Want to know about oysters? Ask Kidd: Andrew Kidd Jr., born in 1927

WANT TO KNOW ABOUT

Andrew Kidd Jr.

Born in 1927

In 1941, when he was only fourteen, he moved to Port Royal to pick oysters for Maggioni’s Lady’s Island

Like an oarsman bucking a strong tide, Andrew Kidd Jr. coaxed young people he knew to learn to pick and shuck oysters.

   Swabbing the floor of the oyster factory at the end of Wharf Street in Bluffton during the 1982–1983 season, Andrew was merely helping out his two daughters, Claire and Cecelia, both in their twenties. The sisters had leased the factory from the Bluffton Oyster Cooperative. With a dozen pickers, including their two brothers, Isaac and Andrew III, and twenty-one shuckers, Andrew Kidd’s daughters were processing oysters and selling them for $30 a gallon or from $12 to $14 a bushel, depending on the size. The family was happy. The potential for earning cash had attracted a number of recruits, some of them in their twenties and thirties, some willing to pick or shuck as a sideline to a regular job.

   Claire gently boasted that she shucked two gallons herself on one night’s shift and added that one of her co-workers had shucked six gallons in a single night’s work. “I’m just learning, but I’m getting better at it,” she said.

   “You can make money at this business if you don’t mind working,” Andrew told his sons and daughters. “The pickers are making ’round about $600 a week in the creek now, and they sho can’ make that on the hill,” he said.

OYSTER PICKING

Andrew was eased into the oyster business soon after he learned to walk. He was born on Pinckney Island in 1927 into what he called a “ten-head” river-going family. Despite having lost one arm in a sawmill, the family’s patriarch picked oysters to keep his family in food, shelter and clothing.

   All of Andrew’s life, the memories of picking oysters with his grandfather lived with him: “He would scull the boat with one oar, standing up in the back, and he could fling the oysters in the boat OK. But he had to take me along to bail the boat. I used a gallon can to keep it dry. I was just a little fellow. He was picking for the L.P. Maggioni and Co. at the time.

   “Every family on Pinckney Island had its own landing then. Most of them had a stake at the landing, where they kept the fish boxes tied up. They used a hand line—ain’t been no rod and reel—and caught the mullet and whiting and other fish Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. They stored them in the boxes in the water, tied to the stake, till early Friday morning. That way they’d still be [a]live, on the string, when they would take them on the steamer to Savannah to sell. Everybody liked to get fish from Pinckney Island.”

ON HIS OWN AS A TEENAGER

From bailing for his grandfather and loading the fish on a string onto the steamer, Andrew graduated to picking oysters and loading them onto the docks for Maggioni. Rowing a seventeen-foot bateau, grabbing oysters with tongs, shoveling oysters and shells, Andrew developed strength in his young muscles and stamina in his whole body. In 1941, when he was only fourteen, he moved to Port Royal to pick oysters for Maggioni’s Lady’s Island factory. A year later, he moved to Yonges Island to work in the Maggioni oyster leases in the Charleston area. Back to this area, living in a house on what is now Moss Creek, beginning in 1943, Andrew started working for Junior Graves, a Bluffton businessman with oyster factories in Bluffton, on Trimbleston Plantation on Sawmill Creek and on Daufuskie Island.

   At the age of seventeen, Andrew moved to Daufuskie to run Graves’s oyster business there, a thriving operation of about thirty workers who harvested, shucked and canned oysters that were hauled, raw, to Bluffton every Friday evening.

   Young for so much responsibility, Andrew said he was able to do a good job there because he was strong and dependable and knew what he was doing with oysters.

   “Mr. Graves raised me up in the business.”

PLENTY HAPPENING ON

“There was plenty happenin’ on Daufuskie in those days, a lot of people workin’ and livin’ there, until the oysters at the other end [the southern end, influenced by the Savannah River] got polluted. Then some jobs opened up in Savannah and people started moving away.”

   When Graves closed the Daufuskie factory, Andrew went to work in the Trimbleston factory . By then, it was going strong, with “forty-four head,” as Andrew called the workers, coming in and out with their boats, shovels, knives and cans during the oyster season. For a short time, Andrew worked again on Yonges Island.

   Then in 1950, Graves built a concrete block factory at the end of Bluffton Wharf’s Street and lured Andrew back to Bluffton to help him process oysters for a strong raw oyster market. After Junior Graves died in the early 1960s, Andrew worked for his sons, Steve and Jerry. In 1969, when Steve and Jerry Graves left the business, Andrew helped organize the Bluffton Oyster Cooperative to take it over.

   “We thought we could do it, and this co-op cause[d] me to ride in an airplane for the first time,” Andrew said. “We needed that grant money [from a federal agency], and I had to go to Washington to see about it. Then they sen’ me back here to look after the place, and we got somebody to do the book work.”

   The cooperative was made up of a few black families in the Bluffton area, men and women who knew all they needed to know about tides and currents, mud and water, oysters and clams, but who had limited experience in marketing and management. Despite producing a product much in demand, they had financial troubles over the years. Unable to pay its debts on time in late winter of 1982, the co-op, which had forty employees at the time, filed for bankruptcy.

   It reorganized and offered some of its land for sale. It kept going by shucking the best oysters on its 360 acres of leases for the raw market; by picking everything within reach for Maggioni’s Lady’s Island steam cannery, handling the oysters with pay loaders and dump trucks; and by working crab traps in spring and summer.

   As his father and grandfather did for him, Andrew continued to “raise up” his own children “in the creek,” many of them reaching adulthood under the co-op’s influence.

   “I told them to learn the oyster business, because then you don’t have a boss over you. If you make good one day, the next day you don’t have to go … and you won’t get fired. You leave your best singles alone for the raw [market], stay off the good beds when you pick for the [canning] factory.”

   For health reasons, Andrew had to give up going in the river in about 1975, but he was proud of what he had taught others. “We’ve got young people in here now,” he said, standing tall and waving his arms, saluting the shucking tables.

   The co-op fell on hard times again. Three area businessmen bought the factory along with a few acres on the May River and kept the factory going. Then it came down to one owner and a lease operation. Early in the twentieth century, through the Beaufort County Open Land Trust, Beaufort County bought the property as a significant representative of the Lowcountry’s environmental and economic culture.

   In 2005, the factory was going strong. Andrew Kidd would have smiled to see it.