DIVE DEEPER

and Edgefield County, South Carolina. Some remained on Jekyll and became property of the DuBignons.

The federal government swiftly brought charges against Lamar, Corrie, and their crew for their roles in the Wanderer episode. There were three trials in Savannah that made headlines all the way to New York. This was something of a test: would the South be punished for breaking an anti-slavery law? Ultimately, Lamar, Corrie, and the others beat virtually every charge and moved on with their lives as free men. But men such as Ward Lee remained in bondage.

Within three years of that clandestine arrival of the Wanderer on Jekyll, the South and the North went to war. The Wanderer by then had been seized and turned into a Union warship. And within five years of their journey, Lee and the others who’d been enslaved were declared free. But what was freedom if you couldn’t return home?

Years later, perhaps around the time Lee carved that hickory walking stick, he wrote a public letter. It began with the words, “Please help me.” Lee, who remembered what it was to be a boy named Cilucängy, wanted to return to Africa before he died. He asked for donations to help him return. “I am bound for my old home if God be with me,” he wrote. He never made it.

A copy of that letter is now part of a permanent multimedia exhibition about the Wanderer in St. Andrews Beach Park on the southern end of Jekyll, where Lee touched ground 160 years ago. His great-great-grandson, Michael Higgins, is now fifty-five years old. Higgins has visited Jekyll with other relatives to pay homage to their ancestor. But it is Lee’s walking cane that sticks in Higgins’ mind.

When he was in elementary school, Higgins was cast as an old man looking back on his life. The day of the play, his grandmother handed him the hickory cane. Higgins walked onto the stage propped up by the legacy of Cilucängy.

Higgins, who now lives in New York, didn’t learn about the Wanderer until he was in college. He doesn’t know where the cane is now, but he knows the story of how his family came to be in this land. Thinking of what Cilucängy went through and who he became, Higgins said, gives him strength to endure.