“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 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 words they happily learned while sitting on their mothers knees with the English words they were forced to learn when they were stolen away from their own people and lands and brought here to America.
She lived a holey floored, crack walled, Duck taped windowed shotgun style shack on John’s Island left over from the days of slavery and the Jim Crow laws.
She fished along the inlet and the shoreline each morning trying to catch red fish, sea trout and flounder to go with the fruits and vegetables that grew out of her garden.
She wove sweet grass into baskets from the late mornings to the early evenings.
“Jus sits dere,” she continued, “Eva monin’ as de sun rises ova de ocean an sits on de wada like a ripe tomata. Neva says one word. Jus sits dere a’watchin de wada and a’list’nin to de waves.”
One day she walked over to him and stood beside him.
The sun cast her shadow over him.
She protected him from the brightness of the new day.
“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.
She figured he didn’t understand her.
His mami and abuelo were migrant workers picking peaches and tomatoes in the lowcountry summer until they were ready to move down the coasts of Georgia and Florida with the fall and winter.
She thought maybe he only spoke Spanish, since his family had made it to the United States from the farms and fields of El Salvador in Central America.
Suddenly, he whistled.
It astonished her, and she almost fell over into the sand.
The sound was unlike any whistle she had ever heard before.
A usual whistle has two notes and a high pitch, but this was an unusual whistle.
Its sound 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, and was very still and quiet.
She felt a wide compassion for him in the deepest part of her heart.
