THE ART AND CRAFT OF SURVIVAL
The Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor
For Black History Month,World Nomads, 2020
Despite its dull label, the South Atlantic coastal plain is a place of decided wonder. As much air and water as terra firma, it’s more a state of mind than strictly mappable territory – a theatre of weather, of tenebrous skies, racing clouds, and sunlight breaking suddenly, like news from above; its deck of sands, salt marshes and ribbony creeks constantly shuffled by wind and sea.
As it journeys 400 miles south, from Wilmington, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, the plain attracts more poetic names – Tidewater, the Lowcountry, the Golden Isles (the Sea Islands, a chain of about 100 tidal and barrier islands, run between the mouths of the Santee and St John’s rivers) – but the region has an official designation, too, the most significant of its titles: the Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor.
The Gullah – who go by “the Geechee” in Georgia – are descendants of the Central and West African slaves who were put to work on the rice, indigo, cotton and sugar plantations that made fortunes for the English colonists who settled the Corridor 300 years ago. On her father’s side, former First Lady Michelle Obama is descended from the Gullah. Her great-great grandfather, Jim Robinson, was a slave on Friendfield Plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina. The Motown studio bassist James Jamerson and the heavyweight boxer Joe Frazier were of Gullah descent, too.
———————————————-
Charleston, South Carolina, was the first point of entry to North America for about 40 per cent of the Africans who were enslaved there. They were first taken to “pest houses” on Sullivan’s Island, at the mouth of Charleston harbour, where they were checked for communicable diseases before being transported to the city for sale at auction. Frankly, it’s outrageous that Sullivan’s Island isn’t as well known as Ellis Island – an outrage that speaks directly to the United States’ abject failure to deal with its own history.
At Fort Moultrie, on the southwestern edge of Sullivan’s Island, a memorial bench donated by the Toni Morrison Society looks out over the Intracoastal Waterway. It remembers the 14 million Africans who were sold into slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean (about a million of whom were shipped to North America) and the two million who died during the Middle Passage, the brutal trans-Atlantic journey from West Africa.
I attended Toni Morrison’s unveiling of the bench 12 years ago, holding a copy of the book it pays tribute to, the Nobel Prize-winning novel, Beloved. There were African drummers, libations were poured and a wreath was cast on the waters. The writer gave a speech, saying, “It’s never too late to honour the dead, and it’s never too late to applaud the living who do them honour.” I have since seen numberless people sitting on that “Bench by the Road”, holding each other, their shoulders quaking, their faces emptied by loss, contorted by sorrow.
So, there are signs that Charleston, the 11th oldest city in the US, has started to reckon with its legacy. As well it might. Its air of prosperity is no accident – it grew fat on slave labour, and fired the first shots of the Civil War, from Fort Sumter at the entrance to its harbour, to keep its distended figure. Its guidebooks trumpet that its record of religious tolerance earned it the handle “the Holy City”, but a mob razed its first black place of worship, and in 2015, the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, built on the same spot, was the scene of the murder of nine parishioners gunned down during Bible study by a 21-year-old neo-Nazi. And until quite recently, Charleston embodied, for many, that peculiarly Southern delusion that sophistication in white people is a sign of good breeding, rather than, say, snobbery or vanity – and that if you do something with sufficient dash, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing so much.
And further change is coming. Two years ago, the city formally apologised for its role in the slave trade, acknowledging that slavery brutalised a people, doing its damnedest to strip them of their culture and values; and there is support to remove the statue of John C Calhoun, Andrew Jackson’s vice-president and a staunch segregationist, from its 100ft-high pedestal in Marion Square. But most significantly, in January 2023, after 19 years of planning, the International African American Museum is scheduled to open – and on a site, Gadsden’s Wharf, where slaves were landed.
———————————————-
Most of the plantations worked by the slaves were isolated and inhospitable; and, largely conjured from Sea Island swamps, they were typically malaria-ridden. This led their owners to run them remotely, from Charleston or Savannah, Georgia, which afforded the slaves some freedom to share their social customs and spiritual practices, and to develop a common tongue that cut the English they picked up from traders in Africa and slaveholders in America with words from Mende and Vai (Sierra Leone), Wolof (Senegal and Gambia), Kikongo (Angola, Congo) and Fon (Benin), among many other languages. It was the beginning of what we now consider Gullah culture.
