Butter-bean picker turned political leader: Henry Driessen, born in 1927

PICKER TURNED POLITICAL LEADER

Henry Driessen

Born in 1927

“I wouldn’t live nowhere but on Hilton Head.”

In his back yard in the Chaplin community just off Hilton Head Island’s William Hilton Parkway, Henry Driessen pointed to an iron kettle, almost three feet from side to side, rusty with age and heavy with memories.

   “That would catch the sweet juice,” he said. “There would be a big wood fire under it to cook it—two or three hours, I think, depending. You got the syrup from feeding the stalks of sugar cane into the grinder, and you worked the grinder by having a horse pull the handle ’round and ’round.

   “My grandfather had the cane mill right here, and people from all over the island brought their cane to make their syrup. They would use their own horses to do the pulling. As the juice poured into the pot and cooked, they had to keep skimming the foam off the top. My grandmother was the expert in deciding when the syrup had cooked enough.”

   Chewing on the stalks of cane that ripened in the fall was a treat, but that cane mill lengthened the joy from that natural sweetener. On a remote island where all granulated sugar had to be imported by boat, cane syrup to spread on biscuits and cornbread, cane syrup to flavor the coffee and cane syrup to disguise the taste of medicine such as castor oil was treasured. Actually, much that was produced on the Driessen farm met the needs and desires of coastal folk in those days—and was treasured. But none of the production came without hard work and know-how.

   As a child growing up in the care of his grandparents, Henry and Annie Miller Driessen, and sharing the household with a first cousin, Henry learned young how to take care of the crops and livestock that put food on the table.

   Butter beans—flavored with a bit of ham or bacon and served on rice, or added to okra soup—would be called “soul food” today. In the early twentieth century, they were a staple for island families. As important as was their appearance on Lowcountry kitchen tables, Hilton Head Island’s butter beans also produced cash sales in the Savannah City Market in Georgia.

CRAWLING BETWEEN THE ROWS

First, though, the sandy bean field had to be plowed and planted in the spring. Then it had to be hoed to keep out the weeds. It was fertilized with manure from the livestock and sometimes creek mud and marsh. The beans had to be picked regularly throughout the steamy Lowcountry summer so the bushes would continue to produce. Henry, the chief bean picker in his family, said his grandfather planted what they called “high beans,” which climbed on a round vertical trellis, and “low beans,” which produced great fat pods of beautiful beans just inches from the ground. You pick the “low beans” by squatting and waddling along between the rows or by crawling on your hands and knees in the black soil. Henry just got on his knees and crawled from bush to bush, filling his basket as he went along.

   As an adult, comfortably situated after the sale of beachfront property he inherited, Henry could not recall feeling especially weary or painful after his childhood butter-bean picking—or the hoeing, which also was his job. “Once you get in the rhythm of it, hoeing comes naturally,” he said. “You had to do it, but it wasn’t a big deal. I was not good at plowing, but my cousin was good at that so we worked it out. You had to produce a lot of beans to make it all pay off.”

   Like other island children in the 1930s and 1940s, Henry had other family assignments as well—one of the most important being cutting the wood that fueled the cook stove and the fireplace that warmed the house in the winter. Cows were let out of their pens to graze during the day and had to be penned back up before dark. They also had to be milked. Along with the adults in the family, farm children were farm workers.

   Henry learned early to help take care of his grandfather’s small store on the same property. He sold gasoline, kerosene, grits, rice, flour, cornmeal and salt—and small quantities of meat from his farm and other nearby farmers. “Everybody kept hogs, and everybody would kill a hog some time, but they didn’t all do it at the same time, so sometimes my grandfather would have a ham or sausage to sell.” He could keep smoked meat easily. The fresh meat, when available, was kept in an icebox, the ice imported from Savannah via the steamer

ROWBOATS AND STEAMERS

“You have to understand,” Henry said, “about the transportation system in those days. It was all based on the water. The steamer Clivedon made a roundtrip from Savannah to Daufuskie, Hilton Head, Parris Island and Beaufort [on] Tuesday, Friday and Sunday. Charlie Simmons was the only one of us with a motorized boat. He made a round trip Tuesday and then went to Savannah [on] Friday and came back Saturday. So people could take their produce and do their shopping that way.

   “But my grandfather and a few others also had sailboats. I’m not talking about a recreational sailboat like you see here today. I mean a working sailboat. And that’s how they took their butter beans and watermelons and poultry and other products to the market.”

   Going to Savannah was an exciting trip for island children, Henry said, because of the “bright lights” in the Savannah street scenes—so different from the black darkness at night on Hilton Head. Except for a gasoline-powered generator at Honey Horn, electricity didn’t come to the island until the 1940s. In Henry’s childhood, there was nothing but the moon and the stars to light the outdoors at night, and nothing but lanterns in homes, churches and praise houses. The lanterns burned kerosene, a scarce fuel that had to be imported.

