True North

Andrea Hazel’s great-great-grandparents arrived on Sullivan’s Island on a slave ship, one as a crew member and the other as a captive. Today the artist preserves the memories of her family and those of others through her art.

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Andrea Hazel, 74, was gifted a set of watercolor paints when she turned 53, sparking a new passion. Her boyfriend, Frank Hamilton, surprised her with a starter set when they were on their first trip together, to Edisto Island. He thought it might help her slow down and decompress. She had been teaching math at Trident Tech since 1975 and worked weekends as a wedding photographer. The two careers were surprisingly similar. “You just smile a lot and tell people what to do, and use your charm and humor to get grumpy old men to get in there for the pictures,” Hazel says with a laugh, seated by the window in Saffron restaurant in downtown Charleston, her hot tea in front of her and bright, winter sun shining in from behind.

Hamilton, to whom she has now been married for 16 years, has a military background and remembered that Eisenhower and Churchill both painted to relieve stress. “I thought if it helped them, maybe it would help her,” he says. “I knew she already had the eye and perspective from her years of photography. I simply presented her with the opportunity.” He thought she might just dabble to relieve stress. “She didn’t just take the opportunity; she blew the door off opportunity,” he says.

Painting the Past

Five years after receiving the watercolors, she held her first exhibit at the Georgina Arts Centre, Around the World in Watercolour, Sutton, Ontario, Canada, and since then has appeared in nearly 40 exhibits and was awarded the Coastal Community Lowcountry Artist of the Year award in 2011. In 2020, her exhibit, How It Was – in 1963, premiered at the Gibbes Museum of Art, an institution she was prohibited from visiting as a young Black girl during the era of segregation.

The collection features watercolor and ink paintings of homes in the downtown Charleston neighborhood off Ashley Avenue, where she lived as a young girl. Most of the structures she painted were demolished when the Crosstown Expressway was built in 1968, and the works share a similar muted color palette, the intent being for them “to look like memories,” she says. Her paintings were drawn from photos she discovered in 2015 in the South Carolina Digital Library archives, taken when engineers were making plans to build the road. Completed in 1968, the Crosstown unified U.S. Highway 17, which originally stopped at the Ashley and Cooper Rivers and required drivers to navigate through downtown city streets.

Dozens of black family homes were removed at the time and only existed in memories until Hazel brought them back to life with her ink and watercolor collection.

The art of building and preserving has been passed down through generations of Hazel’s family. Her father was a restoration carpenter who worked on many downtown Charleston homes. Her grandfather was a carpenter on Sullivans Island who worked on many of the structures at Fort Moultrie.

Sullivan’s Island is where her American story starts, with the arrival of a slave ship around 1802. Among the passengers were a white Frenchman named Vincent Peter and an African girl, given the name Betsey (her African name was AhOu). By the time the ship made its way to South Carolina, Vincent and Betsey had a 2-year-old child. Though Hazel has yet to determine the route the ship took from Africa to South Carolina, the timeline coincides with the Haitian Revolution against  French colonial rule, when thousands of refugees flooded into the Lowcountry, and she speculates the ship may have come from that area.

The family story is that Betsey, or as the family called her, AhOu, was the daughter of an African dignitary who was only on the slave ship to buy European goods. The vessel set sail while she was onboard, and though she attempted to buy her way off the ship with gold she had stashed in her handkerchief, she never made it back onshore to her African family.

The couple settled on Sullivan’s Island, where they had three more children. Vincent and Betsey’s offspring were all born free citizens, married other freed people, and lived on Sullivan’s Island. According to family history, Hazel says “Betsey was very particular about who her children associated with, as they were free people of color, and it was imperative that they not be confused as slave children and liable to be kidnapped into slavery.”

The couple’s great-granddaughter, Maggie (Hazel’s grandmother), married Allen Perry Jones, “A.P.”, and they built a house around 1902, raising 10 children on the back creek of Sullivan’s Island. The house still stands and is owned by the family.

