Epilogue

The epilogue picks up Stevens’s story. It follows the rest of his life, off Kiawah Island, away from the white Vanderhorst family with whom he had a fraught, lifelong relationship, and onto his own land on Johns Island. Without Stevens and his family, Kiawah Island eventually lost its small Black community, was purchased by a corporation, and was transformed into a private resort island for wealthy tourists. Through the case study of Kiawah, it becomes clear how the hurricane prepared the sea islands for their conquest by corporate developers sixty years later. The epilogue surveys the Lowcountry’s present and looks to the future. Amidst the climate crisis and rising seas, it is ever more imperative that histories of environment and climate be brought into conversation with political and social histories, most of all in places exceptionally vulnerable to sea rise, exploitation, and the intensification of hurricanes.