February is recognized nationally as Black History Month. Here on the Georgia coast, this history is rich and varied. It encompasses traditions that can be traced back to West Africa, days of slavery in the plantation era, the unique culture developed here as part of the Gullah/Geechee Corridor, and growth beyond the segregation that prevailed in the South. It spans generations, incorporates tales of both triumph and tragedy. There are endless stories that can be told. People have come from far and wide to document the people, their practices, and the places that make up this region. And this environment has also given birth to historians, storytellers, and fierce protectors and promoters of this very important cultural heritage. We’ve seen the voice of a people brought to life and carried through the years and across the miles from its roots in faraway lands.
Paul Meacham, @CoastalGATravel
Initially, slavery was prohibited in the colony of Georgia; however, that prohibition was lifted in 1750. Plantation owners sought out slaves from the coast of West Africa where rice, cotton, and indigo were native crops. Over the centuries that followed, the relative isolation of the African population brought here allowed them to recreate their native cultures and traditions on the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas, leading to the formation of an identity we now recognize as Geechee/Gullah. In 2006, Congress designated the coastal region from Wilmington, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida, as the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, saying “it is home to one of America’s most unique cultures, a tradition first shaped by captive Africans brought to the southern United States from West Africa and continued in later generations by their descendants.” This culture encompasses language and oral history, music and dance, spirituality, food, and distinctive arts and crafts like sweetgrass basket weaving.
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Paul Meacham @CoastalGATravel
Sweetgrass Basket Weaving
The art of sweetgrass basket weaving is practiced in the Gullah/Geechee Culture Heritage Corridor that spans from the coastal and barrier island communities from North Carolina to Florida. You can find basket weavers here on St. Simons Island, on Sapelo Island and in McIntosh County. The beautiful baskets are each created with a knot to start and then grasses are repeatedly coiled and wrapped with strips of palm frond stems. Many have ornate designs, some have handles and/or lids. They were traditionally used for storing food, fanning rice, and bringing crops in from the fields, among other practical purposes, but now are considered by many to be collectible works of art.
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Sweetgrass Basket
It was in attempting to capture and catalog this unique heritage that stories were discovered. Lorenzo Dow Turner, the Chair of African Studies at Roosevelt University and a leading English scholar, was one of the first to investigate and record the Gullah language, a true African American Creole dialect. Turner interviewed Harrington resident Belle Murray for his book Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. He also recorded several songs for Lydia Parrish, wife of artist Maxfield Parrish, and a part-time resident of St. Simons Island who began a collection of slave and folk songs after hearing her housekeeper, Julia Armstrong, sing. She visited former plantations asking someone at each one to sing the “old songs.” In the 1920s, she organized the Spiritual Singers Society of Coastal Georgia primarily to perform at The Cloister at Sea Island. Parrish later wrote the book, Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands, which remains a definitive work on the subject. The Spiritual Singers Society of Coastal Georgia would later evolve into the Sea Island Singers and catch the attention of folklorist, musicologist, and field collector of folk music Alan Lomax while he was visiting St. Simons Island in 1935. And it is in the music and dance, that we find more stories to be told. Please delve into the other articles featured this month to learn more about this fascinating culture and its origins.
