Heyward Cove

Written by Caroline Heyward Jenkins
Photography by Donna Huffman

e didn’t know it was named the Heyward Cove when we moved to its banks in 1943 but it certainly was “ours” so that turns out to be a fitting name. Tommy was not quite 2 and Anne, Dorothy and I were ages 7, 6 and 4 that day in December when, with the help of Mr. Hugh O’Quinn and his big truck, we moved from what we called the little brown house to the Old Dr. Walker House, complete with its own cove that went the entire length of the property on one side. I don’t think we had ever heard of a swimming pool but this was better anyhow. All we had to do was to wait for the tide to come in and we had our own beach!

There was a path down the bluff to the place where we swam and large, low oak tree limbs shaded the area so it was rare to get sunburned in the cove. At low tide, there was just a little stream of water. It was in the DNA of every child who grew up in Bluffton to know at any given minute what time the tide would start coming in. About four hours after dead low tide, the wait began for enough water to get into the cove so that the swimming could begin. We didn’t have telephones, but that was all right because all of our friends and relatives also knew the time of the tides. We didn’t have to call anybody. They just showed up most days. There were the Padgett’s – Bert, Dottie and Fay. They were regulars. Also, Eunice Walker and her brother, Jim; The Cantrell boys, Johnny and Billy; our cousins, Fran and Dyan Heyward and sometimes their uncle, Don Hair. So many names come to mind. Over the years different children came and there’s just no telling exactly how many children learned to swim there in the cove.

I think that Anne and I probably learned to swim before we moved to the cove because I don’t remember that Mother had to come and watch us swim. In today’s world, the DSS would probably have moved us to foster care because I remember many times that we girls were responsible for watching Tommy and making sure he didn’t drown. We had probably learned down at the beach, All Joy Beach, because we had often gone there to swim with Daddy on Sunday afternoons if the tide was right.

I remember when Tommy (likely at age 2 or 3) announced that he was “tired of Daddy telling everybody that all of his girls could swim except Tommy!” This seemed to be damaging to his little psyche so one day when we were in charge, we taught him to swim. It was a very high tide and at the deepest point it was about 6 or 7 feet deep. We had him “dog paddling” back and forth across the cove until we were satisfied that he really knew how. Then we started yelling as loud as we could for Mother to come quick and see Tommy. You had to yell really loud in order for her to hear us. Our side of the story was that we were so proud of him for learning to swim, and of ourselves too, because we taught him. Mother’s side of the very same episode was that she was busy in the house and heard all of our yelling and screaming and she heard the word, Tommy, and she thought that he was drowning. At any rate, she came scurrying down the path stumping her toes on every exposed root and bruising her arms on the sticky bushes lining the path, and she got down there huffing and puffing and scared to death. One of us then says, “Tommy, show Mother what you can do,” and he once again swims across the cove in all that deep water and back again, his face just beaming. We didn’t understand that she seemed not as happy as we were, but I think that evening when she was showing Daddy all of her injuries, we came to realize that maybe we had yelled too loudly and scared the wits out of her!

Now that all four of us could swim, we ventured down the cove and out into the May River. All we had to do was “borrow” one of the oyster bateaus that were tied up in the cove by various men who went out and gathered oysters to sell. Mostly they didn’t know that we had used their boats, but occasionally they caught us and then we had to return the boats to their place. They never told on us, although some of them did threaten to. Sometimes, we just turned those boats over and got up under them and talked in the air pockets created. Then the people who were waiting their turn would tell us how funny our voices sounded. When our cousins from Hardeeville were there (Bert and Wallace Hubbard), they thought of more daring things to do and we would swing from the limbs of the old oak trees and holler like Tarzan. We almost always got in trouble when they came. One time Bert almost drowned and my Aunt Margaret had to save him.

Mother couldn’t swim and we all knew this, so there really wasn’t any point in her watching us swim. We forgave her for lacking this skill because, after all, she grew up in Pinewood in Sumter County, and they didn’t have a river. We always made allowances for people in towns like Ridgeland or Pinewood because they didn’t have a river. It must have bothered Mother though, because not long after Tommy learned to swim, she ordered a bathing suit from the Sears catalog and announced that she would be learning to swim in the cove! She was about 35 years old then and we didn’t believe that she would be able to learn. Daddy had told us that we had to learn when we were little because it was very hard for grownups to learn. But Mother was determined and without any guidance from us, she did learn to dog paddle! Still, to this day, she is the only person we ever knew who could accomplish this without getting her shoulders or her face and hair wet. Needless to say, she looked funny paddling across the cove in the deep water with about a third of her body sticking out of the water! It turned out that was the only bathing suit she ever needed to buy because once she had learned, she almost never went in the water again. She never advanced past the dog paddling stage but we were proud of her. We never knew why she bothered to learn this skill.

One summer Bert Padgett and Jimmy Stephens (who had moved across the cove) actually built what passed for a diving board. Or at least that’s what they called it. They built it on Jimmy’s side of the cove. It was a jumping off structure because it never really got deep enough to dive in the cove. Possibly at spring tide, but not on ordinary high tides. Long after the marsh and weeds had taken over the cove and nobody had been swimming there for years, that structure still stood! I would sometimes wonder what the “new” people who had moved to Bluffton thought it was.

Swimming and frolicking wasn’t the only thing that happened in the cove. Uncle Tony, an older black man who lived in a small house on our property, would always tell us when there was going to be a baptism by the congregation of St. John’s Church which was located across the cove and through the woods. Mother would wake us up early so that we could watch the ceremony from our side. It seems like these occasions were always very early on a Sunday morning. We would hear the congregation singing “Shall We Gather at the River” as they marched through the woods and approached the water, and by the time we sprang from bed and got down there, the baptisms would begin. Everybody wore white, even the congregation gathered around. The singing was like out of a movie. The ceremony itself was quite solemn but the singing was loud and joyous and their voices rang throughout our side of the town. In the Episcopal Church we didn’t have to be submersed to be baptized and we were fascinated that they did it like Jesus and John the Baptist. I guess St John’s stopped baptizing there when people started building houses in the former woods across the cove.

My father, Gaillard Stoney Heyward, was born in January 1910 in the house across the cove now owned by George and Lillian Heyward. At the time, the house belonged to Elizabeth Stoney Heyward, my great grandmother and she loaned it to her son, Daniel and his wife. Perhaps that is where the name, Heyward Cove, came from. When my grandparents were first married and until after Daddy was born, they lived there. Apparently at that time it seemed to be out in the country to my young grandmother and she was often afraid to be there alone after dark. My grandfather would tell her ghost stories and she was just very uncomfortable being so far away from the town! She said that when the tide was coming in and the breezes would blow, the big rocking chair on the front porch would rock all by itself and the noise of that would scare her out of her wits. PaPa said that it was probably the ghost. I have that same big rocking chair now on my front porch on Skull Creek and it never rocks by itself even though we do get some good breezes here. I don’t know if it’s too weighted down by all of the coats of green paint my grandmother gave it over the years, or if there truly was a ghost over there across the cove! I occasionally talk about removing all that green paint and getting down to the true color of the wood, but for some reason I keep putting that off. I don’t really want it to start rocking all by itsself again. I’m just not ready to take that chance. .