Sallie Ann Robinson - Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way: Smokin Joe Butter Beans, Ol Fuskie Fried Crab Rice, Sticky-Bush Blackberry Dumpling, and Other Sea Island Favorites

In 1969, I found myself twenty-three years old steering a boat across the May River in Bluffton, navigating a tricky route to a mysterious place called Daufuskie Island. It was the first year of teacher integration in the public school system in South Carolina, and I spent one of the richest and most pleasurable years of my life teaching eighteen black children from grades 5 through 8 in a two-room schoolhouse in the middle of a Carolina sea island that did not have a single paved road.

Until that time, segregation had been the law of the land in the South, and I was raised up in a tradition of a separate but equal school system. It took me a single morning with my new students to discover the equal part was a complete lie. My eighteen students all read below the first-grade level, five could not write their names or complete the ABCS, and none of them knew the name of the ocean that washed against the eastern shore of their pristine and paradisiacal island. They lived in one of the most beautiful and undiscovered places on earth, and all of those Daufuskie children had the run of the island.

That night I wrote the superintendent of schools a fiery, intemperate letter denouncing the school system for its cruel incompetence. The superintendent did not like my letter, did not like me, and twelve months later fired me for gross neglect of duty, conduct unbecoming a professional educator, being AWOL, and insubordination. Though he stole my teaching career from me, he could not touch that magnificent, life-changing year the children of Daufuskie had handed me like a gift.

I leapt into the kids lives and they caught me with their arms wide open. Theyd never heard of Halloween, and I took them to my home-town for Halloween. Theyd never heard of Washington, D.C., and I took them to spend five days in one of my favorite cities in the world. Though they had never heard of classical music, when the deputy school superintendent came out for his annual visit, I encouraged several of the kids to get into a heated discussion, arguing whether they preferred Beethoven, Tschaikovsky, or Rimsky-Korsakov. One of those kids was the impish and delightful Sallie Ann Robinson, the author of this splendid book.

When I heard that Sallie Ann, a child of Daufuskie, was publishing a book with the University of North Carolina Press, it ranked with the best days of my life. I know the full measure of struggle that she endured in her quest to lift herself out of a life of great hardship to be published by an arm of the university that gave Thomas Wolfe to the world. I know the names of many of the people and the teachers who came after me. I know about the California boys and girls from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the great, charismatic Herman Blake, who provided a free education for some of the Daufuskie kids. That Sallie Ann Robinson is the author of a published book is a bright miracle that adds grandeur and hope to the American story we are all telling.

Here is the great glory of this book, thoughit will teach you how to eat much better than you did before you read it. My year on Daufuskie was one of the best-fed years of my overfed life. Daufuskie Islanders make the best deviled crab and deviled eggsthey are terrific with all dishes with the word devil in them. Sallie Ann could make biscuits that were light and feathery and teacher-pleasing when she was eleven years old. The island teems with deer and boar, rabbit and quail. The waters around it are tide-swollen, bringing the billion-footed incursion of shrimp into the rivers and marshes where Daufuskie nets await them for transportation to the kitchen tables of the island. I ate like a king in my one year on the island, and you will eat like me because Sallie Ann Robinson, one of the children I loved and taught, and wrote about in The Water Is Wide, grew up and got herself smart and ambitious and wonderfuland decided to write herself a book. I think I may be the proudest man on earth.

Pat Conroy