Pally

I met Edward, respectfully known as Pally, one cloudy afternoon while on the hunt for an overgrown burial ground in the Mary Jenkins community of St. Helena Island, once a plantation owned by a white woman. I informed him that my organization is in the process of revitalizing, preserving & retrieving years of lost stories from the 44 plus black burial grounds on the island and that I had hit a “dead end” in my search for that specific site. Now… let me tell y’all about the way The Divine is set up … if you ask, you shall receive. I took a turn down a unassuming dust track road where I found Pally working in his garden. Not only did he point me in the right direction, he pointed me in the direction of a few other sites that I hadn’t been able to find in my research. 

Since that day, Pally and I have become what I’d like to think of as good friends. He spends most of his days tending to his okra garden and fruit trees. Some days he goes out fishing on the marsh waters, throwing nets, catching mullet , shrimp and crab. Other times I sit around showing him how my camera works. He calls it “the scope” and is still curious of my process of “ getting the photos” out of the camera. In his thick Gullah accent, he tells me stories of all of the Indian Mounds that were once on the island and how his family never came from Africa and was always here. “ Pally, how do you know that?” I asked. He responded with a smirk, “…Because my great great grandmother told me so, and her great great grandma told her so. The old folks don’t lie. Some of “US” were already here.” 

More of Pally and his story coming soon. This pictorial & video chronicle will be apart of an ongoing Quincy Quest series entitled, “UnEarthing : The Faces of an Island “. Inspired by Leigh Richmond Miners , Face of an Island and Early Days of Coastal Georgia , by Orrin Sage Wightman.