Reprinted with permission from
  CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
 (Charlotte, N.C.)
 Feb. 7, 1993, pp. 1A+

GULLAH: A VANISHING CULTURE
by Paige Williams
Staff Writer

Every February, the nation honors African-American contributions to our heritage. Many of us are unaware that along the S.C. coast lies a culture more strongly rooted in African ways than any other in America. That unique way of life, known as Gullah, is in grave peril.

     DAUFUSKIE ISLAND, S.C.--The graveyard looks forgotten.

     Headstones tilt, crumble, sink into the overgrown Daufuskie Island earth.

     Bud Bates points out an old oak.

     "See that? If you don't care enough about your ancestor to let a tree grow through the grave then you don't give a damn."

     Bates is white. The dead beneath his boots were black, buried when no one needed explain that the slave descendants on South Carolina's sea islands left their graveyards to the weeds not out of neglect, but respect.

     It was a time when most sea islanders were black, close as family. They understood the importance of tucking Spanish moss into a shoe, painting window trim blue, running like lightning from a coachwhip snake. The shoreline was theirs for fishing, the salt marshes theirs for shrimping, the woods theirs for hunting. They spoke their native tongue without shame, bellowed spirituals without reserve, and wove baskets without worrying that the sweet grass might vanish from the swamps someday.

     Their unique culture, called Gullah, thrived in isolation for centuries--until the outside world discovered the islands and started paying millions to own them.

     Now new ways force out the old.

     White islanders outnumber black. Resort development drives property taxes so high some natives can't afford to stay. Hordes of vacationers come from around the world. Souvenir shops, posh golf courses and mansions with security gates share the palm shade with the shanties of old, the Gullah natives who inherited them, and a younger generation feeling ostracized from their heritage.

     "If you live behind the gate you can come out and go where you want. But we can't," says Roosevelt Brownlee, 45, one of Daufuskie Island's 42 black residents. "We can't go behind the gate and say, `Hello, friend. Can I come in for a cup of tea?' They're trying to isolate African-Americans."

     If Gullah dies, so will a significant part of Carolinas character--and African-Americans' purest link to their past.

     "My children won't know about the lifestyle. There won't be anything physically left," says Veronica Gerald, a Gullah descendant and English professor at Coastal Carolina College in Conway.

     "Gullah is going to eventually move to the textbooks."

     Joe Agne calls it cultural genocide.

     He's a National Council of Churches civil rights worker and United Methodist minister from New York trying to help save Gullah customs.

     "This is one more case where rich people are taking land from poor people. The more land they lose, the closer their culture is to being extinct."

     Islands' bounty unique

     Edisto, Dewees, James, Johns, St. Helena, Lady's, Hilton Head.

     South Carolina's sea islands number three dozen or more, from North Island off Georgetown to southernmost Daufuskie, and below them lie the isles of Georgia: Tybee, Sapelo, St. Simons, Jekyll.

     No place like them exists in this country.

     Atlantic tides bathe the islands, feed their pungent marshes, fill their coastal creeks with shrimp, mullet, crab. Oysters grow in slick, gray colonies. Ospreys and cranes patrol the salt waters for prey. Deer and foxes roam the woods where Spanish moss laces oaks like wisps of dust from an unswept ceiling. Island winters run chilly to mild, summers sticky- steamy, despite a steady sea breeze.

     History says the Cusabo and Yemassee Indians populated the sea islands first. Then came European settlers who found the fertile land fit for rice, cotton and indigo--and profit.

     Slave traders sailed to West Africa, stuffed their ships with men, women and children, then sold them to plantations.

     When black meshed with white, Gullah was born--the language and the people.

     A thick, lilting mix of African and English dialects, Gullah started as sea island slaves' second language, then became their descendants' unwritten native tongue. A cousin of the Krio language of West Africa's Sierra Leone, Gullah is still almost incomprehensible to outsiders.

     Today it barely survives. Researchers reported finding 100,000 South Carolinians speaking Gullah in 1979, but in the 1990 census, only 180 listed it as the language they spoke at home.

     Some white sea islanders know Gullah, too, though fewer than during slavery.

     "I'll say something that makes people gasp: You had the most totally integrated South during the antebellum period. As a result, they understood each other's cultures," says Gerald, the Coastal Carolina professor. "During the slave period, you find (white islanders) being very sensitive to African-American practices."

     The cultures separated during and after the Civil War.

     White islanders fled, some to avoid Union capture, leaving the land to freed slaves.

     For nearly a century, in solitude, they kept their African customs alive.

     They wove work baskets, made medicine of herbs, delivered their own babies, knitted their own fishing nets. They told stories, danced and clapped when they worshiped, adorned graves with conch shells, and warded off evil spirits with open Bibles.

     In quiet self-sufficiency, they lived off ocean and land.

     Then came the bridges.

     `Progress' spans the waterways

     Mainlanders started building the bridges four decades ago, linking the sea islands like beads on a chain.

     Bridges introduced indoor plumbing, paved roads, better education and access to mainland jobs. And bridges brought outsiders whose criticism of Gullah as "bad English" made islanders ashamed to speak it. Speculators arrived with plans to turn the isles into "concrete jungles," as islanders put it. Television gradually "Englishized" Gullah.

     And while the white population exploded, the islands lost black residents.

     Though many found resort jobs, many more moved to the mainland to make a living.

     On Edisto, 83% of the population was black in 1980, 63% in 1990. Wadmalaw lost 147 black residents in the '80s, while its white population grew by 252. Until the mid-'50s, only two white families lived on Hilton Head, now home to 21,207 white islanders.

     "These islands represent peace," says Kitty Green, an Ohio native with Charleston roots who married a St. Helena man of Gullah ancestry and moved to the island.

     "You can lock into nature here. You can see alligators. Birds still stop in your yard. There's quiet. Most people are looking for that, no matter what part of America they're from.

     "They don't come to intentionally destroy what's here. They just want a piece of it."

     Bridges reintegrated the sea islands, but didn't bring understanding between cultures.

     Bud Bates, a Richland County native who moved to Daufuskie 19 years ago, opened the first real estate office there and drives a resort ferry part time. He counts native islanders among his closest friends, but sees sea island change the way he saw the forlorn cemetery: differently.

     "The way I look at it, white people settled this land before black people. Who's encroaching on who?"

     `Born and raised on Daufuskie'

     A sandy path cuts the brush to Lillie Simmons' wooden house, set up on short columns of brick and cinder block in a dirt yard.

     She has lived past 80 as an independent woman, still chopping her own firewood, washing clothes in a tin tub, cooking on a cast-iron stove and setting off firecrackers to scare the hawks from her chickens. A portrait of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. shares a wall with photos of grandchildren.

     Simmons speaks in a barrage of Gullah, English words thickened with an accent akin to Jamaican, only parts of it recognizable to unfamiliar ears.

     "I was born and raised on Daufuskie, you know. Everybody was together. There was so much more people on the island. It was nothing but people, the whole island."

     She worked in the oyster houses that lined the Intracoastal Waterway before Savannah River Pollution closed them 34 years ago.

     "It's done changed, you know. One time, man, you could go down in the creek and pick 'em and open as much as you want. They don't grow around here like they used to."

     For now, Simmons' home is not on Daufuskie's seasonal bus tours that will start again soon, chauffeuring visitors past resort gates, private-property postings and realty signs advertising acres for sale, then past the abandoned Silver Dew winery, the 125-year-old Baptist church and the ramshackle homes of native islanders irritated that their lifestyle has become a curiosity that makes mainlanders money.

     In only one way, Daufuskie remains entirely as it once was: The only way to get there is by boat, 15 minutes across the Calibogue Sound from Hilton Head.

     Despite that seclusion, Daufuskie is growing with people who can afford a slice of ocean solace. The island lost only three black residents in the '80s, but the white population increased six times over. Beaufort County planners estimate 10,600 people will live on the island by the year 2000.

     Some predict developers will eventually offer islanders sums too tempting to turn down.

     "We all lose a sense of history in the ripping apart of this African community," says Lewis Pitts, a lawyer with the nonprofit Southern Justice Institute in Durham.

     "The strength and tenacity it's taken for this culture to hang in there, that's a valuable thing to preserve. There's something to learn from a culture that hangs on like that."

     Protecting the spirits

     There is a reason Benjamin Chaplin rests within an ornamental wrought-iron fence that is gnarled, sagging, rusty with age.

     He died May 8, 1851, at 77, a St. Helena islander whose people enclosed his grave to protect his spirit. Beneath layers of leaves and prickly sweet gum balls may lie more symbols of their beliefs.

