By the River with Holly Jackson

An author, businesswoman, and master naturalist, Beverly Bowers Jennings spent 12 years interviewing 65 fishermen, marine biologists, and others who were working in the shrimping industry.

Beverly Bowers Jennings> I spent about five and a half years creating exhibits at the Maritime Center, and I probably spent a good five and a half years working on this book, but it was so well worth it and, I just, every time I think about these wonderful people and the opportunities that people like you are giving me to share this book.

Holly> Her book, Shrimp Tales, Small Bites of History , takes those interviews and curates them along with historical context, maps, pictures, and recipes to tell the story of shrimping in the low country.

Beverly Bowers Jennings> The shrimpers.

They, they've all been so willing to sit down and talk to me about their lives and share their photos.

I remember Sonny Gaye out on St. Helena Island getting out his books and showing me all these pictures and, and they just, they've been so accepting and they've become such good friends.

When I, I was very sad when we lost Sonny and I, I will stop by and I'll visit this person, or I'll visit another person when I'm in the area and, or give them a call.

And they, and I said to them that I wanted to write this book, and they were very excited about having their history preserved and all the proceeds I am donating to their choice of industry, which is the South Carolina Seafood Alliance.

Holly> I think that's fabulous.

Beverly talks with me about her unique approach to this book and the extensive work it took to tell the story.

I can tell you put your heart and soul into this, so thank you for doing that.

>> Can I say that there's a lot of variety?

>> Sure, yes.

>> And there're sidebars and there're quotes and their recipes with Gullah words in every chapter.

Each chapter has an operation and there's history.

So you can open to any page.

>> I love that part.

You can sit down, start wherever you want to <Yes> like you would with a magazine.

You pick your page and you can start and pick back at another page.

Beverly> And there're, it's 320 pages with over 820 photographs.

<Love it> And drawings.

Yeah.

I'm Holly Jackson.

Join us as we bring you powerful stories from both new and established southern authors as we sit by the river.

opening music Narrator> Major funding for "By the River" is provided by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina.

For more than 40 years, The ETV Endowment of South Carolina has been a partner of South Carolina ETV and South Carolina Public Radio.

Holly> It is such a beautiful day here at our waterfront studio in Beaufort, South Carolina.

As part of our love letter to southern writing, we bring you powerful stories from both new and established southern authors.

This season we are focusing on unexpected southern stories and writers.

We are here with the author of Shrimp Tales, Small Bites of History , Beverly Jennings.

Thank you Beverly, for joining us.

And I'm just so excited about hearing about this book.

And you know, it has such a backstory because you really have to talk about what led to this.

Before we talk about the book, there was such, there was this big project and I'll let you tell all about that, but I think it's fascinating.

Beverly> Well, thank you very much.

I was invited to do exhibits at the Port Royal Sound Maritime Center after I completed taking a course to be a master naturalist through Clemson and Spring Island.

And Tony Mills' wife, Katherine was in charge of taking the old Lemon Island Marina and Fish Market and creating a museum.

I was given the shucking room.

I did a multimedia exhibits on crabs, shrimp, and oysters in there.

And that led me to meeting so many wonderful shrimpers.

I filmed them and got to know them and a friend said to me, you know, you ought to do some more on shrimping.

There were a lot of books about crabbing.

There's a lot written about oystering, but there's really not too much about shrimping.

And I think part of that is the man who worked for the D.N.R., Victor Beril, he had written a fabulous book on crabs and oysters, and unfortunately he did not finish the book on shrimping.

So those were basic research materials that people could use.

Holly> Okay, so when you went into this project and you got those three walls to this exhibit, did you already have an interest in seafood and, or was this kind of an assignment of, okay, we're gonna give her this?

Beverly> No, they, I was on the committee and I was allowed to do whatever I wanted.

<Okay> I had a blank canvas.

And, when I was six years old, my father built me a boat and he put fiberglass on the bottom of the boat and I would row people out and that, I believe, really began my interest in, and we lived not far from the saltwater in Connecticut.

Holly> I love that you recognize that it goes all the way back to that boat with your dad because so many times it, all goes back to something that started, you know, when we were just young children.

And I find that on this show that a lot of times people talk about, they get down to it and as the more we talk, we end up talking about a school teacher in third grade or something.

So I love that you recognized your dad in that boat.

Through that experience with that boat, did you really fall in love with the water?

Beverly> I really did.

I learned to sail and I would row, I was only six and I row people out to their boats that were moored off the dock.

