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It was a much warmer place than the cemetery outside for a memorial service that always begins the Heritage Days Celebration at the Penn Center on St. Helena Island.
About 25 people showed up to honor the founders of the center's forerunner, the Penn School. It was the South's first school for freed slaves in 1862.
But we were far from the first to find refuge in the rare brick edifice, built in 1855 by the hands of enslaved men. When the task was done, their masters let them come worship God, as long as they sat in the balcony in such a way that they could not be seen.
On this day, the focus was on a different time the brick walls stood as a refuge. In 1862, the sanctuary served as classrooms for Penn School.
The memorial service honored its founders -- Laura M. Towne and Ellen E. Murray -- and Charlotte Forten, its first African American teacher.
"It's important and significant to always remember how things started," said Eleanor Barnwell, a Penn graduate and the daughter of a Penn graduate. She has moved back home after a career as a school system administrator in Detroit.
"They started something that has really lasted," Barnwell said. "They helped the newly freed to obtain land, with the legal deeds to keep it. They established a pattern of community service -- of working with people in all areas of their lives."
Their courage and achievements were highlighted in remarks by David Grim of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Beaufort. That's one of the many denominations that helped some 50 "missionary" teachers pour into the Lowcountry in what became known as the Port Royal Experiment to aid freedmen toward self-sufficiency.
Barnwell and five other women stood beneath the Brick Baptist pulpit -- dressed head to toe in their alma mater's school colors of red and white -- and sang a spiritual a capella: "Stay in the field until the war's over ... oh, stay in the field until the war's over ..."
The "Echoes of Penn" try to keep alive the songs they knew as children -- the same spirituals islanders sang in 1901 as Towne's body was carried to the ferry in a simple mule cart 40 years after she dedicated her life to improving mankind in the Lowcountry.
Brick Baptist's pastor, the Rev. Abraham Murray, lamented before his benediction that Americans have become too busy to share these important stories from generation to generation.
Our stories, he said, need a refuge.