   “There was no amusement here to speak of,” Henry recalled. “We horsed around with one another at school, but we all had certain chores after school. And when night came, you’d better be in.”

   And yet, islanders had a lively social network. They treated the normal exchanges between one another—whether about crops, fish, transportation, hogs or chickens—as recreation. And they had their churches, where they gathered for Sunday services, and their praise houses, where they gathered Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday nights. “There were praise houses scattered all over the island,” Henry said. “The Methodists and Baptists—they were the only two religions here then—used one another’s praise houses. When we’d go to the praise house, somebody would raise up a spiritual, and everybody would join in. Then that’s where everybody would learn to harmonize and get the rhythm right. We’d also use the Baptist hymnbook. And we had serious prayer there. The praise house was an important part of every neighborhood.”

   In addition to the purposes of spiritual growth and social life, the churches functioned as the moral authority in the community. The magistrate often sent disputes or crimes that reached court back to the deacons to sort out and rectify. “That deacon board ruled with an iron hand,” Henry said. “The people who had to go to court would say to the magistrate, “You take care of it, sir. Don’t send me to the deacons!’”

   And yes, indeed, the children were a part of the praise house and church services. And they caught on young to the meaning of authority. “If an adult told you to do something, that was it. You didn’t challenge them or you would get a beating. They would bring you into compliance. It’s just not that way now. The parents have let that authority go by the way. It’s a mess now, I’m telling you,” Henry said.

EDUCATION AS THE KEY

Henry had the good fortune of growing up in a family that pushed education as the hope of the future. He walked to the Chaplin neighborhood school for grades one through six, went to school on Honey Horn Plantation for grades seven and eight, and then spent four years boarding at Penn School on St. Helena Island. From Penn, he went to West Virginia State College, where he stayed only one night, before taking off for New York in the hopes of attending City College. To meet the entrance requirements there, he had to get a credit in foreign language. So soon after leaving the remote islands of South Carolina for higher education, he found himself in Spanish lessons in metropolitan New York City. He then attended St. Augustine College in Raleigh, North Carolina; served time in the U.S. Army; and graduated from Savannah State College (now Atlantic University) with a degree in industrial education.

   After one year of teaching school, Henry returned to Chaplin to help his grandfather run the store and the farm, and he’s been there ever since. His wife, Phoebe Wiley Driessen, taught school on Hilton Head for five years before commuting to Savannah State College, as a young woman with children, to earn a bachelor’s degree. Phoebe taught school altogether for thirty years, most of those years in the first-grade classroom. After retiring, she began volunteering as a tutor. Henry and Phoebe spent their life together on the same spot his grandfather lived and farmed in the 1920s, next to the BP station on U.S. Route 278, which stands where his grandfather’s store stood.

   Out of his grandfather’s thirty-five acres there, Henry inherited fourteen or fifteen acres, of which he sold about ten acres to the Town of Hilton Head Island for the Driessen Beachfront Park. By the end of the twentieth century, Henry found himself wealthy. He never dreamed, when as a child he crawled in the bean field to help his grandfather make a living, he’d have so much money.

   And yet, on into the twenty-first century, Henry continued to live where he had lived before, continued to run his gas station, continued to serve as a deacon for the First African Baptist Church, continued service on the Palmetto Electric Cooperative’s Board of Directors. Earlier, he served ten years on the Hilton Head Island Town Council. “They wanted a black to help in decision-making for the town,” Henry said. “I was a merchant and an automobile mechanic. I didn’t know nothin’ about politics. But I learned, and I enjoyed it. Sometimes I was a loner, and sometimes other council members were loners, but our disagreements weren’t racial, usually. I never walked out of a meeting, I tell you that.” He also spent time on the Hilton Head Island No. 1 Public Service District Commission as well as on the boards of the Hilton Head Hospital and the Hilton Head Island Foundation.

   “I wouldn’t live nowhere but on Hilton Head. It’s as different now from when I grew up as cheese is from chalk, but I still like it. No, not for the beach. I never ‘catered to’ the beach. For us, it was just there, all that sand and that water, but we didn’t go out there. What for?” he said, laughing.

   In the tradition of the Driessen family, Henry and Phoebe in 2002 were raising a granddaughter, a young woman they called a “grand.” They were doing the best they could, they said, also maintaining their independent traditions—Henry as a deacon in the First African Baptist Church, where he grew up, and Phoebe active in the St. James Baptist Church, where she grew up. They liked sharing a story or two with familiar friends and family. They especially liked living where everybody knew their names