The resorts and golf courses and budget luxury—a hotel style first innovated on Tybee Island, Georgia—have creeped up on Sea Island after Sea Island. This was where the forty acres and a mule were promised. And where, after emancipation, the formerly enslaved tried out a collective model of ownership, something that we clunkily call “socialism,” before the land was snatched back. Now, as the younger ones do not want to stay, and the older ones die, and the developers push, the hard-fought-for pieces of land and ways of being are vulnerable. Gentrification is often the enemy of history and
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