These two pulled together: Thomas and Annie Fuller, born in 1900

THESE TWO PULLED TOGETHER

Thomas and Annie Fuller

Born in 1900

Eighty-one-year-old Annie had advice for her eighty-one-year-old husband: “If you trus’ in the Lord, Thomas, he’ll clear ’most everything out of your way. Don’t worry so.”

Native Hilton Head Islanders Thomas and Annie Fuller lived in the tempo and rhythm of planting and harvest, ebb tide and flood tide for more than eighty years, most of that time in the same spot, together, on the edge of Skull Creek. Born in 1900, both grew up in the Pope community, both attended Mount Calvary Baptist Church and the Seabrook school, and both worked in the soil and on the creek banks. In 1981, they were not sure when they fell in love, and it had been so long since they married, they were not sure when that happened either.

   As for how they functioned together, Annie helped Thomas pick butter beans for the Savannah, Georgia, market for many years because, she said with a smile, “You’re supposed to pull together.” Thomas said, with a loving glance at his wife, “When I married Annie, she had her health and strength. Now that she’s not well, I’m going to do the best I can towards her.”

   The Hilton Head that Thomas and Annie remembered as children was cleared from Braddock’s Point on the south end to Elliott Beach on the north end and was heavily farmed. The surrounding waters were full of sailboats and rowboats, and heavily fished. Residents didn’t lock their doors, simply because the community did not tolerate thievery. Grown-ups shared in the tending of the island children, who roamed freely from one cornfield to another. The proper raising of youngsters was looked on as a task big enough to involve as many people as possible, Annie said. Nobody had any cash to speak of, but everybody had food, shelter, clothing and other necessities, plus a friendly community to call home.

   If the place sounds like utopia, that’s because the Fullers remembered it that way.

A BY THE SWEAT OF THE BROW

Although physically demanding and in many cases monotonous, the work of their youth was not drudgery. Thomas had to cast a net to catch shrimp or mullet for supper, but he did not remember the casting as terribly hard. Winters, he picked oysters—between thirty and forty bushels on a single low tide—for 2 cents a bushel, then 3 cents, 6 cents and finally 12 cents a bushel. Summers, he raised butter beans, corn, sweet potatoes and watermelons, and hired sailboats to haul them to Savannah to market. Annie shucked raw oysters in the winter, and picked crabs and shelled beans in summer. But she didn’t remember those chores as onerous. Asked how many gallons of oysters she could shuck in a day, she said she could not remember the amount exactly, but she said without apology, “I just know I did the best I could.”

   The Fullers and other islanders in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s raised big, fat roasting turkeys for the Christmas holidays. The pens would be full until mid-December, when islanders would cage the turkeys and haul them by sailboat or steamer to Savannah. “Turkeys brought good money,” Thomas said, “good money. That’s what we used to buy Christmas presents for the children.”

   The loggerhead turtles that lumbered up from the ocean to lay eggs during the summer—and occasionally stranded themselves on the beach after injury—were a bonus for living on a barrier island. Many islanders treasured the eggs as tasty morsels to eat and harvest to sell in Savannah. Thomas loved the turtles themselves. He said a turtle has different kinds of meat on it—some that tasted like beef, some like pork and some like chicken. “A turtle was a good find,” he said.

   In the 1980s, Thomas and Annie felt in their bones the brunt of what happened to their community once traffic began traveling over the bridges to the island in 1956 and growth took off. They liked the island better B.D. (before development).

   “They’re all kind of people here now,” Thomas said. “You can’t trus’ a lot of them. They break in your house and everything. They’re just now finding Hilton Head, and we don’t know who they are. If they keep on coming, we’ve going to have too many and we’ll have to ship some of them to Bluffton,” he added, grinning.

   On hearing such a statement from Thomas, eighty-one-year-old Annie had advice for her eighty-one-year-old husband: “If you trus’ in the Lord, Thomas, he’ll clear ’most everything out of your way. Don’t worry so.”