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DEL.ICIO.USFrom the archives: Tiny Sapelo Island a big part of Allen Bailey
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/07/07 4:07 PM
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(Note from the moderator: Thought you might enjoy this profile of Allen Bailey our Steve Hummer did in August while we wait for Georgia’s top uncommitted player to pick a college — Jeff D’Alessio).
Sapelo Island, Ga. — On Friday night, Allen Bailey was the pivot point of the Class AA McIntosh County Academy defense during a preseason scrimmage. A two-way player, he even ran for a 41-yard touchdown on the first of his infrequent touches.
For a little while longer, Saturdays still are reserved for coming home.
For one more fall before being swallowed up by college ball, Bailey will be the most conspicuous customer at the Meridian dock — try 6 feet 4, 255 pounds. He’ll be there waiting for the weekend’s first ferry back to Hog Hammock.
It’s an odd mix on the ferry Anne Marie. Day trippers seeking to commune with an all-natural beach. Scholarly sorts headed out to the University of Georgia’s Marine Institute. And the Bailey family, back from the mainland loaded down with necessities like a canister of natural gas, laundry detergent, cookware and, yes, the sixth of their seven children.
“We’re so proud of you,” says an older woman as Allen finds a bench seat inside the ferry. “You keep pressing on.” Bailey will find in talking with her that they share a kinship, like most with links to Sapelo. He has discovered yet another cousin.
Ahead is a half-hour ferry ride, then a rattling trip down a sandy road cut straight through pine and palmetto. At the end is Bailey’s little share of a largely undisturbed island off Georgia’s coast. Sapelo sits to the south, a little secret that places on either side, like Hilton Head and St. Simons, couldn’t keep.
No timeshares. No miniature golf. No Marriotts. No causeway. Not yet, anyway. Just a nearly lost way of life that one of the state’s prized college recruits brings to light along with an ever-ballooning tackle total.
Improvise to survive
It’s not easy being an oversized linebacker from Sapelo Island. The game does not conform to a ferry schedule. Because the link between the island and the mainland (and the school) stops running at 5:30 p.m., his family must stay with friends each time they come over for a game. Because it would be impossible to practice and make the last boat home, Bailey, also a basketball player, has spent most of the past four school years bunking with families in nearby Darien.
But if you learn anything growing up on Sapelo in the tiny Geechee community of Hog Hammock (population 53), it is how to make do. The Gullah/Geechee culture clings to the islands off the Carolinas and Georgia, remnants of freed slave communities that persisted in relative isolation. It is a culture that has to improvise to survive.
At one time, Bailey shared a bedroom with four brothers. If you don’t have it on Sapelo, you either have to catch it, grow it or pay your dollar to get on the ferry, hop in the car you keep on the other side, then buy it and wait for the next boat home. That is just the way it is.
“It’s not an inconvenience; we’re used to it. It’s what we do,” said Bailey’s mother, Mary Bailey.
This is but routine: On certain weekends and holidays, Bailey slides onto the ferry and fills his nose with the saltwater funk, maybe sees dolphins snorkel around Doboy Sound, and touches again the past that can elude a young man with big plans.
Simplicity, thy name is Sapelo. “What I like about it most is the peacefulness,” Bailey says. “I get a lot of sleep over there.”
Those are echoes of his father’s words. Alfred and Mary Bailey raised seven children on the island, and unlike most, never gave much thought about a life anywhere else. Tracing their family line back to the slaves who worked Thomas Spalding’s cotton and sugar cane fields here in the early 1800s, they weren’t the ones who were going to break the connection to the island.
“I never did like the hustle and bustle of city life,” Alfred said.
Big changes lie ahead
This time next year, Allen Bailey should be off looking for his place in the wider world that his parents have little use for.
Because he has the body-by-Michelangelo, because he plants ball carriers like a surveyor does stakes, opportunity fans out before this high school senior. The big roar of a college football Saturday in the South beckons.
Wherever he lands, he figures to be someplace far removed from his barrier island and the proud, struggling culture that formed him.
