I’ve been thinking about beach trips, though few people are taking them this year. The pandemic keeps us landlocked and stuck at home. But I remember going to the beach every sweltering June of my early childhood, when my parents packed the family Buick full of clothes and beach gear, and we drove the two-lane road from Birmingham to the Florida Panhandle.
In those days before interstate highways, it took eight or nine hours to get to the beach cottage we rented with another family, and we stopped at picnic tables along the way to eat the tuna sandwiches my mother packed. There was no fast food. There were few restaurants. Gas stations sold gas, not snacks. It was a bring-your-own kind of trip.
My sister and I crowded against each other in the back seat. The open windows helped cool the car but not enough to stop our fussing. In between us sat Emily, who sometimes came on these trips to take care of the children. Emily was a tall Black woman who worked for our family when I was young.
She built sand castles with us and watched the waves knock them over. She played Old Maid card games with the older children and made our lunch while our parents walked down the beach to gather seashells. She slept on a cot on the screened-in porch where the four children from both families slept on identical cots lined up next to hers. A fan blew sea air over us all night.
In the mornings, she took us to the beach.
We dug in the sand and Emily sat on a mat nearby. The waves washed our castles away and my friend Carol and I built them up again with plastic shovels. At night, our parents went crabbing on the beach, their flashlights shining on the scuttling legs of the creatures they caught and boiled the next day. Emily carried me along, teasing me about how the crabs might bite our toes. They never did.
We usually stayed at the cottage for a week, spending most of our time on the sand and in the water, riding on the plastic floats we brought with us. I always asked Emily to wade in the shallow water of the Gulf of Mexico with me, but she never did. One day she told me why.
She said it was the white people’s ocean, so she didn’t go in. She was a grown-up and I accepted what she said. I didn’t ask anyone else about it. If Emily said it, it was just fact.
At that time, she was right. White people owned the businesses and neighborhoods and stores. They owned the cottages and the few motels along the shore. They owned the tacky souvenir shops and the deep sea fishing boats that took tourists out to see what they could catch.
Emily had her rules for living in two worlds. We just lived in one. When my family came back to the South after living away for five years, I was in middle school and didn’t need a babysitter. We stayed in touch and then we didn’t. I looked for her when I came home from college, circling her old neighborhood and calling a number that didn’t work anymore. When I phoned a family she’d worked for, they said she’d died the year before.
She lived through the Jim Crow years, the Birmingham bombings, and all the signs that separated Black from white. She didn’t live long enough to know that nobody owns the sand or the sea breeze or the ocean. They belong to everybody. It’s taken us a long time to figure that out.