The Ethnologue database gives the current Gullah-Geechee population as 250,000, and an estimated 10,000 of them still identify their speech as Gullah. Two years ago, Harvard University offered Gullah-Geechee as a language class in its African language programme, taught by Sunn m'Cheaux, a native speaker from Charleston.
Unsurprisingly, given its intense musicality, the language lends itself to performance. I have seen the McIntosh County Shouters, “master artists of the authentic ring shout”, reduce both Savannah audiences and congregations to tears and palpitations. The “shout” is an ecstatic, transcendental religious experience – comprising cries, hollers, claps, stamps, blue notes and call-and-response singing – that, in somewhat bastardised form, has been adopted by the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans.
Grounded in a millennia-old oral tradition, the Gullah are also born storytellers, best known for their trickster tales, which began life in Africa but evolved to reflect their new home, featuring animals native to the South. Rich in metaphor and proverbial meaning, they inspired Joel Chandler Harris, who first heard them as a 14-year-old while working at Turnwold Plantation, in Georgia, to write his series of Uncle Remus/Br’er Rabbit books.
Harris’s reputation as a writer is in all but tatters now. Disney’s Song of the South, which set his tales in an antebellum utopia, didn’t help. Nor did Alice Walker, who, with just cause, accused him of hijacking her heritage. Which is a pity, not because his books, penned in the late 19th century, stand a chance of satisfying today’s exacting readers, but they were intended to be faithful recordings of the stories slaves told him, which he prized for their wit and inventiveness. A keen ethnologist, Harris was painstaking in his phonetic transcriptions of the black vernacular of Middle Georgia, utterly appalled as he was by “the intolerable misrepresentations of the minstrel stage”.
And he was progressive in his writings as a journalist, too, in a career that spanned some 40 years. Throughout it, he advocated for racial reconciliation, as well as African-American education, suffrage and equality. Writing to the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie about what would become Uncle Remus's Home Magazine, he said that its purpose was to further “the obliteration of prejudice against the blacks, the demand for a square deal, and the uplifting of both races so that they can look justice in the face without blushing”.
The Sea Islands – and the Gullah communities forming on them – came to national notice when the largest of them, Hilton Head, fell to Federal troops in November 1861, after the Battle of Port Royal, one of the earliest amphibious operations of the Civil War.
Once it became apparent to the Union Army that the Confederates had abandoned the island, they went ashore and found slaves living there in abysmal conditions. Wise to the island’s strategic importance, they set up camp, and Hilton Head became the Department of the South’s HQ, a base for the blockade of Charleston and Savannah and forays inland.
When, in September 1862, General Ormsby Mitchel, a committed abolitionist, assumed command of the Department, he immediately proposed the construction of a settlement, and gave land, and the means to lay streets and build homes, to the former slaves. Unlike the “contraband camps” set up elsewhere, Mitchelville (named for the general, who died of yellow fever a month later) was developed as a regular town and a few months later, long before the Civil War ended, it would become – with quarter-acre lots, churches and compulsory schooling for children between the ages of six and fifteen – the first self-governing settlement of freed African-Americans in the US*.
Mitchelville became an important stop on the Underground Railroad. Massachusetts governor John Andrew sent the Railroad’s legendary conductor, Harriet Tubman, to Hilton Head to meet the new locals. There, she recruited scouts – boatmen who knew every ripple of the surrounding waterways – and schooled them in gathering intelligence. They operated as a kind of special-forces unit for black regiments, determining enemy positions, movements and fortifications on the shoreline beyond the Union pickets.
Using that intelligence, in June 1863, Tubman co-led an expedition of 300 soldiers of the Second South Carolina Volunteers up the Combahee River, aboard two paddle steamers converted into gun ships. Coming five months after the Emancipation Proclamation, it was a liberation raid first and foremost, and it succeeded to that end – 727 men, women and children clambered onto those boats to freedom – though plantations, mills and mansions were plundered and torched. It was still war, after all.
