You don’t enter someone’s home without speaking.

So before I went horseback riding, rum-seeking and disturbing the peace all over Daufuskie Island, I greeted my hosts at Cooper River Cemetery.

If it wasn’t for the map marker at the entrance, you might not even realize it was a cemetery. Cooper River is a tiny culdesac at the end of a clearing that opens onto the water. Aside from the occasional chatter drifting from elsewhere up the coast, the atmosphere is so sacred and secluded that even the waves maintain a whisper.

It’s among 7 cemeteries on Daufuskie Island, all but one dedicated to the Gullah, whose burial practices demand interment near the water so their souls can return to Africa by the same route from which they came.

Until the mid-20th century, almost all of the inhabitants of Daufuskie Island were Gullah, a people descended from the original West Africans enslaved on the lowcountry’s indigo, rice and Sea Island cotton plantations. And yet, despite establishing this insulated, Black coastal paradise, the Gullah knew in their bones that this land was not their final glory.

I left them with only a few words, regretting making Cooper River my first stop after all, as I had come with nothing else to leave in tribute.

About an hour before my ferry departed Daufuskie Island, I glanced to the passenger seat of my golf cart, and my fully extended, 5-foot tripod was gone, lost to the rough, gravel roads or some sand dune abyss, I suppose. I couldn’t help but chuckle over my unintentional (and wholly unconventional) offering, counting it as a small sacrifice in exchange for the abundance which I received.

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where i wandered: