There is no Peacock’s Island on St. Helena’s Sound, or anywhere else, that I know of, but perhaps there might have been, and if there had, I think it would be a lot like this one. There are no actual people like the ones in this book, but perhaps if there had been, they might have lived on Peacock’s Island. There is no Gullah settlement called Dayclear, and indeed, the very name is my invention; the accepted Gullah word for dawn is “Dayclean,” though I have seen “Dayclear” in one or two places. There are wild ponies, or marsh tackies, still on some of the Sea Islands, and there are resort developments on almost all of them, many of them called plantations, but Peacock Island Plantation is my own hybrid. There is, thank God, an Ace Basin, and it contains all the wildlife mentioned in this book and more, except a twenty-foot alligator named Leviathan and a one-hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old panther—and after all, in the Lowcountry, who knows?
My thanks and love to Barbara and Duke Hagerty, who shared their friendship, their library, their house and home, and their passion for Edisto Island and the Ace Basin; to Sandra Player, whose miraculous teenage years provided Caro Venable with a provenance of her own; and to Dr. Alex Sanders, president of the College of Charleston, who once again gave me words, flesh and blood for this book. He will know which ones.
My gratitude and admiration to the creators of two wonderful books,* whose pages I have borrowed liberally and literally.
And, as always, to Larry, Ginger, Heyward, and Martha, the home team.
Anne Rivers Siddons
Atlanta, Georgia
May 1998
*“Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life?”—The People of Johns Island, South Carolina—Their Faces, Their Words and Their Songs, revised and expanded edition, recorded and edited by Guy and Candie Caraway and published by Brown Thrasher Books, University of Georgia Press, 1989; When Roots Die—Endangered Traditions of the Sea Islands by Patricia Jones Jackson, published by the University of Georgia Press, 1987.