Preface

PREFACE

These oral histories almost slipped away. Most of the Lowcountry folk who lived here in the early twentieth century have passed on. When I was a child growing up in their midst, I had no idea of the stories they could have told me if I had asked.

   Fortunately, Terry Plumb, editor of The Island Hilton Head Island’s daily newspaper when I conducted most of the interviews as a reporter in the 1980s, encouraged—nay, drove—me to find out how these men and women really lived.

   Fortunately, the late Daniel Hasell Heyward Jr., my father, a lifelong resident of the area, knew most of the people in this book and introduced me to many of them.

   Fortunately, once the characters of Remembering the Way it Was realized that I was both curious and respectful, they opened up.

   Fortunately, Bill Marscher, my husband, saw these profiles as valuable context for the next generations of Lowcountry folk—both the “bin yeahs” (natives) and the “cum yeahs” (settlers). He encouraged—nay, drove—me to organize them into this book. He then put his technical skills and his patience to work cleaning up the old photographs.

   I very much appreciate permission from The Island Packet for the use of storytellers’ pictures.

   My hope now is that readers will come to like these storytellers, resourceful souls who bloomed where they were planted.

Fran Heyward Marscher

Bluffton, South Carolina

Section of the South Carolina Lowcountry where the storytellers lived. Map from the South Carolina Land Improvement Co. 1877