Hurricane’s rain, wind and fire can’t knock out Gullah family

The Cohen family could always take a punch.

And Hurricane Matthew belted them with the hook and a jab of wind and fire.

Pamela Cohen’s home on Thomas Cohen Drive off Spanish Wells Road was hit by a pecan tree she’s known all her life. It punched a hole in the roof over her bedroom. It crushed her car and damaged another belonging to her husband, Johnnie Brown.

Across the dirt lane, a fire during the evacuation left the home of a niece and her family uninhabitable. Shanada Young, 35, her husband, Marvin Smart, and her four children ages 16 to 7 are staying with the childrens’ grandparents nearby.

But the old Gullah family compound now surrounded by upscale neighborhoods is coming back to life.

Volunteers with Samaratan’s Purse, Hilton Head Presbyterian Church and Grace Community Church showed up en masse — men sawing and stacking two large trees, and women raking.

Pamela Cohen, who was a kindergarten aide for 22 years at Hilton Head Elementary School, said insurance covered the loss of her “baby,” her 2004 Lincoln Aviator. And insurance will pay for a new roof for the trailer she was “trembling” in during the hurricane. She and Johnnie were inside praying they would survive.

Things were still up in the air last Friday on coverage of the home that burned. The fire was likely caused by an iron left on when the family hurriedly evacuated.

But people have responded with gift cards, school uniforms, clothes and shoes. The Ombra Cucina Rustica restaurant in the Village at Wexford donated $500 and urged customers to help. Co-owner Lauren Loadholt Cirafesi grew up near Marvin Smart of Fairfax. The Hilton Head Island High School football team brought clothes. Tyreke Young, the oldest of the children and a strapping 6-foot-3, plays for the Seahawks and had a nice sack in Friday’s win.

In the ring

The four children still get off the school bus at the same place to go to the home of their grandmother, Terry Cohen. They’re now staying there, and with their grandfather nearby, Leon Young.

Terry Cohen said she’s worried the children — all on the honor roll, she said — aren’t getting proper rest with the upheaval after the fire. On Saturday, she was going to a thrift store to try to find a mattress and box springs.

I say they can take a punch because of Pamela and Terry’s late father, Thomas “Champ” Cohen. He and Emily “Emmy” Johnson Cohen raised eight children on that land, and I knew him as a smiling boxing promoter and trainer.

Thomas Cohen was a gentle giant who became a champion boxer in the U.S. Army and came home to make it his passion in life.

He shrimped, crabbed, picked oysters, farmed and built buildings to keep the family fed. Emmy doted on her family so much that Terry said she couldn’t cook until she was 21. “She was a perfect mom,” said Terry, who now claims to the be the “best cooker on Cohen Hill.”

Thomas Cohen built a cinderblock boxing gym on Spanish Wells Road. All five sons trained there every day, whether they wanted to or not, along with grandsons and as many as 100 kids from the community. For a long time, he couldn’t afford a roof for the place. But that didn’t stop him from staging Saturday night bouts with amazing cards featuring regional boxers with wild names, some of them dumb enough to get in the ring with Thomas’ oldest son, Michael Cohen Sr., “The Hammer.”

‘Toughness’

The boys — Michael, Samson, Dion, Vann and James — were star athletes at the high school. Grandson Mike Jr. was a big star as well. Eldest grandson DeShawn Cohen can pull up a photo on his cell phone of him boxing at the Floyd Mayweather camp in Las Vegas.

Thomas Cohen started a baseball team called the Hilton Head Sluggers that played in a field across the street. The Cohen place was always full of kids.

“Tough as he was, the kids loved him,” says daughter Thomasena Cohen. “They liked that toughness.”

Thomas Cohen could keep the baddest guys under his thumb with a smile. At one time he served as a uniformed policeman on Singleton Beach, family members say.

But with those powerful hands he crafted delicate models of shrimp boats. They would bring a big price at the Lowcountry Auction that benefited the island’s public schools.

All but one of Thomas and Emmy’s children are living in the family compound, and they have no intention of selling. The smell of food from the kitchens, outdoor gathering spaces, clothes on the line, prize coon dogs and hogs in pens, roosters on the strut, and, over the years, a marsh tacky horse or two, show that none of life’s punches have snuffed this Gullah family’s spirit.

Thomas Cohen was given a roof for his boxing emporium by a wealthy woman of Spanish Wells Plantation. After he died in 1991, the place was used as a social club for a while and eventually the roof burned. And Hurricane Matthew knocked three of the cinder block walls down.

But this is the Cohens.

They know how to take a punch.

This story was originally published October 25, 2016 at 1:22 PM with the headline "Hurricane’s rain, wind and fire can’t knock out Gullah family."