Saturday night music and terrapin “smother”: Herbert Chaplin, born in 1907; Regina Perry Chaplin, born in 1906

SATURDAY NIGHT MUSIC AND TERRAPIN

Herbert Chaplin

Born in 1907

Regina Perry Chaplin

Born in 1906

   “I don’t do it no mo’, but I could hew a sill,” he said with the pride of a man who knew his

“You take [life everlasting tea] and go to bed, and the fever will sweat out,” she

In the days when drinking water was pumped by hand and Hilton Head Island’s only links to the mainland were steamboats, rowboats and sailboats, Herbert Chaplin made music for dances in the “Grandammy Hall,” a modest wooden building on the side of a dirt road in Baygall. Remembering Saturday night good times from a long-ago era, he grinned with pleasure at the memories, showing gold-filled teeth.

   “I knocked the tambourine with my hands and played jazz horn with my mouth. The jazz horn is short,” Herbert explained, measuring about eighteen inches with his hands. “I could do both at once. I really got it,” he said, shifting in his seat as if thinking of the Lowcountry’s early twentieth century rhythms. “I played so them gals could dance.”

   Herbert bought his instruments from a Savannah, Georgia, store, but after the discs fell off his tambourine, he fashioned new ones out of soda-water bottle tops and kept playing. Life must go on, especially on a barrier island in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, when islanders looked forward all week to the Saturday night dances. Herbert’s father had taught him that attitude years before.

   Beside a pond in what is now Hilton Head Plantation, Herbert grew up in a small frame house with ten brothers and sisters (“eleven head of us”). His father, Billy, had been a Savannah-area Georgian, his mother, Louisa, a Chisolm from Hilton Head, born on Braddock’s Point. The family earned a living in several ways.

CLAMS 25 CENTS A PECK

“The mos’ important [source of cash] was the clams off Port Royal Sound. He [Billy] dug them right out of the beach in the winter. There were plenty of clams out there, and the DeSoto Hotel [in Savannah] would take all he could get.” Billy Chaplin loaded croker sacks with the clams and hauled them by sailboat, or occasionally by commercial steamer. When his children “got up to size” they dug clams, too. Herbert recalled them selling for about 25 cents a peck.

   The beach yielded another treasure for the Chaplin family in the summer—loggerhead turtle eggs. Uncovered in the sand on the beaches of Hilton Head and Bay Point across Port Royal Sound at the rate of 100 or 125 in a single nest, the eggs also sold well in Savannah.

VARIED ENTERPRISES

And old Billy Chaplin had another marketable skill.

   He was a basket maker in the days when baskets were essential household goods. His material was the rush grass found in the island’s freshwater wetlands and the strips of young palmetto fronds. His best-sellers were the hampers—tall, rectangular baskets for holding things like clothes—and the fanners—big, shallow baskets used for fanning corn.

   Herbert’s wife, Regina, demonstrated with a worn basket how the fanners were used. The farmer would grind the corn and then put it in the fanner. Then the women would shake it ’round and ’round. “You do it like this, and the husks come off and leave the grits,” she said.

   Herbert regretted in his later years not “taking up” the basket making, having noticed that the Gullah’s “sweet grass” baskets had begun selling for pretty good prices.

   However, Herbert got another skill from his father, in addition to the clamming.

   “There was a lot he learned me to do,” Herbert said. “I could split trees to make a rail fence. I could bus’ ’em up. I could make a lot of rail in a day. I could hew a sill out of a log, too. I don’t do it no mo’, but I could hew a sill,” he said with the pride of a man who knew his business.

BOUNTY FROM THE SEA

Fishing was fishing when Herbert and his brother-in-law brought in flounder, trout, bass, porgy, croaker and blackfish by the barrel, using a five-hundred-foot net in Port Royal Sound. They pushed the boat along ’till they saw the fish and then would “pen” them up and haul them in.

   In the spring, the fishermen would listen for the “boom” sounds in area waters and then go drum fishing. To catch the thick, meaty, popular drum, lines were baited with conch, crab or shrimp.

   “They was plenty of fish out then,” Herbert said, speaking of the 1930s and 1940s.

   For crabbing, they used a spool of twine as long as five hundred feet with pieces of ham skin or bull nose tied all along it. They would stretch the string out in the water, then silently slip along beside the baited twine in a bateau and scoop up the nibbling crabs with a dip net. They caught crabs by the barrel to ship to Savannah markets.

   Herbert had at least one additional way of using the Lowcountry’s natural resources to make a living for his family. He trapped mink, often spending the night alone, camping on the uninhabited small islands after setting out the mink traps. Savannah fur traders paid as much as $15 for a mink hide.

UP

Regina was born in 1906, a year before Herbert, in a small house on the other side of the pond from the Chaplins’ house, daughter of Charles and Alice Perry. Her father farmed and hauled freight in his sailboat. Regina had memories of mountains of watermelons being loaded onto his boat on a landing in Big Creek, an inlet off Port Royal Sound.

   Herbert and Regina said they were “raise up together,” both attending the Cherry Hill school in Baygall. She then married someone else and had three children. Herbert got his career as a fisherman and a trapper going, and worked as a longshoreman in Savannah for a couple of years. Herbert and Regina married in 1937. They then finished rearing her three youngsters and had two of their own. For a while, the newly married couple lived by the pond again. In 1942, they built a house on Fish Haul Road. When it burned down, they built another on the same spot.

ONE MEDICINAL HERB AND ONE RECIPE

Like Herbert, Regina knew ways to make the most of some of the Lowcountry’s natural resources.

   She picked “life everlasting,” a low-growing woods plant, in the summer, tied it into bundles and dried it for use year round. “You just dry ’em and boil ’em and make a little tea. Then you put a little lemon in ’em. You take it and go to bed, and the fever will sweat out,” she said, turning her hands with the movement a trained dancer might use to suggest casting off a fever.

   One more example of how the Chaplins lived off the land and out of the creeks: terrapin.

   “You could find ’em right on the beach. [The late Sim] Toomer would buy them from you. Or you could put it in a good smother.”

A

Regina described it: “Take the terrapin’s four legs out. Put ’em in hot water and scrape the black part off. Use a little bacon, onion and flour, and make a gravy. It’s good eating.”

   By 1982, when interviewed at their home on Fish Haul Road, Herbert and Regina didn’t work much anymore except for planting a vegetable garden and keeping chickens. They enjoyed listening at night for the hoot of an owl in a nearby oak tree and watching every morning for quail to cross the yard.

   Regina could remember going twice to New York and Connecticut to visit adult children, but Herbert said at the time that he did not have time to go. He admitted in 1982 that he never, ever intended to go to New York and never would.

   “I couldn’t live even for a little while huddled up with people,” he said, no doubt remembering the satisfying solitude that came with digging clams on deserted beaches and camping out beside the mink traps on small, remote islands.