Daufuskie, nothin’ else like it: Lance Burn, born in 1911; Frank Burn, born in 1916

ELSE LIKE IT

Lance Burn

Born in 1911

Frank Burn

Born in 1916

“I came back as soon as I got two pairs of shoes,” Frank said,

The Burn brothers, Lance and Frank, knew Daufuskie Island intimately and loved it passionately. To them it was a place where mullet jumped in the boat and where neighbors shared what they have without counting the cost. It also was a place that would bind you like a tourniquet, and they knew that facet of Daufuskie, too.

   Lance was two years old in 1913 when his father, Arthur Ashley “Papy” Burn, became assistant keeper of the Bloody Point Lighthouse and moved the family from Charleston to Daufuskie. Frank was born on Daufuskie in 1916.

   During Lance and Frank’s growing-up years, about one thousand blacks and a handful of whites lived on Daufuskie, a lively island characterized by plenty of work to go around—jobs at the Savannah River quarantine stations and jobs with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dredging projects that kept the Intracoastal Waterway channels open. From the turn of the century until the 1950s, Daufuskie was in its prime as a producer of famous South Carolina oysters, with five “raw houses.” Each factory employed several dozen men and women in the fall and winter, picking the beds, shucking raw oysters, packing them in cans and hauling them every day to Savannah, Georgia.

   Lance and Frank remembered being able to stand on the bank of the Cooper River and look all the way across Daufuskie to the ocean. The island continued to be timbered, was farmed extensively, had livestock running all over it and was known far and wide for its moonshine stills.

   If you didn’t mind working, you could eke out a living on Daufuskie in those years.

   And yet, you could not get much formal schooling, and you didn’t have reasonable access to even the few amenities in nearby mainland communities at the time—doctors, churches, museums, libraries, trains, movies, music lessons, even a circus or carnival once a year. In 1983, looking back on more than sixty years of Daufuskie’s history, Lance and Frank recalled poignant memories of living on an island separated by wide waters from the rest of the South Carolina Lowcountry. They looked deprivation and poverty square in the eye.

A LEGACY OF ISOLATION

“You get scars,” Frank said. “There are scars when you get away, among other people, and realize you haven’t had the education and the experiences you need. You have to work to overcome those disadvantages.”

   Lance didn’t use the word “scars,” but he did experience disadvantages. His mother died when he was five, and his father felt he could not take care of his son. So Lance was handed over to Daufuskie residents Nita Fripp and her husband, along with a piece of paper acknowledging the transfer of ownership.

   After Mr. Fripp died, Mrs. Fripp could no longer afford to keep Lance, so she sent him to Bethesda Home for Boys (a Savannah orphanage), where for about seven and a half years, he worked in fields and barns, raising vegetables and livestock, and attending school for about two hours a day. “There were some hard times, I remember,” Lance said later.

   Papy Burn suffered through a series of personal crises on Daufuskie, and he felt forced to give away another child as well. Papy’s second wife died when Frank was ten. By the time Frank was thirteen, his father had married a third time, and Frank and his sister Leonella had a half-sister, Wanda, whom they adored. Then the third wife died, and Papy gave Wanda, a wisp of a two-year-old at the time, up for adoption to a family in Savannah.

   The trauma of seeing Papy give up the little girl in 1933 haunted Frank for more than four decades. “For years, I remembered the last time I saw Wanda,” Frank said. “It was the hardest thing. You can’t imagine.”

   The family that adopted Wanda renamed her Mary. She grew up knowing nothing of her real family until she began a search in the early 1970s. In 1974, with the help of a former Savannah neighbor, she found Frank and Lance Burn and documented them as her siblings. Her two older half-brothers hugged her and wept. “We found her forty-five years later. It was so unbelievable. It made me cry. I’ll tell you that without any shame at all,” Frank said.

   After Lance was old enough to leave Bethesda, he took off on his own. He worked in a drugstore. He became a wall-plasterer. During World War II, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. After the war, he got back into construction to support his family and traveled the Southeast to wherever the jobs were.

