Halfway through a long walk to the Winn-Dixie to procure “essential” supplies (raspberries, snow peas, hummus, paper napkins, box wine), I came across this sign:
Stretching past the sign to the left of the main sidewalk was an unpaved road off into the indeterminate distance. Of course I had to find out more. The secondary road led me alongside a faintly stinky drainage ditch behind a housing development called Plantation Village, then a transformer sub-station, then the baseball fields for Frederica Academy. As I walked, I wondered. Based on the name and the dates, was this a cemetery for Union soldiers? But why would anyone here bother with burials and cemeteries for Union troops?
After about ¾ of a mile there was a fence, then an open gate in the fence, and some visible headstones. No signs at all, but Google Maps confirmed that I was at the site of the Strangers Cemetery, so I went in. Nobody else was there, and the graves seemed scattered about fairly randomly, some overgrown, others festooned with flags and flowers. To my disappointment, none seemed to date back to the 1800s; the oldest one I saw was a WWI veteran. In fact many of the people buried there were veterans or the families of veterans, and quite a few had been buried fairly recently, despite the overall atmosphere of casual neglect.
Later on back on the boat, some light googling revealed that the Strangers Cemetery originated in the wake of the Civil War, when a handful of free Black Americans came to work on St. Simon’s Island. Historically, enslaved people were buried on the plantations where they worked, and this tradition continued even after the Civil War. (Apparently the grounds of the Sea Island Golf Club still include the slave cemetery from Retreat Plantation, which previously occupied the space.) But there was no place for those who died on St. Simon’s Island without having been enslaved there, and so the Strangers Cemetery was created. It’s out of the way and not very well landscaped, but it must have been very important to many people who chose to make St. Simon’s Island their home.
Ideas of home, chosen home, and who is and is not a stranger are at the heart of this journey we’re on. “Where are you from?” has become increasingly difficult for many people to answer, as we all move around and around the globe. I think it’s supposed to mean “where were you born,” but have generally chosen to answer it as “where do you live,” which for so long was New York (this made things simple, as everyone knows where New York is).
These days, we’re truly stumped by the question. Some version of “we live on the boat, but we started in New York” is generally where we land. The truth is that we’re searching for our home; trying to find out if America belongs to us, and if there’s a pocket of America that we might belong to. No answers yet — and it’s not getting any easier as America turns itself outside-in. So we’ll continue on as strangers a bit longer.