And one of the things that was really special about that boat is when my father was commuting to New York, one of his friends said, you should fiberglass it.

And, fiberglass was in its early stages and it was a cloth that you put on in this pink resin.

And there's a, the correlation to that in shrimping is, fiberglass is what really saved the industry.

When the wooden boats were starting to fail and the shrimpers just didn't have the money to buy the really expensive new ones, they could cover their hulls of the whole boat with fiberglass and get another 20 years out of them.

And that's a sidebar in, in the book.

Holly> Okay.

Let's talk about the shrimpers themselves.

I imagine it was really fascinating getting to hear their stories.

Was there any reluctance from them at first in opening up about this, this lifestyle and industry?

Beverly> Not the shrimpers.

They, they've all been so willing to sit down and talk to me about their lives and share their photos.

I remember Sonny Gaye out on St. Helena Island getting out his books and showing me all these pictures and, they just, they've been so accepting and they've become such good friends.

When I, I was very sad when we lost Sonny and I will stop by and I'll visit this person or I'll visit another person when I'm in the area or give them a call.

They, and I said to them that I wanted to write this book and they were very excited about having their history preserved and all the proceeds I am donating to their choice of industry, which is the South Carolina Seafood Alliance.

Holly> I think that's fabulous.

and that will support what exactly?

Beverly> What it supports is, it allows them to go, groups of them to go to Washington to be involved in legislation that affects the watermen down the east coast.

It also allows them to do projects to monitor the water and help try to preserve the water.

And the third thing is they have signs that they put up at food stands and they tell people the importance of eating local seafood.

And that's very, very, very important.

There's a little sidebar in here about the dangers of the import.

Holly> Oh, I can imagine through all these interviews, it probably got emotional at times because this is, this is an industry where you've gotta have heart and it typically is dads and grandfathers and all of that.

So did you find that to be the case that... Beverly> I really did actually, my very first interview, there was a lady in the halfway house at Colton River asked me what I was doing and I said I was working.

She said, oh, you have to meet David Jones.

You have to meet David Jones.

So, I contacted David Jones and he has become such an incredible friend and supporter, but David is a very interesting story and it was quite emotional.

He was a shrimper and he was in his early twenties, had a wife, a small baby, and all of a sudden one day in about 45 minutes he got a meningitis and he went from being a very healthy shrimper to confined to a wheelchair and a tube.

He just, but his whole demeanor, he's just a wonderfully positive person.

And he told me that his father had been on the shrimp boat that went to Washington trying to keep the German petrochemical plant, B.A.S.F.

from building on the Colleton River, which isn't a river, it's an embayment.

There's no water that feeds down to clean it.

And B.A.S.F., Badische Anilin Soda Fabrik was gonna discharge 250 million gallons of affluent a day into the Colleton River.

And the shrimpers who had their own co-op on Hilton Head where the boat camp is, they were the first people to file a lawsuit against having this built three miles above Sea Pines, and we're talking 69, 70.

That was during the height of their production of being very prosperous.

And there were three men from the co-op and three from the Sea Pines group that went with 45,000 signatures and 25 pounds of shrimp to Washington to see Secretary of the Interior, Hickel, to ask him to please help them keep from having the plant built, which the politicians wanted very badly.

This was a time nationally, you read about how the health was very poor for the Blacks in Beaufort County, but the jobs were only gonna be entry level jobs and it could have ruined, probably would've ruined the whole industry.

This co-op sent people to Texas to look at a similar plant.

They couldn't see anything living behind it.

And this B.A.S.F.

is a specialty chapter in this, in the book.

There's one other specialty chapter that's on the blessings of the fleet.

Holly> You can tell, you've done quite the research.

I'd like to know the research hours put into this.

Do you have any idea, did you ever clock your time?

Beverly> Well, I spent about five and a half years creating exhibits at the Maritime Center and I probably spent a good five and a half years working on this book.

But it was so well, well worth it.

And I just, every time I think about these wonderful people and the opportunities that people like you are giving me to share this book.

Holly> Well, it's fascinating.

I'm learning a lot just in this time here that we're sitting together, I do want to touch on the challenges that this industry is facing right now, which are many.

One of those being, which I kind of mentioned earlier is that, you know, some of these, these sons are choosing other professions.

<Yes> Why are you, why are they believing that that's, that's the case?

Beverly> Well I think that, that they are, I, but there are some younger people who are getting into it because they have their own freedom.

It's their thing.

They can make of it what they want and they, well look at the Toumers, Skip and Jeff Toumer, they have recently purchased, they had two 65 foot boats at Hilton Head.

