South Carolina’s Lowcountry is a Gateway to the Past

South Carolina’s coast, made up of islands, marshes, deltas, rivers, and small towns, is known as the “Lowcountry” because so much of it lies close to sea level. But to think of this term as merely geographical is a bit too literal for my taste.

I’ve lived in Atlanta most of my life, and though South Carolina is only one state away, it has a distinct, complex history that has always fascinated me. As a Southerner, I also understand things operate on more than one frequency. Sure, the topography may be low, but there is also a feeling that there are hidden histories beneath the surface. 

I set out to explore the Lowcountry in autumn, when the tourist season had subsided and the beaches and towns would be quieter. One of my guiding beliefs is that you haven’t properly visited a place until you engage with its history—which is why I began my journey at the International African American Museum, on Gadsden’s Wharf, in Charleston, which was once the busiest North American port in the transatlantic slave trade. 

My guide, Malika Pryor, asked if I had ever visited the infamous “Door of No Return” in Ghana. “Imagine this threshold as its complement,” she said. Back in 2008, I had indeed seen the arched doorway that led from the Cape Coast Castle to the Atlantic Ocean, where a boat waited to take captive Africans to places like Charleston. Nearly two decades later, I am still haunted by the experience.

Pryor explained that nearly half of all Africans brought to the United States arrived exactly where we stood; it’s estimated that, today, as many as 90 percent of African Americans can claim at least one ancestor who stepped ashore at Charleston. I paused, considering Pryor’s words. My own family history is largely a mystery: I know precious little about the generations preceding my grandparents. In front of us was a small pool with a mosaic depicting the belly of a slave ship, in which men, women, and children were stacked almost like logs. I bent my knee, dipped my fingers into the water, and wondered if maybe it recognized me.

The museum is dedicated to the history of African Americans around the world, with an emphasis on the Gullah Geechee—descendants of the people who harvested cotton and indigo on South Carolina’s remote coastal plantations. Being geographically isolated, they retained much of the culture with which they arrived, and also combined English and several West African languages to form a new tongue. 

Of the many artifacts on display, I was most moved by a cotton bag called “Ashley’s Sack,” which was discovered at a flea market in 2007. Embroidered across its coarse surface was a heartbreaking message:

My great grandmother Rose mother of Ashley gave her this sack when

she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina

it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of

pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her

It be filled with my Love always

she never saw her again

Ashley is my grandmother

Ruth Middleton, 1921

As a professor of African-American literature and culture, I am no stranger to the history of the enslaved. Yet to see this sack in person, to see Ruth’s precise stitching alongside the rips and stains of a century, seared into my soul an understanding not just of who I was, but of where I stood.

Still thinking about Ashley and her granddaughter, I set off on the 20-mile drive from Charleston to Johns Island, hoping to arrive before dark. My destination was the Dunlin, a new 72-room Auberge resort set on the Kiawah River. The road was lined with ancient trees festooned with Spanish moss. When I turned off the highway onto a short road, I saw a few signs urging drivers to slow down. Once I arrived, I felt my breathing relax, as if it were obeying those signs. The white bungalows, trimmed in a shade of mint green, seemed to invite me to take a load off. The interiors were similarly calming, with lots of rattan, wicker, wood, and textured linen. 

Although I could have satisfied myself with the welcome platter of pimento cheese and fruit that awaited me in my suite, I couldn’t resist stopping into the restaurant, Linnette’s, for dinner. While mixing my cocktail, the bartender, Juleon Schneider, who seemed to have been time-machined from a Prohibition-era speakeasy, explained that although he had no idea who the real Linnette was, he imagined her as a woman who loves to entertain—maybe she even drinks a little too much—and at whose table everyone wants to have dinner.

At the urging of my bow-tied waiter, I chose the warm crab dip, followed by duck-leg confit with Carolina Gold rice. Picturing Linnette urging me on, I ended the evening with a spiced apple cobbler that paired nicely with red-corn bourbon.

In a place as comfortable as the Dunlin, it’s easy to forget that relaxing is more than doing nothing: it is the refilling of the spirit. I was curious about the land around me, so early one morning I met Tia Clark, whose Casual Crabbing With Tia tour has made her something of a social media sensation.

Clark offers crabbing expeditions at the Dunlin, but I chose to join her at her home dock on the Ashley River, back in Charleston. Three other travelers were gathered at the dock, eager to learn. Clark, a Charleston native from a Gullah Geechee family, showed us how to catch crabs: she put the bait—chicken legs—into a wire basket and lowered it into the river. “I grew up eating crabs every day and never considered where they come from,” she told us. “But the first time I caught my own meal?” She shook her head, causing her dreadlocks to swing. “That changed my life.”