——————————————––––
Mitchelville didn’t survive the 1893 Sea Island hurricane**, and after the Second World War, Hilton Head, like so many of the islands, was developed as a resort and residential community, with golf courses, marinas, tennis courts, riding stables, wildlife parks and well groomed beaches. Having bought up most of the land, whites resettled it in their own image, adding modern insult to historic injury. The Gullah have maintained a presence, though – of the 40,000 year-round residents, 3,000 still call it home – and tourist interest in their heritage means there is a market for their art and crafts (textiles, cast nets for fishing, sweetgrass baskets), food (of which, more later), music and storytelling.
But there has been criticism within the community that they are miserably rewarded for the value they bring to the island; that their future there relies almost entirely on them reliving their past in states of picturesque poverty. Off the record, I hear the words “human safari” and “state-sanctioned begging” more than once.
“Tourists don’t want to be challenged; they want it confirmed that we did alright, really, and we’re happy as we are,” says Marquetta L Goodwine, who was enstooled Queen Quet, the chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, in 2002.
“Human safari? That’s a good one. But no one’s going to steal the wiper blades off anyone’s car on Hilton Head. If we seem too poor, the tourists tell themselves we’re poor by their standards, not ours, that we probably think we’re richer in other ways. The way they do with Native Americans. Guilt doesn’t agree with vacationing whites.”
A tireless advocate for her people, and founder of the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, whose mission is to safeguard their rights and way of life, Goodwine has spoken before the United Nations about what’s needed to sustain Gullah culture in the face of climate change and development-induced displacement.
“Promote globally, preserve locally. That’s the idea. We have international recognition. Press and TV. Anthony Bourdain featured Gullah food in his show about Charleston. And we have influence here. A lot of my time these days is spent with climate change activists, and trying to ensure that cultural heritage is a part of the resiliency plans that many local governments are working on.”
The low-lying coastal lands where the Gullah live are at immediate threat from rising seas and extreme weather. Goodwine, a native resident of St Helena Island, in South Carolina, is working to mitigate their impacts, appealing to authorities to remediate erosion and promote careful stewardship of waterways, but action is rarely taken where it supports only environmental integrity and subsistence living. If a gated community, or one of its playgrounds, were at risk, there would be a scramble to address the problem.
“Gullah-Geechee culture is inextricably tied to the Sea Islands. The land is our family and the waters our bloodline. All the development has driven up taxes and forced us out. If that wasn’t bad enough, toxic run-off from golf courses and resort properties has led to ocean acidification, which upsets the ecosystems we rely on for crabs, oysters, snails, clams. Farmers and fishing families have suffered financially. And the Gullah’s food security has been hit. We are paying for the greed and carelessness of others.
“As for the other effects of climate change, people of colour, of African descent, are suffering disproportionately, as they do across the country, because they don’t have the means – the healthcare or savings – to weather 100-plus-degree weather for weeks, or combat mould and mildew, and the lung problems they create, in their homes.
“We have a long way to go, but we’re moving forwards. A saying came to me as a vision from my ancestors and it became the motto for the Sea Island Coalition: “Hunnuh mus tek cyare de root fa heal de tree” (“You must take care of the root to heal the tree”). If you want to get to the root of a problem, you need to dig for it, because roots go deep. I want to make sure that the fruit that’s produced by this tree in the future is sustainable and healthy.”
Unstable property rights have complicated matters further for the Gullah-Geechee. Four years ago, Hurricane Matthew laid waste to a great swathe of the South Atlantic coastal plain, and thousands of householders were left needing Fema assistance, private loans and nonprofit help. Many discovered, however, that they were ineligible for relief as, legally speaking, they didn’t own their homes.
Anyika Bailey is one of them. Her shotgun cottage, and the land it sits on, on the outskirts of Savannah, is an “heirs’ property”. It was passed down informally, and she shares a partial interest in it with every living descendant of its original deed holder, her great-grandmother. None of them hold the actual title. This means that she can’t raise money against it to pay for repairs, and she’s excluded from applying for federal and state grants traditionally given to disaster victims. Given the state of Bailey’s finances, her home is beyond rescue, and she expects she’ll have to surrender it.
The US Department of Agriculture calls heirs’ properties, which are thought to comprise almost half of all black-owned land in the South, “the leading cause of black involuntary land loss”. The central problem is, any heir to the land can force a sale, and if the other heirs are in no position to buy it, they’ll all end up losing it – predictably, developers have long exploited this loophole by leaning on heirs who don’t live on the property.