     Only in burial were Gullah customs so elaborate, for the well-being of the living depended on placating the dead.

     They dressed graves with life's necessities and pleasures, so the departed could pass easily and amiably between material and spiritual worlds: a cup of water for thirst, a jar of rice for hunger, a lantern for light, a wooden pistol for protection, a bed frame for rest, herbs for health. They regarded cemeteries as sacred ground, and left them alone.

     Islanders still dress graves, but less often.

     It's getting harder to find houses painted blue to banish evil spirits, or islanders who toss salt to get rid of unwanted guests. And how many of today's island children grow up on stories of the coachwhip snake, the most fearsome island creature that chases prey by putting its tail in its mouth and rolling like a wheel?

     Long ago, a Lady's Island root doctor might have advised a friend with high blood pressure to tuck a little moss into the shoe sole, or to dress a wound with cobwebs to stop bleeding, or to brew holly berry tea to ease pain--home remedies that originated in Africa and some of whose ingredients are found in modern medicines.

     "These traditions are being lost. And that is a shame." Anthony Kandel, a professor at Greenwood's Lander College, warned at January's S.C. Humanities Festival in Beaufort.

     Islanders who still practice the customs often do so privately, the way they speak Gullah only when outsiders aren't listening.

     Because outsiders often just don't understand.

     2 worlds, 2 perspectives

     Two large resorts already occupy nearly half of 5,300-acre Daufuskie Island: Haig Point, a residential community, and Melrose, a "national country club." With paved roads and street lights, they take up one side of the island; with bone-rattling dirt roads nearly impassable in the rain, native islanders live on the other.

     On the Cooper River sits a Melrose welcome center and pier, the focus of much disagreement recently among some islanders.

     Some black residents say Melrose built the center on top of a Gullah graveyard--and that the pier blocks the spirits' journey across the water, home to Africa.

     Six black islanders have sued Melrose to move the visitors' center from what they say is a half-acre of unmarked graves.

     "The cemetery suit symbolizes several of the issues that the National Council of Churches has called cultural genocide," says Pitts, the Justice Institute lawyer. "It's theft of the land, insensitivity to cultural beliefs."

     Melrose owners contend no graves lie beneath the welcome center. They say they've been good neighbors by creating jobs and running the resort with an eye to preserving Daufuskie, not displacing its people.

     "There's interaction and cooperation among indigenous islanders and newcomers," says Steve Kiser, a Melrose Co. senior partner with homes on Daufuskie and Hilton Head. "There's a spirit there that's noncombative. It's a spirit of unity I haven't experienced anywhere I've ever lived. There are certainly special-interest groups that from time to time perceive things to be differently."

     Two of those suing are Yvonne Wilson, a 39-year-old county employee, and her 76-year-old mother, Louise, who still lives on family land. The Wilsons, bitter toward some developers, say they're trying to regain what's rightfully theirs.

     "They want to rule `Fuskie and they're not gonna do it," Louise Wilson says. "I'll die and go to hell first. Yessir, boy, this place sure gone down, `Fuskie done gone gone down. Everybody want to be boss."

     Is Coosaw Island next?

     From an oyster-shell creek bank, Leroy Browne casts for trout toward Coosaw Island.

     An unmarked road crosses that narrow slip of land, mostly marsh, where hunch-shouldered vultures command palmetto stumps and kingfishers swoop to kill. Except for a few homes, Coosaw is undeveloped. For now.

     Browne's people lived on the island when there were no construction trucks, no utility wires, no beer cans bobbing in ditches.

     He is 76, a gardener and fisherman, whose parents reared him and six others on St. Helena. He attended Hampton Institute in Virginia, and served 20 years on the Beaufort County Council as the first black South Carolinian elected since Reconstruction. Still, the old island ways dominate his memory.

     "The development was so little you could roam all over anyplace. Nobody prevented you because you had that freedom. You didn't see no signs about trespassing. As everything started developing, everything started shrinking away."

     Browne used to fish where he wanted, hunt rabbits on Dataw, where a security gate blocks the island entrance now. Private property. Residents and guests only.

     It's the same on Harbor Island, and on Fripp.

     "I guess we're something like the Indians. You do have the feeling something's been taken away," Browne says. "You realize, also, that progress has got to be made whether you like it or not. It gives you a negative feeling."

     Singing God's praises

     Six men and 16 women form a circle.