Crabbing, it turns out, is something almost anyone can do. And by almost anyone, I mean me. After three tries, I hauled up a basket containing two bright blue beauties that looked as surprised to see me as I was to see them. Rather than use a ruler, Tia carefully measured the crab against a tattoo on her muscular calf—she got inked after she went crabbing without a ruler and had to detangle 100 angry crabs to verify their size.

I posed for a photo while Clark gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up and my fellow crabbers cheered. As she cleaned the catch, she entertained us with a terrific yarn about hunting her first alligator—a story that started with her winning a hunting permit in a lottery and ended with her brandishing a harpoon in one hand and a pistol in the other.

All that crabbing put me in a DIY frame of mind. I knew a cocktail session was not an adventure on the level of harpooning an alligator, but learning to make one’s own drink had to count for something. When I got back to the Dunlin, I took a class called Southern Sips, a brief but informative primer in all things boozy, led by my new bartender friend Juleon Schneider. Under his patient instruction, I learned to make an Old-Fashioned that would make Linnette herself proud. After gently correcting my stirring technique, he presented me with a jumbo ice cube—specially band-sawed to fit the Dunlin’s glasses. 

A few days later, driving out of town, I noticed a tiny sign cautioning that a left turn would not take me to the Angel Oak on Johns Island. A few moments later came another homemade marker alerting me that the tree was not down that road, either. Intrigued, I hung a left when, finally, a banner announced this was the way.

Live oaks are so called because they retain their curvy green leaves year-round. Sometimes wider than they are tall, the trees live for centuries: the Angel Oak is estimated to be at least 400 years old, and is believed to be one of the oldest living things east of the Mississippi. Standing more than 66 feet tall with a circumference of 28 feet, it has become a celebrity of sorts. Touching my hand to the coarse bark, I marveled at its stature.

My next stop was Beaufort (pronounced bew-fert). This is Pat Conroy country—where the author of The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, and other novels lived and wrote for many years. Folks I met in town wanted to be sure I knew this, even before they found out that I, too, am a novelist. They insisted I visit his grave, if only to see the offerings of bourbon, paperbacks, and other gifts left by devoted fans. 

I stayed at the Cuthbert House, a 10-room inn so close to the Beaufort River I could smell the salt water from the terrace of my suite. The house straddles the uneasy divide between the South’s troubling past and the touristic realities of the present: the 1790 mansion was, in all likelihood, built by enslaved people; today, romantic portraits of historical figures like the Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard are affixed to the walls. Yet there was also a framed photo of a platoon of Union soldiers mugging on the front porch, victorious. 

Just three blocks away from all this antebellum splendor is a statue of Harriet Tubman, created by the great African American sculptor and aviator Ed Dwight. Cast in bronze, Tubman is depicted leading Union troops and non-soldiers on the 1863 Combahee River Raid, after which hundreds of the enslaved were freed. I paused, listening to the music of the Beaufort River. “Thank you for your service, ma’am,” I said, surprising myself by speaking the words aloud.

Thinking about the layers of history beneath every surface, I drove 40 minutes to Bluffton, the last stop of my tour. It is only 20 feet above sea level—the lowest town in the Lowcountry. 

I checked in to the Montage Palmetto Bluff, a sprawling 200-room resort on the banks of the May River that comprises guest rooms, villas, restaurants, boat docks, and even a post office. The beating heart of the property is the main building, the Inn, which was inspired by the 1910 manor built by Richard T. Wilson, a New York tycoon who made his fortune in banking and racehorses. To please his wife, Wilson constructed one of the most magnificent homes in South Carolina, only to see it catch fire 16 years later. Local gossip says Mrs. Wilson rushed into the flames to save her prodigious shoe collection, tossing pumps and boots from a second-floor window. Now all that remains of that house is the stone foundation, the entry steps, and pillars; today the site is used for outdoor concerts.

There are other markers of history, too. On the riverbank are chunks of tabby, a.k.a. “coastal concrete,” made from oyster shells, sand, and lime—remnants of the homes of the people who were once enslaved on this beautiful land. 

As a southerner, I sometimes chafe at the idea that our regional culture is composed of quirky eccentrics. (From time to time, I even go out of my way to be a little bit boring, just to defy expectations.) So please forgive me for my description of Captain Pete Barbano, who roared up to the Montage on his motorboat to ferry me through the coastal waters. The man is a character there is no other way to say it.

Imagine Hemingway with a Southern drawl. Ruddy skin, white beard, and an outdoorsiness that immediately identifies him as a man who is at home on the water. We got under way, and Barbano shared some local trivia, explaining—with what seemed almost like a father’s pride—that the bottlenose dolphins of the Lowcountry are especially intelligent, as proven by the fact they feed by herding smaller fish onto the mud banks. We saw a small pod swimming past, oblivious to us as they frolicked on the waves, and I enjoyed feeling like just another creature on the water.

“See that rocky island?” Barbano asked, pointing. I nodded, observing the rough gray peaks that jutted up above the water’s surface. He grinned, then said, “Those aren’t rocks. They’re oysters!” Suddenly, I saw them—thousands of shells that were growing together to form a sort of reef. They are an ecological asset beyond measure; Barbano told me that a single oyster can filter 50 gallons of water per day.

We soon arrived at Daufuskie Island, the subject of Pat Conroy’s book The Water Is Wide, a partly fictionalized memoir detailing his experiences as a schoolteacher there in the 1960s. Barbano gave me a brief history of the island, beginning with the “Great Skedaddle”—a local term for the hasty exit the white residents of the Beaufort area made in 1861 as Union soldiers approached. Left behind, the plantation workers took up indigo and cotton production themselves. When the boll-weevil epidemic in the 1920s decimated the crops, the people took up oyster harvesting, only to see pollution destroy that industry in the 1960s. Seeking other opportunities, islanders migrated to communities including Charleston and Savannah. Now the population of the island is down to about 500 people; only about 18 are what Barbano describes as “true” Gullah descendants.

The island feels haunted, but not eerie. Driving us along the unpaved roads in a golf cart, Barbano pointed out the modest, tidy “Gullah houses” and told me who lives where. We also stopped at the segregated school where Conroy taught (it is now an artists’ workshop) and the First Union African Baptist Church. Finally we visited the cemetery, where all the headstones face east, making it easier for the souls of the departed to return to Africa. After a moment of silence we returned to the boat, where I asked a question that had been on my mind. “Where are you from? How do you know so much about Daufuskie?”

“Well,” he said, not the least bit sheepishly, “I am a Yankee.”

If I hadn’t been holding on to the boat railing I might have fallen into the river. 

Barbano’s transformation from a born-and-raised New Yorker to a Lowcountry boatman was sparked by the 1977 miniseries Roots, based on Alex Haley’s novel, the story of an African man sold into slavery, and his descendants. I was familiar with the show, which aired on ABC over eight nights and achieved a record-breaking viewership, but I was stunned to learn that it had served as an impetus for Barbano to change his life so entirely—he has now lived here for 35 years.

While the Lowcountry can seem obsessed with its past, it is also taking strides toward a bright future. The library at the Montage was furnished with all the clubby trappings you might expect: heavy leather-bound books, brass sconces, a stone fireplace. But above the mantle hangs a portrait of a Black woman dressed in white, calmly gazing outward. Vibrant indigo paint drips down the canvas, from clouds, palm trees, and the sweetgrass basket atop the woman’s head. 

The artist, Amiri Geuka Farris, a graduate of Savannah College of Art & Design, settled in South Carolina to hone his craft. “I want to pay homage to the past, yet keep my work contemporary at the same time,” he told me. “I feel like the ancestors speak through me. They want the story told, but the right way.” While many artists in the Gullah Geechee tradition specialize in the painting of silhouettes, faces are central to Farris’s imagery, as are emblems of life in the Lowcountry, such as palmetto trees, blue herons, and sweetgrass. 

Farris is friends with Bridgette Frazier, a Bluffton Town Council member and the founder of the future Bluffton Gullah Cultural Heritage Center, which is scheduled to open later this year. When I visited, construction was still under way, but the complex will eventually house a bakery, an artisan market, and a restaurant that will showcase modern Gullah Geechee cuisine. There will be a place where local citizens can record oral histories and artists like Farris can present their work. 

Since the restaurant was not yet open, Frazier treated us to a lunch of shrimp stew and red rice that she’d prepared in her own kitchen. Dessert was a buttery pound cake and rich banana pudding. The three of us talked about the Gullah Geechee and the efforts to preserve their history. “We just want to have the opportunity to pass our stories down through the generations,” Frazier said. 

Driving away from the Montage early the next morning, I paused on a bridge facing a small spit of land called Bird Island, which is just big enough to support a few trees and some dense vegetation, making it perfect for roosting.

I recalled my conversation with Tia Clark, the crabber from Charleston. I had asked her how her mother felt about her unique and marvelous life. Clark had spread her arms to encompass the land, the water, and maybe even the sky. “My mother loves it for me, because time on the river is your time with God.” 

No metaphors here. Some things are best taken at face value. 

A version of this story first appeared in the May 2025 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline “Carolina in My Mind.”