BY TONY REHAGEN
You can stand on St. Andrews Beach, look out over the brackish water of Jekyll Sound, and picture on the horizon the broad white sails of the Wanderer, one of the last ships documented to bring enslaved Africans to America. You can follow the footprints through a maritime forest to retrace the journey of young Umwalla, one of 490 captive passengers and one of only 409 survivors to make it ashore on November 28, 1858. You can listen to the rushing of the river that conveyed Umwalla and countless others inland to lives of forced labor and hardship. You can try to imagine how his faith and his community helped fend off despair until Umwalla, renamed Lucious Williams by the man who claimed to own him, finally was released from bondage. You can return humbled to the beach that, even a century later, was still segregated and wonder how it all was possible. You can never forget it happened.
