Jekyll and Hide

Taken Emily's advice and written travelogue of one of my favourite places. Challenge connection bit tenuous but starts with a dream and ends with struggle to come to terms with my idyll's racial history.

Jekyll and Hide

Deep southern dreams, Georgia on my mind,

warm memories cling like Spanish moss

to the oaks in my head, defying winds of time;

the hazy freeway from Savannah’s sultry soul

leads me over the causeway to Jekyll Island,

home to the mansions and ghosts of billionaires.

Drifting past Rusty, dog and dolphin, I recall,

oceans of shrimp and grits and crawdaddies, red as rubies,

frozen apple cider, the salty tang of Vance’s margarita,

maid to the marriage of peaches and beer;

flitting, like the shifting white sand to St Andrew’s beach,

white egrets in the hot Georgian sun, paddling in the Sound.

Drawn by the local’s melodic drawl, I watch

a family dredging for shrimp in the shallows;

Mom and Papa wrestle the poles and net, while

milk white kids behind, deter bottle-nosed larceny;

the small girl wails, “Papa, I can’t swim!”

“Well, is it over yer head yet?”                                                     

But turkey vultures wheel their black circles;

history, an alter ego this Jekyll cannot hide,

a ’gator’s eyes and snout lurking in the brackish edge,

a hint to the horror hiding below,

dark, gnarled, twisted like the ghoulish boughs

haunting the shore at Driftwood Beach.

This pristine sand, all-white, a segregated token;

misery-laden, the Wanderer alighted here,

crammed like spoons, crushed as tabby, life no box of chocolates;

gospel echoes from the plantation or causeway chain gang,

the Gullahs have flown, African free like the island census;

well, is it over your head yet?