Raised by an island

Johnny Bringas has forgotten a lot about the day his family arrived on Daufuskie Island.

He couldn’t tell you what they packed in the boat or which box got carried into the house first. He doesn’t remember where they put the kitchen table or which bedroom became his. Time has a way of sanding away those ordinary details.

What remains are the moments that mattered, the ones that quietly became part of who you are.

That was his introduction to Daufuskie.

His family had come from Texas looking for a fresh start, and they found one on a small island where life moved with the tides instead of the clock. Their home sat along one of the island’s sandy roads beneath a canopy of sprawling live oaks. It was painted school-bus yellow, a color that probably shouldn’t have worked but somehow fit perfectly among the palmettos and moss.

Before long, Johnny had abandoned his shoes like most of the other boys on the island. There wasn’t much need for them anyway. The roads were dirt, the marshes were your backyard, and every morning held the promise of another adventure if you were willing to wander far enough.

It wasn’t long before Johnny found his place among the island boys. He quickly became inseparable from Ricky Blake and Travis Painter, and the three were known for always being together. From the time they left home in the morning until someone called them in for supper, they fished the creeks, rode bicycles down sandy roads, explored the woods and followed whatever adventure happened to present itself that day.

Johnny still laughs when he describes those years.

“We were thick as thieves,” he says.

Looking back now, it’s hard for him to remember one of those adventures without Ricky and Travis standing somewhere beside him.

Johnny realizes he didn’t just grow up on Daufuskie. He grew up because of it.

The island had a way of raising children together. Parents certainly did their part, but so did teachers, neighbors, fishermen, grandmothers, store owners and just about anyone else a child happened to cross paths with during the day. If you were hungry, somebody fed you. If you got into trouble, somebody corrected you. If you wandered into the wrong yard, chances were you knew the people sitting on the porch anyway.

Nobody called it community. It was simply life.

Most families didn’t have much money, but as Johnny remembers, very few people complained about it. They made a grocery trip to the mainland every month or so for flour, sugar, rice and the things the island couldn’t provide. Everything else seemed to come from the woods, the water or somebody willing to lend a hand.

Even getting around required neighbors to depend on one another. Johnny remembers his family often leaning on Travis Painter’s family whenever they needed transportation on the mainland because the Painters were one of the few island families who kept a car there. Otherwise, hiring a taxi could quickly become more expensive than the groceries themselves.

Nobody kept score over things like that. If you needed help, someone usually helped, knowing that one day they might need you, too.

That spirit of looking after one another is what Johnny remembers most. It wasn’t something people talked about, and it certainly wasn’t something they advertised. It simply existed in the background of everyday life, as dependable as the tides.

Some of Johnny’s memories revolve around his stepfather, Harvey, and an old Volkswagen Beetle that had no business being driven anywhere. The brakes barely worked, and the floorboards had rusted away so completely that you could look between your feet and watch the sandy road passing beneath the car.

Harvey had learned to work around its shortcomings. Long before arriving anywhere, he’d cut the engine and coast the rest of the way, saving what little braking power he had left. Johnny remembers riding on the outside ledge of the passenger side while holding onto the car as they rolled down the road, something that would horrify parents today but felt perfectly ordinary to an island kid 40 years ago.

Many of those trips ended at Simmons, a makeshift place that was far more than a restaurant or country store. Simmons was where people caught up on the latest news, settled tabs, shared a meal and lingered a little longer than they probably intended.

Harvey always seemed to have a running tab there. Johnny remembers the candy, cigarettes, beer, jars of pickles and pickled pig’s feet. While the grown-ups talked, he usually disappeared toward the Frogger arcade game or wandered outside, where Miss Linda Simmons let him pick bull grapes from the arbor growing beside the building. Before they left, she almost always reached into the pickle jar and handed him one for the ride home.

It’s funny how a gesture that small can stay with someone for 40 years, but that’s the way memory works.

One afternoon, Harvey shut the Beetle off and coasted toward Simmons just as he always did. Hidden in the tall grass was the stump of an old oak tree neither of them could see. The car struck it hard enough to throw Harvey face-first into the windshield while Johnny went tumbling through the grass.

Somehow, the boy escaped without a scratch. Harvey climbed out bloodied but stubbornly refused to see a doctor. Instead, he bought himself a case of Budweiser, loaded it into the Beetle and went on with his day.

Johnny still laughs telling that story because, in his mind, there wasn’t another man quite like Harvey.

Just behind Simmons lived another unforgettable island character, an older Italian craftsman named Sal Strazzi. Johnny says you could smell Sal’s house before you ever reached it because he had built nearly the entire place from cedar. The sweet scent drifted through the yard year-round. Inside, Sal spent his days crafting cedar hope chests, furniture and anything else he thought someone might buy.

As a boy, Johnny was fascinated by the way rough boards slowly became something beautiful beneath Sal’s hands.

“You would’ve had to have been there,” Johnny says. “There were some interesting characters back then.”

The more he talks about those years, the more you realize Daufuskie was full of people like Sal. They weren’t famous, wealthy or important in the way the outside world measures success. They were simply themselves, and somehow that was enough to make them unforgettable.

School reflected the island just as much as the people did. Mary Fields Elementary had one classroom serving every grade from kindergarten through fifth. Ms. Catherine Campbell somehow managed to teach every student at once without making any child feel overlooked.

Lessons often stretched beyond the classroom walls. There were kickball games that seemed to last all afternoon, Matchbox races down the playground slide and walks to the beach that became part of the school day. When tourists arrived, the students grabbed stacks of green “I Love Daufuskie Island” bumper stickers and copies of The Daufuskie Kids’ Magazine, eager to sell them to visitors. Johnny still laughs remembering how successful they were and believes those sales eventually helped pay for a class trip to Disney World.

Lunch meant Mrs. Wiley’s cooking, another memory that seems to come up whenever former students gather. Nobody remembers anyone leaving her cafeteria hungry. If a growing boy wanted another helping, chances are he got one. Looking back, Johnny realizes that simple act said everything about the people who lived there.

The same could be said for Ella Mae Stevens Jenkins.

Johnny spent countless afternoons at the home of his best friend Ricky Blake, where Ella Mae seemed to welcome whichever boys happened to wander into her yard that day. He remembers sitting beside her while she patiently picked blue crab meat for deviled crab, listening more than talking as life unfolded around them.

As a child, he thought he was simply passing another afternoon. It wasn’t until years later that he understood those quiet hours were shaping the kind of man he would become. Ella Mae never sat him down to teach lessons about kindness or generosity. She lived them, and children have always learned best by watching.
When Johnny looks back today, he doesn’t see one long story. He sees moments.

Fishing from the dock. Riding through the island in a Volkswagen with holes in the floor. The smell of cedar drifting from Sal Strazzi’s house. Miss Linda handing him a pickle before leaving Simmons. Ella Mae Stevens Jenkins picking blue crab beneath the shade of an old tree.

None of those memories seem particularly extraordinary by themselves.
Together, however, they tell the story of an island that raised its children differently.

And perhaps that’s why so many of the boys who grew up there still speak of Daufuskie the way they do. They aren’t longing for a place as much as they are remembering a community where people depended on one another, where neighbors quietly became family and where a child could leave home after breakfast knowing that, no matter where he wandered, someone on that island was looking out for him.