"Po lidda fella," said the old weathered woman with skin as dark and wrinkled as the bark and arms as thin and knobby as the farthest reaches of the island's ancient oak trees.
She spoke with the flavor of her Gullah ancestors, who had created a new language in the low country of South Carolina by mixing the west African words they happily learned as they sat on their mothers knees with the English words they sadly learned when they were uprooted and stolen away from their own land and brought to America.
She lived in a holey floored, cracked walled, Duck tape windowed, shotgun style house 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 that grew out of the community garden between her neighbors houses and hers.
She wove sweet grass into baskets from late mornings to early evenings, and sold them in the downtown market on Saturdays and Sundays.
"Jus sits dere," she continued.
"Eva monin' as de sun rises ova de ocean an sits on de wada like a ripe tomato.
Jus sits dere a lookin' at de wada an a lis'nin to de waves."
One day, she walked over to him and stood beside him.
The sun cast her shadow over him, and that protected him from the glare and heat of the new day.
"Wha's yo name?" she asked kindly.
"My name's Mattie.
Would you tell me yo name?"
He turned his earthy brown eyes to her.
He didn't say one word.
She figured he didn't understand her.
His mamí and abuelo were migrant workers, picking peaches and tomatoes in the lowcountry summers until it was time to move on down the coasts of Georgia and Florida with the southern winters.
She thought maybe he spoke only Spanish, since his family had come to the United States from the farms and fields of El Salvador.
Suddenly, he whistled!
It was unlike any whistle she had ever heard before.
A usual whistle has two notes and a high pitch, but this whistle was unusual.
It's sound had all kinds of notes in it, and it's pitch went high and low, low and high, and many places in between.
It was as if the great composers of the world had written his whistle at the height of their compositional powers.
"Ya know, t'was like he was a tryin' to say somepin' to me in a be-yoo-tee-full way," she explained. "But I din' hab no idee whad id was."
He looked back over the water and the sky again.
He was very still and very quiet.
She felt compassion for him in the deepest parts of her heart.
- Trevor Scott Barton, stories for a brown-eyed girl, 2020
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