On idyllic Gwynn's Island, echoes of a racial divide

GWYNN'S ISLAND

Sandy Tabb didn't set out to be a pioneer. She was just homesick.

The single mother of five had been living near Charlottesville, but she and her kids missed the Chesapeake Bay environs of her native Gloucester County.

In 2006 she saw an ad in the Gloucester newspaper for a rental property on Gwynn's Island, in neighboring Mathews County. A spacious, four-bedroom brick house with a water view, it seemed perfect. Tabb says she called the rental agent and rented it over the phone, sight unseen.

Gwynn's Island is, indeed, an idyllic place. A marshy triangle of sand and towering pines at the mouth of the Piankatank River, it has been beckoning mainlanders for eons. Native Americans used it as a hunting preserve and place of worship as long ago as 10,000 years.

Its first European settler, a Welshman from the Jamestown colony named Hugh Gwynn, arrived around 1635. "Gwynn" is Welsh for "white."

Tabb didn't know much about the island's history. She just wanted a nice place near home with lots of room for the kids.

When she showed up to see the house in person, the rental agent was "visibly shocked, surprised and disturbed" to discover that Tabb is African American, according to a fair-housing lawsuit filed last month in federal court.

What followed, according to the lawsuit, was an ultimately successful 18-month campaign of racial harassment and intimidation calculated to drive Tabb, 39, and her children - Gwynn's Island's only black family - off the island.

Tabb's allegations paint Gwynn's Island as a place seemingly left behind by modernity, stuck in a time warp where overt racism still rears its head.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages from Bay Country Inc., the real estate firm that handled the rental, along with the rental agent and the owner of the property.

The defendants declined to respond at length. Tim Rowe, owner of Bay Country Inc., called the lawsuit a "farce."

"There are two sides to every story," the defendants' attorney, J.C. Cancelleri, said. "Our side will come out in due time."

Shortly after showing the house, the rental agent, Michelle Bell, called Tabb and told her the owner had increased the rent from $950 to $1,100 because she had so many children, according to the lawsuit.

By that time, Tabb said in an interview, she had already terminated her old lease and it was too late to back out. So she agreed to the higher rent and moved in.

Bell then began routinely driving by the house and watching the new tenants' activities, according to the lawsuit. Tabb said Bell asked her more than once who cared for her children while Tabb worked as a deputy sheriff in Richmond and attended college classes at night. Tabb also said Bell once asked whose car was in the driveway and told her "she was not to have any boyfriends" while living there.

Tabb said that on several occasions the family heard gunshots at night and awoke to find liquor bottles and trash strewn over the lawn. Once, she said, there was a cereal box near the front door with feces in it.

When she complained to Gene Jarvis, a representative of the Gwynn's Island Civic League, Tabb said, Jarvis told her he didn't want any "troublemakers" in the neighborhood.

"I told him I was thinking about contacting the NAACP," Tabb said. "He said he didn't like that organization. He asked would I like it if he called the KKK to have a little chat with me."

Neither Bell nor Jarvis responded to requests for comment.

The last straw, Tabb said, came when Bell - who is also a Mathews County school bus driver - began interrogating her sons Nick, then 8, and Don, 6, at Lee-Jackson Elementary School.

Tabb said Nick told her that Bell asked him, "Does your mother have a boyfriend? Who's sleeping with her? Is she beating you?"

Finally Bell took each boy aside in a school restroom and performed a strip search to look for evidence of child abuse, Tabb said. In Don's case, Tabb said, she pulled the boy's pants down and, when she found no signs of injury, angrily walked away, leaving him alone in the restroom with his pants down.

The lack of evidence notwithstanding, the Mathews County Department of Social Services received two complaints that Tabb's sons had been abused. An investigation ensued, and the complaints were ruled unfounded.

Tabb has filed a separate lawsuit seeking to learn who made the complaints. So far, the social services department has refused to say.

The Mathews County schools are equipped with surveillance cameras. When Tabb asked to see the film of her sons' interrogations, she said, the superintendent told her the cameras were broken.

In April 2008, Tabb surrendered. She and her children left their island home with the water view and moved to Gloucester County.

Gwynn's Island has not always been lily-white. To the contrary, it has a rich black history.

