I didn’t intend to spend ten years searching for one man’s name.
My obsession began in a tidal creek where I went to swim in South Carolina. It was the summer I was pregnant with my fourth child and I longed for a quiet escape from Charleston’s tourist-swarmed streets. Behind Wadmalaw Island, I found a place where I could slip down a mud embankment and lower myself into a canal called New Cut. I became a suspended bather, swimming through water so rich with silt that I couldn’t see below the surface. In this forgotten corner of the Lowcountry, the loudest noise was the chattering and clicking of shrimp singing beneath the surface. As I floated back and forth with the sea tide, I wondered about the canal’s origins. The British colonial name of New Cut was different from other nearby creeks—Wadmalaw, Bohicket, Leadenwah, Stono—all named in Indigenous dialects.
Naively, I thought that discovering New Cut’s origin story wouldn’t require much research grit—especially in Charleston, South Carolina, where history is worshipped. Charleston is filled with libraries and special rooms dedicated to preserving the past in carefully curated collections of diaries, maps, ledgers, and colonial archives. To investigate New Cut, I intended to swing by the local library, look through an index and read a couple of paragraphs about my swimming hole…