At age one hundred, lively as a dancer: Georgianna Barnwell, born in 1881

AT AGE ONE LIVELY AS A DANCER

Georgianna Barnwell

Born in 1881

Medical service everywhere was primitive, especially on that remote island off the South Carolina coast. Georgianna’s small scorched child died of

Georgianna Miller Barnwell personified a slice of local and American history. The straight nose and high cheekbones on her dark face gave a hint of her part-Indian heritage as well as her African ancestry.

   At the age of one hundred, at her home on Hilton Head Island’s Squire Pope Road, she moved like a dancer and told stories like an entertainer. Nearly deaf, she relied on her granddaughter-in-law to help communicate. As she reached back into some of the dramas of her Lowcountry life years before, ready emotions flooded over her.

FAMILY LORE FROM SLAVERY

Georgianna’s people “sprang,” she said, from Charleston during the Civil War. Her mother, who was born on the “Okatie Main” (the mainland around the Okatie River) told her many times about the Jones family’s furtive rowboat trip from the Okatie down the Colleton, Chechessee and Broad Rivers in the early 1860s. The family was headed to Union-occupied Hilton Head Island, the first “free place” in the South.

   Among the fleeing runaway slaves was a baby who started crying on the trip, would not stop and could not be silenced.

   Fearing capture and punishment if the infant’s wailing could be heard on shore, various family members grew frantic. Finally, several in the boat whispered commands to the mother: “T’row him overboard, t’row him overboard.”

   Panic-stricken, the mother muffled his sobs. Telling the story as it was told to her, Georgianna grimaced and demonstrated with her hands and her whole body how the young woman must have clutched her child to her breast.

   The rowers pulled their oars in rhythm in the dark waters, slowly moving their living cargo. At last, in breathtaking relief, the family landed on the safe shore of Hilton Head Island.

   “That was a time in this world,” Georgianna said, shaking her gray head.

   Out of the Jones family’s escape from slavery in the 1860s evolved the community around Jarvis Creek known for many years as Jonesville. From that family came Katie Jones, who married islander John Miller and gave birth in 1881 to our storyteller Georgianna. John Miller, Georgianna’s “Pa,” got work as a seaman and in a meat house and a coffee mill in Savannah, Georgia, about twenty-five miles south by water. The family lived in Savannah for a while. Then, after buying thirty-five acres in the Pope community and moving back to Hilton Head, John would commute to jobs as a longshoreman by catching the steamer to Savannah or rowing his boat across Port Royal Sound to the harbor at Port Royal. He would pack a baked sweet potato and a bit of smoked pork for a meal along the way.

   At the age of sixteen, Georgianna became the bride of Jerry Barnwell, a young man from Jericho, a community near Port Royal. They began raising horses, hogs, turkeys, chickens, guineas and children on Elliott, an abandoned antebellum cotton plantation on Port Royal Sound in what is now Hilton Head Plantation. Like Georgianna’s father, Jerry commuted to Savannah and Port Royal to load and unload ships for wages.

FIRES WERE DEVASTATING

Tears filled Georgianna’s dark brown eyes when she described the terrifying death of her daughter, Alfreda, at the age of four. Georgianna had built a fire in the yard and gone next door to get a pot to wash clothes when she saw, out of the corner of her eye, flames licking at Alfreda’s little leg. Jerry came running with water, and Georgianna wrapped her own clothes around the child. “I bind up her like this,” she said, demonstrating how she smothered the blaze. Medical service everywhere was primitive, especially on that remote island off the South Carolina coast. Georgianna’s small, scorched child died of burns.

   Far ahead of water mains on Hilton Head, fire also destroyed two of Georgianna’s island homes. A chimney blaze started one, an electrical spark the other. After one such fire, the family lived temporarily in what had been a corn barn.

   Tears filled Georgianna’s eyes again when she described the unforgettable atrocity that struck the island in 1923. A white couple ran the largest store on Hilton Head, a place to buy a little coffee and a few nails, a place to tell the news and get the news, a gathering center for blacks and whites near what is now Hilton Head Regional Medical Center. One night, just as the well-respected, well-liked man and woman were closing the store and preparing to go upstairs where they lived, two men murdered them with an ax from the store and burned their property to the ground.

   “That was a time on this island,” Georgianna said, shaking her head.

THE SOCIETY HALLS

Georgianna’s happy memories were as happy as the sad ones were sad. She cackled with joy as easily as she wept for sorrow.

   She smiled broadly and patted her knee when she thought about the dances, the “societies,” held in the “halls” with live music. She lifted her chin and poked out her chest when she recalled overhearing a comment at a Penn School ceremony on St. Helena Island. “They didn’t know I was listening, but I heard them say that whoever raised Thomas raise a good child.” Thomas was her son (father of Thomas Barnwell Jr. and, by the twenty-first century, a well-known island businessman and community leader).

   Unlike most islanders of long, long ago, Georgianna Miller Barnwell and one other young black woman took their children and others on little excursions to the beach to play in the sand and swim. She remembered fondly that their party of less than a dozen would have the whole twelve-mile strip to themselves.