HOME AGAIN

Shipped away from Daufuskie against his will as a young child, Lance yearned to return to Daufuskie for many years before he was able to do so. During that time, the regular steamers quit running, the population dwindled down to less than about one hundred and the oyster factories closed, victims of water pollution from Savannah-area industries. By the time he got back to Daufuskie to live, it was a community quite different than the one he had left.

   For a while in the 1960s, Lance and his wife, Billie, ran Jolly Shores, a cafe and store on the Intracoastal Waterway, a place known for its Saturday-night shrimp suppers. They bought and sold property. Lance worked two county jobs: one as the Daufuskie magistrate, the only “law” on the island, and the other as the county’s maintenance worker, the man responsible for taking care of Daufuskie’s dirt roads and ditches. Billie drove the school bus and ran the post office. Together, they provided most of Daufuskie’s government services and lived comfortably.

   They became experts at “making do.” Lance called it “Daufuskyizing.” Lance became known as the fellow who could improvise on a contrary engine, get the vehicle out of the bog and revive the disabled boat. Living a long way from hardware stores and auto garages, he patched and fixed to keep things going. Billie could make a meal out of a couple of tomatoes from the garden, a cup of grits and three eggs from the chicken yard. Living a long way from the nearest market, she learned to use whatever was available—in sickness and in health, for better or worse.

MAKING UP FOR LOST LESSONS

As a teenager in the 1930s, Frank Burn began running the thirty-four-foot shrimp boat Ashley for his father, selling the catch to the L.P. Maggioni and Co.’s shrimp factory on Jenkins Island. But he got the feeling that there was more to life than the salt water and the back-breaking work on a shrimp trawler.

   In the Civilian Conservation Corps, beginning in 1938, Frank realized for the first time that his upbringing had been stymied by the remoteness of Daufuskie Island.

   “I felt sorry that I hadn’t experienced things I should have,” he said. “I’d been deprived of social activities. Opportunities on Daufuskie had been nonexistent. With some tempering and seasoning, I realized that the lack of education was a serious handicap. I saw that I was outside doing manual labor, while those with better education were working in offices where it was comfortable. So I started taking correspondence courses.”

   Frank finished earning his high school diploma at the age of thirty-eight. After time in the U.S. Merchant Marine Corps, he worked as a civilian for the U.S. Navy shipyard in Charleston for thirty years and was rewarded for steadily upgrading his education. He and his wife Ethel raised three daughters and a son in Charleston before he retired and moved back to Daufuskie part time in 1977.

HAPPIEST RETIREE

“I came back as soon as I got two pairs of shoes,” Frank said, laughing.

   In 1955, while still living in Charleston, Frank started shrimping coastal waters for recreation, reveling in the salty air and water as well as the sheer joy of harvesting from the sea. Once he and Ethel returned to live on Daufuskie, he shrimped regularly in season, selling his catch off the deck of his boat Little Bubba in the Harbour Town Yacht Basin.

   Having returned to his roots, Frank felt good. “The things in life that most people strive for have all been given to me,” he said. His family made him happy. His home’s site on the creek overlooking Mongin Creek made him happy. The three and a half acres on Daufuskie his father gave were not only valuable in terms of dollars but personally for what they provided—peace and beauty.

   As an example of Frank’s attitude about money, he often told the tale of seven acres as real estate on Daufuskie, which he bought in 1936 for $75 and sold eleven years later for $100; which the purchaser then traded for an outboard motor and a boat; which Robert Burn, Frank’s nephew, later bought for $1,000; which Robert later sold for $3,500 an acre; which in 1983 was valued at $18,000 per acre.

   “I’m laughing about it,” Frank said. “You see, I know you have to have money, and I’m willing to work for it, but I don’t strive for it or worship it, so I can laugh.”

   The photo on page 109 is of Lance Burn and his wife, Billie.