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Rufe

© Virginia Marin

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One can easily become lost in the many tidal inlets, creeks, rivers and swamps around Edisto Island. Edisto is located in the Low Country of South Carolina and designated as one of the Sea Islands. Paved roads came rather late to Edisto, but one road in particular stands out among the Islanders - High Ball Pike, which winds through the salt marshes of the Little Edisto River. The road was so named because of the automobiles that "high-balled" their way down to the beach.

Well, along this road and back among the thick and deadly snake-infested Palmetto Palms, and far off in the dense woods, where huge rattlesnakes grow as many as thirteen rattles, (an unlucky number for an unlucky victim), and where any man once lost, is lost forever, is a small community of African-Americans - descendants of some of the original slaves brought to Carolina from the Gold Coast of Africa.

Now one of the women, Lucy Mae Reese by name, had married when only sixteen to ol' Sammy Gaddy, who was not old at all, but only numbered to seventeen years and one-half. He was considered the luckiest boy in those parts to get Lucy Mae.

Lucy Mae, it was said, could cook up the best crab stew in Carolina, and had become the envy of all of the local women of any age. No other cabin around was kept cleaner or boasted to her number of hand-made quilts. Lucy Mae was also thrifty. If she baked a pie, she made sugar and cinnamon "fingers" out of the leftover pastry. She and Gaddy worked side by side in the cotton fields and it was a guarded secret that she had saved a considerable amount of coins in a jar, which she kept buried under a stump.

Lucy Mae bore several children, but her first born, named Rufe, was her pride and joy. When Gaddy died, Rufe inherited head of the household, and became a good provider just as his father had been.

Rufe was an enterprising young man. He caught rain water in a barrel, to which he had added oak ashes. When the lye had been leached from the ashes, the liquid was strained and poured over corn, which, in twenty-four hours, produced hominy grits. He also farmed rice, sweet potatoes, peas, beans, turnip greens and okra. He kept wild pigs, and was adept at hunting rabbit, deer, and squirrles for meat. His seafood traps were the envy of all of his friends and relatives. But he did not have a wife!