Southern accents - suggestions for visiting places in Florida, South Carolina, Virginia; excerpts from the book 'In Their Footsteps: The American Visions Guide to African-American Heritage Sites'

American Visions, Oct-Nov, 1993 by Henry Chase

America's southeastern coastal states are rich in black history - but that scarcely exhausts their appeal to visitors. Outstanding museums (many with notable collections of African and African-American art), alluring beaches, great ethnic food, quiet hills and forests, and not-so-quiet nightlife can be found from Virginia to Florida. A dollop of the Southeast's appeal is offered below, and more can be found in the forthcoming In Their Footsteps: The American Visions Guide to African-American Heritage Sites. Written by American Visions Travel Editor Henry Chase, In Their Footsteps will be published in early 1994 by Henry Holt & Company. The book will offer a comprehensive survey of black heritage sites not only in the United States, but in Canada as well. Adding to its appeal will be essays by such prominent African-American writers as Amiri Baraka, Gloria Naylor and Ishmael Reed.

FLORIDA

American Beach

On Amelia Island, about 40 miles northeast of Jacksonville by way of Florida A1A, between Fernandina Beach and the Amelia Island Plantations.

From the 1930s to the early 1960s, carloads of folks from as far away as Tupelo, Miss., church buses from Jacksonville filled with children, and hoards of fraternity brothers and sorority sisters from Morehouse and Spelman colleges headed for American Beach, the Atlantic Ocean social hub for African Americans in a South so segregated that it would try to deny the ocean's waves to blacks.

American Beach was the product of the remarkable A.L. Lewis, founder of the Afro-American Life Insurance Co. of Jacksonville and one of the Jim Crow South's few black millionaires. By the 1920s, his firm had become a ubiquitous feature of Southern black existence, its 10-cents-a-week policies securing burials and tiny annuities for all but the desperately poor. After the Depression forced the closing of Jacksonville's sole black beach, Lewis purchased several hundred acres on Amelia Island as a recreation center for his employees.

Soon, middle-class blacks from Alabama and Georgia were buying lots from Lewis, happy to have a summer home for their families away from the omnipresent "Whites only" signs (and, doubtless, away from whites as well). Working-class African Americans then began day-tripping to American Beach; they were shortly followed by small black businesses, and in no time the area was jammed and jammin'.

What the pressure of segregation had created, integration destroyed, as black folks headed toward that which for so long had been denied them. Today, American Beach is under a new pressure: escalating taxes and condominiums; but locals who remember the glory days, when a black beach community lived without the necessity of asking whites for anything, are seeking to secure a listing on the National Register of Historic Places so as to limit development and gentrification.

Museum of Art

One East Las Olas Boulevard, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. 33301-1807 (305) 763-6464; (305) 525-5500 Hours: Tue, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Wed-Sat, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sun, noon-5 p.m. Free highlight tours: Tue, 1 p.m., 6:30 p.m.; Thu-Fri, 1 p.m. Admission: Adults, $4; seniors over 65, $3; students with ID, $2; members and children under 12, free; groups of 10 or more, $3 per person.

The Yoruba Egungun society crocodile is eight feet long. During ceremonies commemorating the death of a loved one, three or four elaborately costumed society members dance about with the wooden carving - inside of which is a boy working the croc's mouth open and shut.

The crocodile, like most of the African objects in Fort Lauderdale's Museum of Art, was created not as an object for aesthetic appreciation, but rather as an object of spiritual power and purpose. Nevertheless, the Yoruba bring an aesthetic appreciation to everything they do. That they are not unique in this regard is evident from the museum's holdings of creations of the Mende, Guro, Bambara, Baule, Dogon, Ibo, Pende, Kuba and Yaka, among others.

SOUTH

CAROLINA

Baptist Tabernacle church

907 Craven Street, Beaufort, S.C. 29902 (803) 524-0376

On the grounds of the Baptist Tabernacle Church are the grave and a memorial bust of Robert Smalls, a black Civil War hero and political master of South Carolina's low-country Reconstruction. Smalls' story is perhaps more dramatic than that of any of his African-American contemporaries. Born a slave in Beaufort, Smalls was rented out by his master and moved to Charleston, where he worked as a waiter before being pressed into service as a pilot on the Confederate steamer Planter, which plied Charleston Harbor. A year into the war, he smuggled his family on board and, with its white officers ashore, sailed the craft and its black crew into the ranks of the Union Navy, which was blockading Charleston. Rewarded with a pilot's rank in the Union Navy, Smalls rose to a captaincy (the only such rank to be held by an African American) due to his coolness and valor in combat.

After the war Smalls returned to Beaufort. There he had purchased, in a direct-tax sale of Union Army-confiscated property, the McKee home, in which he had served as a slave in his youth. One day the elderly and somewhat confused widow of his former master entered the house, thinking it was still her home. Smalls installed Mrs. McKee in her old room and thereafter took care of her.