——————————————––––
My Gullah friends live in conscious tribute to their forebears, but resist what has been called the “museumisation” of their culture. As Queen Quet tells it, “Gullah concerns are today’s concerns; they’re about how people live and their place in the environment. Our relationship with – our respect for – the earth is a useful model for people who want to leave their children something.”
It’s true that Gullah culture is at its most vital when you don’t know – though you suspect – it’s at work, whether that’s in everyday dress and speech, in song and worship or exterior design (visitors to Charleston often gush over the colour of its porches, doors and window frames, which are painted a soft pale – or “haint” – blue, the better to ward off restless spirits).
Where the Gullah have had the biggest mainstream impact is dining. And the enormous debt owed to their foodways is only now being acknowledged. It has made Charleston, a regular top-five entry in polls of “best food cities”, a lot of money. “Lowcountry cuisine” is inarguably a Gullah creation.
BJ Dennis, “a chef, educator and community incubator” who made an appearance on the Bourdain show Parts Unknown, is happy to talk me through the richness of his culinary heritage over a bowl of she-crab soup.
“We live close to the earth here and feel a spiritual connection with it. It is beautiful, fertile country, teeming with wildlife. We grow our own vegetables and we’re keen fishermen. Lowcountry cooking differs from other southern cooking – from soul food – because seasonality and seafood are central to it, but make no mistake, however fancy people make it, we, the African diaspora, gave it to Charleston. You must remember that as well as preparing meals for each other, the Gullah did all the cooking in the planters’ grand homes, adapting our incredible larder to European culinary techniques.
“Okra, shrimp and grits, oyster roasts, oxtail, fried shark, barbecue pigs’s feet, whiting, this is food from down there raised to where it should be – up there. It’s the way we eat, too. Not fussing over cutlery and avoiding looking at each other – it’s a celebration of the company, of eating together, as much as the food.”
Presented with cornmeal-fried catfish, Carolina gold rice purloo, lobster buttered grits, and littleneck clams and king mackerel, it’s hard to not eat stupendously well in Charleston, but to eat with a good conscience, at a Gullah-owned establishment, is much harder (be aware that there are restaurants, food producers and even a brewery that push the Gullah name without any link to the community).
At Dennis’s urging, I take myself to the James Beard award-winning Bertha’s Kitchen for a late lunch. The family-run meat-and-three restaurant is busy, with a line halfway down the block. The menu is plain-speaking – pork chops, red rice, okra stew, collard greens – but the eating is anything but: driven by dark roux, with salt, sweet, sour, bitter and savoury all making a grab for the wheel, the dishes are deeply flavoured, and servings are ladled from pots, vats and trays that look like they’ve been bubbling since the beginning of time.
I sit at a large table, with Celeste – “my job is grandma” – two of her granddaughters, Harmony and Melody, three USPS drivers and a Japanese tourist. The conversation is broad-ranging and convivial, even if it is mostly conducted in the oohs, aahs and lip smacks of giddy contentment, a language in which I learn I’m fluent.
* Founded in 1738 in north Florida, the first legally sanctioned free black town in what would become the United States was Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose. Self-emancipated slaves had been fleeing British North America to Spanish Florida for about 50 years when, in 1693, Charles II of Spain granted them liberty in exchange for their defence of Spanish settlers at St Augustine. The fugitives were unprepared to take a bullet for their new benefactor and sought out wilderness areas nearby – marginal territory often made of the same forbidding, paludal stuff they’d been subjected to under British control – where their knowledge of rice and corn cultivation, and resistance to tropical diseases, might serve them better. And these “maroons” became natural allies of the Creek and other Native Americans who were escaping into Florida at the same time.
** There are plans to expand the Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park, which sits on a 33-acre plot near the airport, with replica lodgings, a school and church, all built on the town’s original template, new signage and an interpretation centre. Though Gullah culture will be its focus, the centre will also tell the story of the island’s 4,000 years of habitation, starting with the Native Americans who made the shell ring, a remarkably preserved circle of oyster, clam and mussel shells, in the Sea Pines Forest Preserve. The Catawba, Sewee, Edisto and Guale are among the likely descendants of the ring-builders.