He will trade the melody of the island’s dialect for the blare of the bands and the howls of the crowd. He’ll leave behind the hammock, its collection of small clapboard homes and the closed community of those like him who descend from one man’s slaves.
Bailey is a football player from a place quite unlike any other. Yet he must move on to a life where the lights are so much brighter than the moon on the marsh. Out there where a young man can lose his uniqueness as easily as his wallet.
It’s almost as if Bailey is the player from another planet, not an island that is but five miles from shore. And not just in the way he towers over his teammates or bench-presses the west wing of McIntosh County Academy (370 pounds, and squats 550). It’s just that who takes a ferry home, and then can feed the chickens watermelon or be the only soul on a beach when he gets there? (OK, Bailey mostly camps on the couch and watches dish TV. His chore Saturday was to drive to the island post office and pick up the mail. Today there’s a big gathering at the African Baptist Church on Raccoon Bluff — he may have to help with the cooking for that one.)
When his coach at McIntosh first got here a couple of years ago, he would pick up Bailey at the Meridian dock and take him to offseason conditioning. And wonder what mysteries lay at the other end of the ferry route.
“I was bothering him every day, I think, asking him, ‘What do you do over there?’ ” said Robby Robinson. “Finally, late that summer, we took some of the team over for all day on Sapelo. It’s amazing over there.”
“[Mainland kids] still do tease me sometimes, mostly about the wildlife over here. They want to know if I have to run from the alligators,” Bailey said. There are gators on Sapelo, along with rattlesnakes, wild pigs, feral cattle, deer. Bailey grew up learning how to fling a cast net into the creeks for bait and mullet, and how to drag crab from the marsh.
People leave Sapelo all the time. A person grows up on an 11 1/2-mile-long island that is three parts nature preserve and one part cultural last stand, sooner or later he has to find somewhere that pays. Some have sold their plots on the 434 acres of Hog Hammock to “outsiders,” but Mary Bailey says she’ll put it in her will that none of her children can sell off the heritage.
Bailey’s parents scrape out a living on the island, Mary as a cook at the R.J. Reynolds mansion house and Alfred as a mate on the ferry. Other Baileys, Allen’s great-aunt Cornelia and great-uncle Julius, run a small lodge for visitors who like their beach vacations raw. As they all sit on land that has developers all jelly-legged, these people have few options to make money consistently and still control property they consider a birthright.
“We worry about kids leaving because the only jobs are in Brunswick or Savannah and other places,” Cornelia said. “It’s hard to see your offspring leave the island for what people call a better life. It’s not a better life. It’s a life they need to be into because that’s the only way they can get a job and start a family.”
Four colleges on his list
Bailey will leave as the brightest kind of football prospect, one who plays upright for McIntosh but is projected as the second-best defensive end in the country by Rivals.com. He has delayed his decision on which of his final four universities to grace with his signature until the last moment. The candidates, narrowed from a list of 20, are Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Miami.
He has been on watch lists ever since he was a sophomore, when he already wore the physique of a man. “They had never seen a 15-year-old who looked like that,” Robinson said.
Like a lot of the men of Sapelo Island, Bailey is not given to much talking. That quality carries over to the field. “He’s a quiet player. He doesn’t run his mouth. But when he gets the blood pumping, he can take over football games,” his coach said.
But of all the high school seniors who will leave behind their homes to chase Imax-sized football dreams, who will face a bigger culture shock than Allen Bailey?
He at least can face that with the collective strength of Sapelo. “Just last evening I was laying in bed hoping I can say something to Allen that will help motivate him to do good in school, good in athletics,” said Charles Hall, the head of the Sapelo Cultural and Revitalization Society, and a neighbor of the Baileys. “Once someone is separated from his roots you want him doing the right thing, not going way out on a tangent. I don’t think that will happen with Allen.”
“He can always come here and rest. He’s always got a place to come back to,” said his mother. The most solid ground awaits Allen Bailey on the island side of the Sapelo ferry route.
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