“Po lidda fella.”
The old, weathered woman had skin as dark and wrinkled as bark and arms as thin and knobby as the farthest branches of the island’s ancient oak trees.
She spoke with the flavor of her Gullah ancestors, who had created a new language in the lowcountry of South Carolina by mixing the west African rhythms they had learned on their momma’s knees with the English they
had learned when they were stolen away from their own people and lands and brought here to the American South.
She lived in a holey floored, crack walled, Duck tape windowed shotgun shack on John’s Island left over from the days of slavery and Jim Crow.
She fished along the inlet and shoreline each morning, trying to catch red fish, sea trout and flounder to go with the fruits and vegetables she grew in her garden.
She wove sweet grass into baskets in a roadside market from the late mornings to the early afternoons, until it was time to go home and cook supper for her husband and five children.
“Jus sits dere. Eva monin’ as de sun rises ova de ocean an sits on de wada like a ripe tomata. Neva says anything. Jus sits dere a’watchin de wada and a’list’nin to de waves.”
She walked over to him and stood beside him. She placed her bony hand gently on his head. Her shadow fell over him and protected him from the light and heat of the sun.
“Wha’s yo name?” she asked kindly. “My name’s Mattie. Could you tell me yo name?”
He turned his earthy brown eyes to her.
He didn’t say one thing, didn’t utter one word.
She figured he didn’t understand her.
His Mami and Abuelo were migrant workers, picking peaches and tomatoes in the lowcountry summers, then moving on down the coasts of Georgia and Florida with the falls and winters.
Theirs was a migratory life, moving with the hard work, scrabbling a life.
“Maybe he only understands Spanish”, she thought, for he and his family had made it to the United States from the farms and fields of El Salvador in Central America.
Suddenly, he whistled.
This astonished her, and she almost fell over into the sand because of it.
The sound was unlike any whistle she had ever heard before.
A usual whistle has two notes and a high pitch, but his was an unusual whistle. It had all kinds of notes in it, and the pitch went high and low, low and high and all kinds of places in between.
It was as if the great composers had written his whistle at the height of their compositional powers.
“Ya know,” she said in hushed tones to the women weaving sweetgrass baskets around her later that day, “It was like he was a’tryin to say sumpin to me in a bee-yoo-tee-ful way, but I din’ hab no idée whad id was.”
He simply looked back over the water and the sky again, and was very still and very quiet.
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