces of lives.
There is pain and love and ache here. All forgotten now. I think of the heartbreak of my dad and the ache I’m feeling over Miah right now. Life is an accumulation of aches. They fill you up and take your breath away and you think you’ll never breathe again, but before you know it, you are just words on paper, gone quiet and asleep until someone finds those words and reads them.
For a while I lose myself in the history. Then Mom and I take turns telling each other some of the things we come across, and I’m suddenly transported back to Ohio, back to other projects I’ve helped her with over the years.
She tells me:
According to a letter from Tillie’s husband, the two of them would set up a table on the beach, where they would play cards and then drink under the live oak trees.
They took midnight sailing trips to the surrounding islands.
They dressed in their finest and drank champagne and danced on lawns like Daisy Buchanan and Jay Gatsby.
For the first time I’m seeing Tillie in moving, vivid color, and I don’t know why this is surprising, because of course she was a living, breathing person once.
Mom tells me:
On the north end of the island, Shirley’s great-grandmother Clovis became the first female root doctor, and people—including Tillie—would come from as far away as Savannah and Charleston to see her.
I tell her:
Clovis’s daughter Beatrice collected stories, creating the first oral history of the island. She set out one day from her house on the north end, carrying a walking stick and a knife, and told her family she would be back when she’d spoken to every person who had a story to tell.
Clovis’s other daughter, Aurora, became the lighthouse keeper after her father and brothers were lost at sea.
She tells me:
Claudine returned to the island from Miss Porter’s School for Girls when she was nineteen. She never left again. She married the son of the Rosecroft landscaper, a man named Tom Buccaneer.
After Tom was killed in a plane crash, Claudine armed herself with a pistol and started patrolling the beaches, watching for poachers, prepared to protect her home at all cost.
She tells me:
Rosecroft was supposedly burned by one of those poachers. The family saw the flames from the inn, but by the time they reached the mansion—the hub of Blackwood life on the island—it was gone.
I tell her there are other rumors about the fire, mainly that Claudine herself burned Rosecroft down two months before she died so that it would die with her, ensuring that no one else could ever live there.
All these words and stories. My mom calls them the color of a human life: those little moments that are so uniquely ours. I think, Claudine—just like all of us—was writing her story as she went.
I stop thinking about Jeremiah Crew and where he is now. I lose myself in this other world. I begin to recognize names I’d never heard before today. I begin to piece together this person’s life and that person’s life. I learn about the separation of blacks and whites on the island, the Geechee at the north end, the Blackwoods at the south. Clovis Samms was the first to cross that invisible boundary line.
And then I come across a letter about twenty-two-year-old Samuel Blackwood Jr. and his marriage to nineteen-year-old Tillie Donaldson of Indianapolis, along with a newspaper clipping. Following a whirlwind courtship and a honeymoon to New York City, Samuel and Tillie were planning to head to their winter home, “an island off the coast of Georgia, abounding in natural beauty.”
I feel a pang in my heart for young Tillie, who believed her whole life was ahead of her, only to have the floor drop out beneath her feet.
I ask my mom, “How did Tillie meet her husband?”
“I believe he was friends with her older brother and came to visit one holiday break from college.”
“You know, I used to be fascinated by Aunt Claudine and the fact that