“It was some hard work”: William Aiken, born in 1894

WAS SOME HARD

William Aiken

Born in 1894

“The net would be heavy with fish and I’d have a time getting it in, but I’d have to say, ‘T’ank God.’”

Born in Gardner, the community on the north bank of Hilton Head Island’s Broad Creek, in 1894, William Aiken was the second son of James and Annie Aiken, both of who had also been born on Hilton Head. His roots linked him directly to the plantation slaves of the 1850s and 1860s.

   When William was a little boy, crows cawed from the limbs of the chinaberry tree and chickens clucked around the farmyard. Like other islanders, his family raised most of the food they ate. For cash, they hauled their cotton and watermelons by sailboat to markets in either Savannah, Georgia, or Bluffton. From Bluffton, they moved the cotton and watermelons by horse, mule or ox over roads of sand and oyster shell to the market in Estill. Between one growing season and the next, in winter, William’s father would catch the steamers Pilot Boy or Clivedon to work for a couple of weeks at a time as a “header” (head of work crew) loading and unloading ships.

   As a child, young William traveled to Savannah “very seldom,” instead spending his barefoot days in the fields and woods near his home. What formal education he got occurred in a one-room school in the Chaplin community.

   William plowed, planted and harvested for his father until he married Maybelle Singleton, the girl next door, and then started plowing, planting and harvesting for his own family. Maybelle helped in the fields as much as possible, he said, “till her time”—the deliveries of more than a dozen babies. Maybelle’s fourteen pregnancies, which resulted in eleven children living into the 1980s, handicapped her for the picking of butter beans. Butter-bean picking—a task physically taxing for even those very young, very healthy and not pregnant—was too much for a woman with a belly full of baby. Still, it was important to William, years after Maybelle’s death, to make sure no one thought he had a lazy wife. “She was a smart girl. I miss her today.”

SAILING TO MARKET

In the 1920s, in addition to farming, William plied the waters regularly between a Broad Creek landing and Savannah’s “market dock,” providing a small commercial link between island farmers and fishermen and their customers. A couple of times a week, he would load crabs, shrimp, fish, butter beans, peas and a coop of chickens onto his 22-foot sailboat The trip to Savannah across Calibogue Sound, through the Cooper River, Ramshorn Creek, New River, Wright River, Fields Cut and finally into the Savannah River was about twenty-five miles. For Thanksgiving and Christmas every year, turkeys from Hilton Head Island were especially important cargo for the Savannah City Market.

   “I’d have the boat full of freight,” he said, remembering those times fondly. “Sometimes I’d have a whole coop with twenty pairs of chickens in it. I had a fellow run with me as a mate. It was a pretty good living.

   “If the weather would ever catch me in the sound, I’d just try to get ’cross, then lay over on Daufuskie till it break. It if stormed for a long time, the freight might spoil, but I couldn’t help it.”

   Never having learned to swim except when his “feet could touch,” William was scared of the open waters, but he fought off the fright to keep the boat-freight business going for a dozen years or more. He explained that he and Maybelle gave birth to fourteen children. “It was tough raising that many. I had to do what I could.”

   So along with farming and hauling merchandise on his boat for others, William picked oysters for a living, throwing them into in a bateau—a flat-bottom boat much like an oyster boat—then taking his catch by sailboat to Lowden’s steam factory and shell mill in Bluffton and Maggioni’s factory on Jenkins Island.

   From his bateau, William also cast a net for mullet and trout, sometimes catching so many fish he could hardly pull the net up. “The net would be heavy with fish and I’d have a time getting it in, but I’d have to say, ‘T’ank God.’” Conscious of hungry mouths at home, he was grateful every time the cast net filled up.

   “It would be freezin’ weather, and I could get a whole barrel of trout. The fish would freeze up sometimes on the way to Savannah [to market]. Yeah, there were more fish in there than there is now. I can’t throw a net no mo’, but I’m just going by what they tell me.”

LONGSHOREMAN

So William farmed, fished and hauled freight to make money for his family and, like his father before him, worked as a longshoreman in Savannah from time to time. He, too, caught the steamers at Spanish Wells and stayed for a few weeks at a time in the city, loading and unloading cargo during the day and renting a room to sleep at night.

   It was the hardest work he ever did. He built up calluses on his hands and muscles in his arms, legs and back. He described the process: “I held a hook in my hand. Four of us would grab onto the hooks and stick them in the bale of cotton. We had to lift it up to the beam, and it had to go up and up. We loaded resin, turpentine and lumber. There’d be times I’d think I couldn’t go on. I would be tired, oh man. But I tell you I knew I just had to make it.”

   By the time William was in his late eighties, he no longer did the physical work of his youth. His calluses were gone. After Maybelle died, he lived alone in his home in the Gardner community (now Indigo Run).

   Eager, at the age of eighty-seven, to tell about his unceasing enterprises to make a living most of his life, he forgot to talk about the fun he had. When I quizzed him about his recreation, he answered, “There wasn’t much time for that. Me and Maybelle had to work to raise all them head of children.”

   Questioned further about what surely must have been good times at least occasionally, he said, “It was some hard work in those days.” But then a smile spread across his face and a grin formed on his mouth, and I wondered, then imagined, what kinds of simple pleasures from the past were on William’s mind.