I be here

“Po lidda fella,” said the old, weathered woman with skin as dark and wrinkled as bark and arms as thin and knobby as branches on the farthest reaches of the angel oak tree on the island.

She lived in a holey floored, crack walled, Duck taped shotgun style shack left over from the days of slavery and Jim Crow on Johns Island, South Carolina.

She fished the inlet and the 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 from late morning to early evening.

“Jus sits dere,” she continued, “Eva monin’ as de sun rises ova de ocean an sits on de wada like a ripe tomada.

Neva says a word. Jus sits dere a’watchin de wada and a’lis’nin to de waves.”

One day she walked over and stood beside him. 

Her shadow protected him from the bright sun and oppressive 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 a thing. 

She figured he didn’t understand her. 

His mamí and abuelo were migrant workers, picking peaches and tomatoes in the lowcountry summers until moving down the coasts of Georgia and Florida with the southern winters.

“Ma’be he only speaks Spanish,” she thought, for his family had come to the United States from the farms and fields of El Salvador.

Suddenly, he whistled. 

She was astonished. 

She almost fell over into the sand. 

The sound was unlike any whistle she had ever heard in her life.

A usual whistle has two notes and a high pitch, but this 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, it was like he was a’tryin to say somepin to me in a be-yoo-tee-ful way,” she explained, “But I din’ hab no idée whad id was.”

He looked back over the water and at the sky again.

He was very still and very quiet. 

She felt a wide compassion for him in the deepest part of her heart. 

She wrapped her arm around his shoulder as the tide rolled in.

She placed her warm, calloused hand on his head. 

“I be here,” she whispered, not exactly sure why.

“I be here.”