     Without an accompanying note, they start their song slow and hold the notes long, eyes closed as if they're praying. And they are.

     "Oh my good Lord, show me the way. Oh my good Lord, show me the way."

     They step softly right, then left, back and forth in place to the a cappella spirituals mournfully born in the cotton fields to the rhythm of hoes and sweat. The spirit builds, faster, louder, heads back, eyes closed, bodies swaying, feet stomping, hands clapping, man with woman, high and low voices blending into one mighty, harmonious tribute to God and tradition and the hope that sustained generations before them.

     "I'm gonna drink that healing water some of these days. I'm gonna drink that healing water some of these days. I'm gonna drink and never get thirsty...."

     Two hundred years ago, this might have been a "ring shout," spirited worship once largely confined to praise houses, the spiritual center for black islanders. Only in the praise houses could they truly be free.

     The ring shout lives through the Hallelujah Singers. They perform for schoolchildren, civic groups, churches, reliving Gullah history through song.

     They are among today's keepers of the culture, islanders who believe Gullah ways won't die if they don't let them.

     Luke Smalls, 69, still hand-knits fishing nets, though today's fishermen favor cheaper, lighter webs made in Japan. Rena Singleton, 34, weaves baskets, though her sweet grass comes from Florida because development and pollution have made sea island sweet grass scarce. Kitty Green, 47, opened the Gullah House restaurant, with dishes reminiscent of days when supper came from the sea. Ron and Natalie Daise tour the Carolinas telling stories in their ancestral Gullah. And Emory Campbell runs St. Helena Island's historic Penn Center, America's first school for freed slaves, now a community resource center committed to preserving African-American sea island ways.

     The old faces of Gullah stare from Penn Center's museum walls:

     Adelaide Washington, a hoe across her shoulder, basket balanced on her head, walking to the field in 1900; a man named Brutus and his wife in front of their one-room shanty in 1908; young Rebecca Green, in checkered apron and head rag, grinding corn in 1909.

     They lie at rest somewhere on South Carolina's sea islands, probably in graveyards weedy as the one on Daufuskie, as the new faces of Gullah struggle to remind the world that they lived.

     * * *

     What is de Gullah? Fus, read on

     Gullah

     Gullah (pronounced GULL-lah) is the language blending African and American English dialects that became a second language for African-born slaves, then their descendants' native tongue. "The Story of English" by Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil, says Gullah may be closer than any other American variety of black English to the original creole English of the New World and the lost pidgin English of the slave ships.

     Hundreds of words derived from West African languages occur in Gullah. Some became common English sayings. A few, listed in the December 1987 "National Geographic," with African languages from which they might have come:

     goober = peanut (Kimbundu)
     gumbo = okra (Tshiluba)
     hoodoo = bad luck (Hausa)
     tote = to carry (Kongo)
     biddy = small chicken (Kongo)

     Storytelling

     In 1986, Ronald Daise of Beaufort, S.C., wrote "De Gullah Storybook." Following is his tale, which might have been told centuries ago:

     "De Gullah gone a plowin een de fiel e fambly own. Fus, e unhitch e hoss from weh hit beenna feedin all lone. Dat one lee hoss plow up all the dan de Gullah had. De Gullah gone home tyad to de bone, bot him been good en glad!"

     Translated: "The Gullah went plowing in the field his family owns. First, he unhitched his horse from where it was feeding all alone. That one small horse plowed all the land the Gullah had. The Gullah went home very tired but very glad!"

     Sweet grass basketmaking

     Basketmaking is one of the nation's oldest art forms of African origin. Sea islanders wove baskets of sweet-smelling, pliable marsh grass to hold vegetables, cotton, shellfish, clothing. Fifty years ago, baskets cost 50 cents to $2.50. Today, the smallest sell for about $40, the largest for hundreds of dollars.

     The New York Times reported in 1987 that when two Gullah rice baskets were taken to an African arts curator at the Smithsonian Institution, the curator inspected them and said they came from West Africa, between Senegal and Sierra Leone.

     Painting window trim blue

     This African custom was believed to scare off evil spirits. Sea islanders painted some rooms inside blue, too, to keep out spirits, called hags, during childbirth.

     Food

     Rice and greens, and rice with gumbo (okra) are among the Gullah foods linked closely to African cuisine.

     Gullah cooking relies strongly on oysters, shrimp and fish. In the old days, seafood was caught with nets woven in West African-based patterns.