Ghost Trees and Swishing Wind

Life in the lowcountry of Beaufort County, South Carolina, is marked by dramatic extremes of wealth and poverty. For example, while most of the inhabitants of Hilton Head Island qualify for welfare, the annual median income is about $50,000 per family. The small school serving the nearly all black population of Daufuskie Island^[1]* stands in sharp contrast to the resort hotels and condominiums on Hilton Head. Growing up on these islands, rich and poor youngsters alike experience acute isolation and provincialism. Yet, like other visiting artists who work in the area’s schools, I’ve found that while these conditions often affect a child’s academic performance, his or her artistic sensibilities and powers of expression can remain amazingly fresh and compelling. In fact, it often seems as though the provincialism of Beaufort County children has given them an openness, an appetite for new aesthetic experiences which their more sophisticated urban peers often lack. 

The little community of Dale is less than five miles off Highway 21, the main route linking Beaufort with the rest of the state. Yet it too might as well be sur rounded by water. Many of the children I met at Dale Elementary never leave the county; ironically, when they do leave, it’s often a radical move to New York City or Philadelphia to visit their parents who have migrated in search of jobs. Only 12 out of 478 students are white; the language of many of the black students reflects their Gullah heritage. 

Visting writers who have worked in Dale Elementary agree that the quality of the children’s creative work is nothing less than astounding. They draw richly on the imagery of the surrounding lowcountry environment of swamps, pine trees, Spanish moss, snakes, fish, and of course the ocean. Visiting artists are also amazed at the children’s receptivity to strange new ideas. For instance, in Shaun Farragher’s poetry classes he shows slides of paintings by Picasso, Dali, Klee, Van Gogh. The students — most of whose prior artistic experience has been limited to an occasional class in finger-painting or puppet-making — respond to these painters’ images with poems and pictures of their own, and demonstrate vivid and original perceptions. 

Because of Hilton Head Island’s large financial resources, more students in the island’s schools are exposed to the visual arts than elsewhere in the county; even very young students pick up on the rather avant-garde techniques of the visiting artists. Despite their access to artists, the wealthy children of Hilton Head are in many ways as provincial as their peers in Dale or Daufuskie. For the most part, Hilton Head youngsters have a very limited circle of friends and an equally circumscribed perspective on the world at large. Entire cities are dismissed with a summary phrase. Savannah, I am told, is “seedy;” there’s “nothing to do” in Beaufort. Yet underlying these adolescent biases is a fundamental interest in new experiences and a desire for real, original self-expression. 

Historically, few cultures have been strong enough to sustain themselves in total isolation. As a result, they have learned not only from the riches of their own pasts but also from unique or exotic encounters with the outside world. In a sense, individuals resemble such cultures because, although we each have the fundamental knowledge necessary for survival, we also need outside stimuli to trigger this knowledge into action. If judged by their receptivity to new experiences, ideas and people, the students in these lowcountry schools may be the most worldly, the most sophisticated of people.