Previously Unpublished Excerpt

From Michael Muhammad Knight's forthcoming book

Blue-Eyed Devil 

SAPELO ISLAND, GA—I was riding a five-dollar rented bike up and down the island’s dirt roads through palm tree forests, chasing big buzzards and searching for the two-centuries old Behavior Cemetery; legend had it that your behavior at the graves affected how their spirits would treat you.  One story said that people who “weren’t supposed to be there” had found the cemetery and ended up surrounded by rattlesnakes. 

The night before, I had walked eleven miles from Darien to Meridian to catch the morning’s first ferry.  It was about four hours of walking down a long country road in complete darkness with every other house hosting three or four big barking dogs.  A couple of houses had their dogs untied so they’d follow me maybe three quarters of a mile, twenty feet behind me and barking the whole time.  I figured that running or making eye contact would make it worse so I just trudged on, muttering under my breath that they thought I wouldn’t kick a dog, but I would…I’d kill a goddamned dog if I had to, I’d wrestle it down and bite its neck like Jack London did in that one story.  The dogs all tired of the chase sooner or later and left me alone and I kept walking. I walked until I had a shadow, and then until the roosters crowed and I could read signs without a flashlight.  I made it to the ferry a little after 6:00 a.m. with big blisters on my toes that exploded when I pressed on them.

        My mission centered on Bilali Mohammad who was taken as a slave to the Bahamas and came to Georgia in 1803, ending up on Sapelo Island in a tabby house made from a mixture of water, lime, sand and seashells.  He was the author of a thirteen-page Arabic manuscript believed to be a treatise on Muslim jurisprudence and the first Islamic writings of North America.  Bilali’s descendents still lived on Sapelo in a community called Hog Hammock (population: 70).  Though they had since gone Baptist, Bilali’s legacy crept through here and there; the island’s two churches were built facing east and segregated by gender.

            I sat on the front stoop of Stanley Walker’s trailer as he relaxed from cleaning three hundred pounds of fish.  His thick arms didn’t come from the gym but a naturally hard life.  Sapelo Island people were rugged, with their straw hats and beat-up old pickup trucks and bumpy dirt roads, and old trailers and a pump that would only give you gas two days a week.  Stanley told me that people would still say “I’ll see you tomorrow if Allah spare me life,” and then pointed me to the home of his mother, Cornelia Bailey who served as the island’s historian.

            I sat at her kitchen table while she attended to her little grandson and told me that Bilali had a lot of secret chapters to his story, and you can’t say that the story is even over yet.  Cornelia was directly descended from Bilali and said that Muslims had to practice in secret back then, so who knows how long it lasted after him—but Bilali never hid anything, he even taught Islam to his kids.  The historian who wrote that Bilali prayed three times a day didn’t know what he was talking about, said Cornelia: “because nobody was there to witness him praying before the sun came up or at the end of the night, and those people weren’t Muslim so they had no idea.”  

            We talked about his writing.  She said his thirteen-page book was at first thought to be a plantation record but they were “actually the teachings of an old man he knew in Africa” and still available at the archives in Athens.

            I asked her about the legend that Bilali was buried with a Quran.  She didn’t know about that and had never heard of him owning one; where would he have gotten it?  When he was brought across the ocean in the bottom of a boat with his hands shackled, did he have a Quran on him?  Maybe he was a hafiz, she considered, and transcribed the Quran in America.  But she did know that he had prayer beads and rugs.

    “There was a great deal of Islamic history in Georgia,” she said.  “Elijah Muhammad was born in Georgia, did you know that?”  I nodded.  “But did you know,” she asked, “that there are white Muslims too?”

It was Cornelia that told me I could rent a bike from behind her son’s trailer.  Five dollars would get me one for the whole day.  “Find one that fits your frame,” she said.  There was something to walking all night down a country road and then riding a bike all over Sapelo Island that seemed a big Fuck You to the people paying for Bally’s memberships so they could walk nowhere and ride bikes that don’t move.  I had a map of the island showing where Behavior Cemetery was but it didn’t help much so I went up and down the same dirt roads, passed the same garbage dump twice and scared the buzzards each time.  Even if I found the cemetery, I wasn’t sure that I’d find Bilali Mohammad; Cornelia said he left Sapelo Island for Darien as an old man and may have died there.

When I finally spotted tombstones through the palm trees I parked my rented bike and walked.  The cemetery was surrounded by a fence.  I decided to respect the barbed wire and recited al-Fatiha for the souls.  When I rode back to the docks, thinking that after the ferry I’d have to walk all the way back to Darien, I met up with a man who had come to the island to work on people’s air-conditioners.  He said he’d drive me the eleven miles, so I guess good behavior paid off.

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