Then they bought, Skip bought a, they, no, Jeff bought a, an 85 roughly foot boat.

And just recently his brother had bought one that's about a hundred.

So they're doing, and they're doing very well.

And there are other places that are, Port Royal is talking about rebuilding the shrimp dock and bringing in boats and putting in a processing plant.

That would be huge.

Holly> So there's great news.

Beverly> That would be huge to this area to have a processing plant.

<Right> Because so many, so much of the shrimp when it comes in has to be shipped to the Gulf, to the processing plants.

'cause we just don't have 'em.

There was one in Shem Creek and they don't have that.

There were other processing plants that we don't have.

Holly> What are some other challenges that they face?

Beverly> Well, a place like Stock Island where the shrimpers would go in the off season often, they can't tie up on the island how they used to, because tourism has taken over the docks and hotels and residents.

So that area that was very, very large, a little bit different.

That's, it's a sidebar in the book about how they had to shrimp at night.

'cause the water was so clear and the shrimp wouldn't come in.

It was a little different kind of shrimp, but it was very profitable.

And now that, that's not as the case because they just don't have the place to put the boats.

They can bring in and unload, but they can't dock.

Holly> I want you to talk some about just what hard work this is.

I can remember back several years ago, whenever I was a local news reporter in Savannah and my news director at 9:30 in the morning assigned me to do a story on shrimping.

So I said, oh, I'll call a shrimper and see if I can go out on the boat with them.

I call and they just, you know, somebody laugh like they've been out there for half a day already, you know, you gotta start this thing at what, three or four in the morning.

Beverly> They get up about 3:30.

They go about 4, 4:30.

Holly> Talk about, like, you know, give us kind of a day in the life of, so to speak, of one of these shrimpers.

Beverly> Well, in the old days they had to make sure that they had ice on board.

Now, the wooden boats still have to ice and not having ice plants can be a problem.

But they, they go out before, before daylight and they wanna catch the tide, catch it properly.

And they have favorite places that they shrimp and the shrimp move around.

They don't just stay in one place.

So they may go up to North Carolina, they may be going down to Florida and they, they just follow 'em.

But they get out there and they have a thing called a trynet, a very small net that they drag because the shrimp live in mud.

They don't live in rocks.

<Okay> And they wanna see by dragging this net, and they pull it up every 15, 20 minutes to see how many shrimp they've caught.

It's much easier than putting the big nets out and not catching anything.

So they test the area with that.

In the old days, they used to use lead lines and this was rope with knots showing the fathoms, and there was a metal, a lead with wax which would hit the bottom and they could tell what the bottom was.

So the trynet, they can tell how many shrimp and whether they put the nets down.

<Wow> And so it, and it's, it's hard work.

<Right> They have to, putting... Holly> And at what point of the day, when does the workday end?

Or does it vary every day?

And what if a storm comes?

Beverly> Well, if a storm comes, they, sometimes they ride it out, sometimes they head towards shore.

When they're putting the, the nets out, you know, they, they do try to do it in, in reasonable weather.

If it's too rough, it's gonna be too hard to, to manage the nets and putting the nets out with all these winches and rolls of heavy wire, it can be dangerous.

<Right> And they use their feet on the wooden boats to manage the part of it and their hands to do the other.

They've gotta do the winches and the nets and they've got to be balanced.

When they have two nets or four nets, they can't just drop one on one side and one on the other.

Shrimp boats are very shallow and that's a reason they have those outriggers.

And on the end of the outrigger there are triangles that are stabilizers to keep them from rolling as much.

So... Holly> I wanna ask you this question.

How would you say that shrimping defines the south?

Beverly> I think a lot of people, seafood, seafood does and being the number one seafood, shrimp defines the south 'cause that's one of the easiest places or has been the easiest places to, to catch them.

There used to be a hundred boats in Hilton Head there used to, and Shem Creek up that creek, there were five boats attached to each other on both sides of that creek, all the way up and down.

So there used to be a huge number of boats out shrimping and shipping that all over the country.

Holly> And, what is the difference now in the numbers?

Beverly> Oh, they're maybe nine, 10 boats at Shem Creek.

Hilton Head right now has probably three or four that are working.

There's, there's one on Buckingham Landing, but they, it's not working right now.

It's, it can, but they just don't happen to be.

Edisto, I understand there was a young man who was going to get a boat and they'd be then that would be two there, but there, and Jimmy Bell was building another boat, so it could be two or three there, but there're not very many.