Historians citing court proceedings from the 1640s have identified one John Punch, a field hand on Hugh Gwynn's estate, as the first African enslaved for life by law in Virginia.

Punch was one of three indentured servants who were caught after running away from the Gwynn plantation. The other two escapees, a Dutchman and a Scotsman, got 30 lashes and had their indentures extended by four years. Punch's indenture was extended for life.

Over the ensuing decades, African Americans multiplied and contributed in myriad ways to the Gwynn's Island economy - clearing land; planting, tilling and harvesting crops; building houses and boats; plying the bay and its tributaries for fish, crabs and oysters.

By the late 1700s, blacks accounted for more than half of the island's population. Their numbers began a gradual decline after the Civil War, but they remained a well-established community at the dawn of the 20th century. By then, many were property owners. They built their own church and school.

Then something happened. Exactly what, remains shrouded in the mists of history, but this much is certain: Between 1910 and 1920, the island's entire African American population vanished.

One story that has been passed down through generations of islanders has it this way: A black man was charged with assaulting a white man. Emotions reached a fever pitch, and there was talk of a lynching. Then, either forced by whites or fearing for their safety, all the blacks fled the island.

The reality might not have been that dramatic, but there is almost certainly a germ of truth in it. Just ask Otis Foster.

He is 97 now, but Foster still carries a vivid memory from his childhood. Sitting in the cozy living room of his island home on a recent drizzly afternoon, he recalled how his future father-in-law once rescued a black man from a potential lynching.

"He hadn't hurt anybody," Foster said, leaning forward in his easy chair. "It was the whites who'd had too much whiskey and got rowdy. It was booze that was at the foot of it."

There was no overnight mass exodus, Foster said. But his future father-in-law did put the falsely accused man in his skiff, rowed him to the mainland and had the sheriff lock him up for his own safety.

John Dixon had heard similar stories growing up in Mathews County and, a few years ago, set out to sort fact from fiction. A retired civil engineer and amateur historian, he pored through musty courthouse records, conducted dozens of interviews and produced a booklet, "The Black Americans of Gwynn's Island."

It's on sale at the Gwynn's Island Museum, a former schoolhouse crammed with island memorabilia. Thanks in large part to Dixon's research, the museum contains an exhibit chronicling African American life on the island. There are old pictures of muscular men working in fish houses, tonging oysters and picking crabs. There are also recent pictures of a large extended black family that has begun holding reunions on the island.

He spoke to many descendants of black islanders, Dixon said, and "a lot of the younger ones definitely believe they were chased off the island."

Dixon found court records documenting an incident that may have given rise to many of the stories. On Christmas Eve 1915, a fight erupted at the Hudgins and Mitchem Store that resulted in the arrest and ultimate conviction of a black man for assault and battery.

Like Foster, Dixon doesn't think the island's entire African American population left overnight. Many probably left for better employment opportunities on the mainland as the island's seafood industry declined.

But racial tension likely was a factor in the exodus, too, he said. The Ku Klux Klan was becoming active in Mathews County during that period. A cross was burned on the courthouse lawn in 1925.

"Growing up, I always heard if you were black, you had to be off the island by sundown," said Dixon, 77.

Bud Ward used to hear the same thing. Born in 1958, the lifelong islander hardly ever saw a black person until he started school on the mainland.

Ward said he found Barack Obama's election an encouraging sign that Americans are putting racism behind them. His optimism was tempered when he heard about Sandy Tabb's lawsuit.

"Finally, it seemed like people were starting to come together," he said. "But this little pocket of hate still sits there."

Tabb's former island home looks a little forlorn now, its white-shuttered windows all closed, curtains drawn. The grassy roadside is flecked with purple wildflowers. Just beyond, the green bay waters gently lap the rocky shore.

"It was a beautiful home," Tabb said.

By bringing suit, she said, she doesn't mean to paint all Gwynn's Islanders with a racist brush: "I met some very nice people there."

In the end, she decided to leave for her children's sake.

"They had never experienced anything like this before," she said. "Emotionally, it has messed with my sons. It's a lot for a little child 7 years old to go through."

A year later, the children are doing better, she said: "They're in a more diverse place now, where everything's not black and white."

Bill Sizemore, (757) 446-2276, bill.sizemore@pilotonline.com