Weathering the Storm

In 1989, as Hugo was bearing down on Sullivan’s Island, Hazel’s brother, Walter Hazel, and uncle, Alfred Jones, were hunkering down in the house, refusing the mandatory evacuation order. “If it was going down, they were going down with the ship,” she says. She remembers entire houses being wiped away and the island being unrecognizable. But, remarkably, they were able to use their landline telephone during and after the storm.

Her brother was injured by flying debris when he went outside, and some of the tin roof came off during the storm. But, otherwise, the house their grandfather had built with his own two hands survived relatively unscathed. Since A.P. was a carpenter and was able to buy excess building materials, much of what he used to build the house came from the same stock as homes built within Fort Moultrie.“The house is elevated, but they said they could hear the ocean lapping underneath the floor,” she says. Hugo brought a 12-foot storm surge when it made landfall.

As soon as the storm passed, her uncles, John and Arthur Jones, rushed to the island in a boat since the Ben Sawyer Bridge was in pieces. Her three uncles, all in their 70s, were immediately up on the roof hammering until the National Guard came by and ordered them to leave. Hazel and her sister, Rovena Hazel Owens, were in the first car back on the island when the bridge reopened two weeks later, anxious to get to work cleaning up the property.

Priceless Memories

The house, visible just off the causeway as you enter Sullivan’s Island, is what the family describes as their ‘True North.’ “It’s something we all have in common. The swing under the house is the same one I used when I was young,” Hazel says, remembering “grand old days” of watching sunsets on the back beach, eating wild plums, tying matchboxes to fiddler crabs, and watching them pull them, and getting boats into the Intracoastal Waterway by pushing them through the marsh in a wheelbarrow. “Black girls weren’t supposed to be on the beach, but we went,” she says. “We would usually go in by the lighthouse. It was actually safer to play in the back creek, though, since the water only got knee-high. There were many more Black families on the island back then. Most of them were on the back side.”

The Sullivan’s Island of her youth in the 1950s included days of sliding down The Mound on cardboard boxes and getting respite from the summer heat in the bamboo groves at the base of the former Army ammunition store. Nighttime might include walking through the echoing concrete walls of Fort Moultrie, carrying candles and making ghost noises. The fort was abandoned for a period of time and had fallen into disrepair.

Even though Hazel grew up and lived in downtown Charleston, Sunday always meant visiting the Sullivan’s Island house. It still does. It’s where they go to celebrate and where they grieve, remember, and honor their grandmother Maggie’s wish.

“She begged us to save the house,” says Hazel, the oldest of six children and relatives of A.P. and Maggie Jones who have gathered at the house through the years, including 33 grandchildren and 70 great-grandchildren. “We want to share the experience. It creates a stronger family having this common bond. It gives every family member and every cousin – from aunts and uncles who have died to cousins in Seattle, New York, California, and everywhere in between – a magnetic North. This is the place they can come and be ‘home.’ That sense of belonging and wholeness is the value of the house and the property – it’s not a monetary value.”

  • Hazel was the official photographer for the first Spoleto Festival, in 1977. With no photography experience, she bought a Canon 35mm and took photos for that first festival to help generate interest in future Spoletos. She recalled looking through the viewer of the camera. Her mind said “Click. I can do this.”
  • Hazel earned a bachelor of arts in mathematics from Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York, and a master of education in counseling from The Citadel. She also studied studio art at the College of Charleston.
  • Andrea Hazel’s grandfather, Allen Perry Jones, a carpenter, built the house around 1905. He worked on many houses on the island, including some in Fort Moultrie. Jones had been a soldier in the Spanish American War.
  • Her most recent exhibit, The Way It Was – in 1963 features paintings of homes in the downtown neighborhood of her youth. Many of the paintings were drawn from photos she discovered in the South Carolina Digital Library archives, taken when engineers were making plans to design and build the Crosstown Expressway. Dozens of Black family homes were demolished when the Crosstown was built and only existed in memories until Hazel brought them back to life with her ink and watercolor collection.