‘You’ve got to live it’: Daufuskie Island from the teachers who followed Pat Conroy
People flock to the South Carolina Lowcountry to live the dream of an isolated island.
On Hilton Head Island, they rough it by going a solid week without Trader Joe’s.
On Daufuskie Island, the one with no bridge, it’s a whole ‘nother story.
That story fills a new book by Jim Alberto of Hilton Head. He and his wife, Carol, lived a dream that precious few can match in this world. They taught school on Daufuskie for nine years in the same two-room schoolhouse that had already been made famous by Pat Conroy.
You think it’s a dream?
“We had originally planned to stay one year,” Alberto writes in “Daufuskie Daze,” published by Lydia Inglett’s Starbooks.
“Seriously ... one year, or any parcel of a year, was probably all the average person could tolerate. Getting caught in an October or November rainstorm and having that cold rainwater run down your neck and soak your back in an open motorboat was about all it took.
“Cold. You don’t know real cold until you cross Calibogue Sound on a December misty morning, knowing that the return trip is going to be worse.
“One year turned into two, then four, and then nine.”
At least 10 teachers had come and gone between Conroy’s firing in 1970 and the arrival of the Albertos in 1974. Conroy taught there one year, then told the world about the farce of separate-but-equal public education in the memoir, “The Water is Wide” and its movie version, “Conrack.”
The Albertos responded to a newspaper ad in Columbia. The Beaufort County School District was seeking a young couple to teach on Daufuskie.
“We were young,” Alberto said. “We wanted to work. We wanted to teach. And nobody else on the planet was interested in the job.”
They weren’t yet officially a couple. And Carol wouldn’t have her University of South Carolina degree until December, halfway through their first school year in a neglected corner of the Lowcountry, where Hilton Head and Bluffton were still about as quiet as Daufuskie.
But H.E. McCracken hired them.
Carol Alberto’s first night on Daufuskie was spent on the floor by a wood stove in schoolhouse.
Jim Alberto writes that there was some discussion that night of her not signing up for this, and a reference to “for better or for worse.”
“She stuck it out,” he told me. “If she had said, ‘No way,’ it would’ve been over right then.”
Alberto, now approaching his 69th birthday, said sticking it out was common then.
“When we started something, we planned to finish it,” he said. “It’s not that we’re hidebound. We wanted to see the end. See what we could do.”
He said the book is really about teachers, and all that they do, simply for students. When he gives talks, he asks classroom teachers to stand. He thinks schools don’t let teachers teach anymore.
“It was quite a challenge at times,” Alberto said, “but we had really good kids.”
He writes that their teaching highlight was when the “Today” show came to Daufuskie to do a piece about a magazine the students produced.
But on a dreamy island (“We finally realized Carol had been in shock for nine years”) the book about teachers is really “a book about boats and cars and old, beat-up vehicles,” Alberto said.
“I wanted to name it ‘Small Craft Warning.’“
They had eight small craft over the years. That’s how they got to Savannah for groceries or to Hilton Head for tennis on Saturdays. All of life was dictated by the tides.
The first big shock was that the school district made no arrangements for their travel on Daufuskie. For the first four months, it was all on foot.
They ended up with an old Jeep on the mainland and a Volkswagen on Daufuskie, where the sand “would swallow an Abrams tank if you let it,” Alberto said.
On their dream island — where Jim Alberto’s first “home” was “a glorified deer stand built on the ground” — they learned to identify poisonous snakes and patch boats. They learned how hard it is to haul a 5-gallon can of gas — and to be accepted by the families of their 22 Gullah students.
The Albertos moved to Hilton Head shortly after their son, Zach, was born in Savannah following a 2 a.m. dash to the hospital in an open boat.
They taught history and math in middle schools on Hilton Head and in Bluffton. He retired in 2003. She spent three more years with the district as a math coach for all the schools in Bluffton before retiring in 2006.
The Albertos live in a condominium on Skull Creek, where they can see the bridge to Hilton Head from the living room window.
The cars look like ants from that distance, making a steady march onto an island that is no longer isolated. Alberto muses that they’re coming to escape worlds much worse than ours.
But, he says, if they really want life on a remote island in the Lowcountry, there’s nothing he can say to help them.
“You’ve got to find out for yourself what it’s like,” Alberto said. “You can’t describe it. You’ve got to live it.”
This story was originally published November 29, 2019 at 7:00 AM.
