Fifteen true things about the Gullah Geechee people and the tradition they kept: the corridor, the language, the rice, and the practices that survived.
The Gullah Geechee story gets told in fragments when it gets told at all, so here are fifteen true things in one place, from the corridor to the kitchen table.
1. The Gullah Geechee are descendants of enslaved Africans who lived along the coastal Lowcountry and Sea Islands, a corridor running from North Carolina down through Florida.
2. That corridor is federally recognized. Congress designated the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor in 2006, one of the few such designations for a living culture.
3. Gullah is a language, a full creole born of English and West African tongues, and the only creole language developed by African Americans that survives in the United States.
4. The isolation of the Sea Islands is why so much survived. Water separated the islands from the mainland, and that separation protected language, foodways, and practice for generations.
5. Carolina's rice wealth was built on African knowledge. Planters specifically sought people from West Africa's Rice Coast because they held the engineering and agriculture the crop demanded, a history I told in The Enduring Echoes of the Rice Coast.
6. Hoodoo and Voodoo are not the same thing. Vodou is a religion with clergy and ceremony. Hoodoo is a spiritual tradition and practice that lived inside Black American Christian life.
7. Haint blue porch ceilings are protection work in paint, covered in Haint Blue Porch Ceilings.
8. The most feared and respected rootworker in America worked the corridor: Dr. Buzzard of St. Helena Island, whose story is here.
9. The ring shout, one of the oldest African American sacred traditions, survives in the corridor to this day, kept by groups like the McIntosh County Shouters of Georgia.
10. Sweetgrass baskets are an unbroken African lineage. The coiled technique came from the Senegambia region and never stopped being taught, hand to hand, for over three centuries. More in the sweetgrass post.
11. Kumbaya is likely ours. The song's title is widely traced to the Gullah phrase for come by here.
12. Penn Center on St. Helena Island housed one of the first schools in the South for freed African Americans, and later hosted Dr. King's retreats.
13. Bottle trees, glass bottles set on branches to catch troublesome spirits, decorated Lowcountry yards long before they became garden decor.
14. The praying grounds came first. Before there were Black churches there were hidden brush arbors where the enslaved worshipped in secret, the story told in The Invisible Institution.
15. The Great Migration carried all of it north. The practices rode in trunks and memories to Harlem, Philadelphia, and Detroit, which is how a Gullah grandmother's work ended up in a New York kitchen, and eventually in this shop.
Fifteen down, a culture to go. The rest comes through the email list at the bottom of this page.