And hopefully when Port, if Port Royal really does open what they're saying, that would be a place.

Holly> When you go to a seafood restaurant, do you order shrimp?

And if you do, do you look at it differently and are you able to hold back from telling the party with you, all about shrimp?

Beverly> Well, the first thing, if I'm gonna order shrimp, I ask where it comes from.

<Okay> And if it's not local... Holly> Do you think we should all do the same?

Beverly> I do.

Holly> Why is that?

Beverly> Well, it's, if it's imported.

Bloomberg Business did a very interesting article a couple, several years ago, and they talked about the, in China, how the pork on land, they have to give them certain antibiotics so they stay healthy and they're near the fish ponds and the fish live in these ponds and they have to put antibiotics in that.

The antibiotics that came from the pork, they go into the fish because it's not all metabolized through the, the pigs, and then that feeds into the shrimp ponds.

And because those are not out in the water, there, tend to be, just limited.

They live where they eat, and they, they don't have fresh water going through.

They have to give them antibiotics.

So the shrimp can have a lot of chemicals in them, unfortunately.

Holly> Good to know.

For those of us who are sitting down and ordering something.

A good question.

We wanna remember.

So, Beverly, I am fascinated with this and I can tell you are a big thinker.

<laughs> Just before the show, all the things that we were talking about, I, this is, this is really cool.

And it, and it's a great book.

I love all the photos.

Unfortunately we have to wrap up the time.

But I, I'd love to keep talking because it, I can tell you put your heart and soul into this.

So thank you for doing that.

Beverly> Can I say that there's a lot of variety?

<Sure, yes> And there're, sidebars and there're quotes and there're recipes with Gullah words in every chapter, each chapter has an operation and there's history.

So you can open to any page.

Holly> I love that part.

You can sit down, start wherever you want to <Yes> like you would with a magazine, you pick your page and you can start and pick back at another page.

Beverly> And there, it's 320 pages with over 820 photographs.

<Love it> And drawings.

Yeah.

Holly> Beverly, the shrimp lady, thank you so much <Thank you> for coming here and thank you all for joining us.

I'm your host Holly Jackson and just wanna say thanks again for joining me by the river.

Beverly> Street Hucksters, Savannah's old city market located at Congress and Barnard Street was the place to sell seafood and wares.

As the city grew and it became less convenient to get to market, the street huckster was born to bring the market to the neighborhoods.

Hucksters would meet farmers and incoming boats, pack in baskets, the fresh catch, vegetables and fruits or whatever the product to carry on their heads or in carts to roll down sidewalks.

They were the voices of the morning, a rich dial blend of dialects, mostly Gullah, that came out in short songs like Swimpy, Swimpy Shrimps, Five-A-Plate shrimps or roe.

Jack Chaplain, A Man who loved Shrimping, Saxby Sto Jack Chaplin, 1927 to 2011, grew up in Port Royal and started shrimping when he was 20.

His wife, Sally McTeer Chaplain said he had to have loved what he did since he got up at 3:00 AM to go to work.

He was his own boss and every day was different.

Every day was usually beautiful.

He never knew what he would bring up in the nets.

He called it a surprise package.

Over the years, all of his children and grandchildren went out with him.

In an interview, his wife said they would have loved to have spent their lives on the water fishing, but he could see the writing on the wall and encouraged them to seek other jobs.

(typing) >> Oh, that's a good question.

Let me think about that for a second.

Hi, I am Holly Jackson and I'm the host of By The River.

There's so much that I love about this show.

And I would say if I had to just name one, it's working with the students from the University of South Carolina, Beaufort.

I mean, it's just great to have their energy while it seems like just yesterday, it wasn't just yesterday that I was in their shoes.

And I just love being around the excitement and the energy that they have for this industry and what we're doing.

>> Hi, I'm Tyler Yates.

I'm an editor for By the River.

What I like most about By The River is the opportunity that it gives myself and other students to learn new skill and practice it every day.

>> There's so many things to like and to put it into just one, it's a challenge.

But I also really love the experiential experience for the students.

It takes me back to when I was in college, which was some years ago, and what it meant to have those hands-on experiences and to be part of something that's actually real.

And being distributed nationally.

I'm sure that not many students out there across the country get that kind of experience that they're getting here.

Narrator> Major funding for "By The River" provided by the ETV Endowment of South Carolina for more than 40 years.

The ETV Endowment of South Carolina has been a partner of South Carolina ETV and South Carolina Public Radio.