In coastal SC, Gullah culture's African roots persevere amid community change

JOHNS ISLAND, S.C. — After the Civil War, former slaves across the South left the region to escape white terrorism. But along the Carolina coast, many remained. They claimed land from abandoned plantations, opened businesses during Reconstruction and, as Jim Crow laws took hold, increasingly isolated themselves in communities along the coastal corridor, especially on sea islands where their descendants settled for generations.

They became known as Gullah Geechee — the name’s origin is unknown — and the area where they live is now widely acknowledged as the most African place in America.

They farmed collards, lettuce, tomatoes and butter peas; fished for oysters, shrimp and sea bass; and raised hogs and chickens. Their relative isolation from white society left intact much of the traditional culture that had developed during slavery and harks back to African and Caribbean roots.

Gullah communities built wooden one-room praise houses to worship with energetic singing and shouts. Many painted their shutters and porches a shade known as 'haint' blue to ward off angry dead spirits. The Gullah culture can be seen in the sweet-grass baskets some still weave on the sidewalks of Charleston or in the creativity and adaptability of Gullah soul food that incorporates the ingredients available to cooks during slavery — rice, seafood, sweet potatoes, grits, local vegetables and basic spices.

More than anything else, Gullah people share a distinct dialect, a creole language that has similarities to some West African languages melded with English to create a quick-paced, easily flowing language.

During Reconstruction, Joe Fields’ grandparents bought 11 acres on Johns Island, where they first raised hogs and lived a quiet lifestyle of subsistence farming in the poor rural communities south of Charleston. His parents bought more acreage across a winding two-lane road in the 1960s and expanded as commercial farmers. Then Fields took over, the youngest of eight children and a third-generation farmer who began by spreading chicken and horse manure over 46 acres and grew tomatoes, collards, cabbage and peas.

He returned the land to its organic roots in 2010 and now farms 35 acres of organic collards, lettuce, kale, spinach and more.

Joseph Fields Family Lane is a dirt road that leads to his house. The lane bisects Fields Family Lane, which leads to other houses on the back of the farm. The entire family still lives here, and many work the farm together.

“We all built around the farm so all of the houses that you see are brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews,” Fields said. “It’s something we love to do. Farming is in our heart.”

Fields doesn’t plan to go anywhere, but real estate signs have sprung up all along the stretch of road nearby. It’s a sign of the rapid suburban development that’s reached its tentacles from Charleston and the resort islands nearby.

Development is one of the leading threats to the Gullah way of life. On some islands, such as Hilton Head and Kiawah, the Gullah have virtually disappeared.

Because of their isolation, they lived in tight-knit communities with families often sharing land passed down through generations. Most remained poor and suffered through segregation and are poorly educated and bereft of wealth-building opportunities afforded white landowners who ranched cattle or managed forestry operations.

Parents left no more than oral wills, telling their children not to sell the land but to share it and live on it. Many did, and because the children shared ownership and often passed it down to their children, the specifics of land ownership have gotten murky.

Children who owned shares of land got married or took jobs and moved away. Others who stayed shoulder the burden of paying property taxes. Because of shared ownership, many Gullah people can’t get mortgages to build homes on their property. So they often bought trailers.

Artist, author and community activist Marquetta Goodwine, who holds the elected title of Queen Quet, Chieftess of the Gullah Geechee Nation, said attitudes of some property heirs pose a threat to the Gullah way of life.

“Many that have not grown up on the land do not value it in the same manner that those that live on it do,” said Goodwine, a native of nearby St. Helena Island. “They often see it as a cash cow for an instant (profit), but they do not look at the long-range value of it and how you cannot calculate the value of cultural heritage and self-sufficiency.”

Some families have chosen to relocate, unable to afford rising property taxes, while others have ended up in court because they can’t agree on whether to sell or stay, she said.

Ed Atkins took over Atkins Live Bait, which his parents started in 1957. He lives on inherited land along with 10 brothers and sisters and their families, and he’s watched his livelihood erode because of increasing development.

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“So much regulation has run the poor man off the river,” he said. “Used to be you could go out and catch a little something to feed your family or trade shrimp for peas to somebody who do farming. They limit you on the shrimp you can catch. They limit you on the fish you can catch. They limit you on the oyster you can go out there and get. It’s a mess.”

In addition, he said, tourists are overfishing for oysters and shrimp, and land-clearing for expensive homes is removing oyster and shrimp habitat along the river’s edge.

Despite the challenges, Goodwine said the Gullah people’s embrace of their history and culture over the past few decades can be seen in those who have begun to speak the dialect more openly and proudly and have opened businesses with “Gullah” or “Geechee” in the title.

Some of that newly exhibited pride has to do with the work of Gullah activists like Goodwine and Zenobia Harper, a guide at a former rice plantation who has started the Gullah Preservation Society of Georgetown County.

Harper walks visitors up to the second-floor Rice Museum and shares a fuller history of rice cultivation in Georgetown. Or she leads them on a tour of the plantation to share her ancestors’ history. She tells visitors of the wealth of knowledge and culture of those who created those cash crops and the way the Gullah culture first developed, as disparate Africans became “a people in the New World and tried to figure out how to mesh together all of those traditions and languages and religious beliefs… under extremely hostile situations.”

“I’ve been trying really hard to get an expansion of the narrative so that when people come out they’re not just focused on the planter class narrative,” Harper said.

Louise Cohen carries on the Gullah culture at Hilton Head, where she restored her father’s 1930s one-bedroom house as a museum on the land where he lived and she was raised. Gated communities and giant resorts lie just down the street, but the Gullah survive, one generation passing its traditions to the next.

And in Georgetown, Natalie Daise sits and paints inside an old red-brick building on the city’s main drag, where oral history says slaves once changed hands. Daise and her husband, Ron, starred in the mid-’90s Nickelodeon TV series "Gullah Gullah Island," which has been partly credited with bringing the Gullah culture to national exposure, along with the 1991 film "Daughters of the Dust," written and directed by Julie Dash. Beyoncé used imagery from Dash’s movie in her 2016 visual album "Lemonade."

Daise’s husband wasn’t allowed to speak Gullah at home, she said, because his parents weren’t aware that the creole language was “a sign of great creativity and the ability to adapt in difficult situations.”

Then he wrote a book about it, began to share Gullah culture in schools, and eventually they landed on television.

“Where before, Gullah was a thing you didn’t want to be ... now it’s like, ‘I’m Gullah,’” Daise said. “I have such gratitude to see that embrace.”