Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Land Of Gullah South Carolina’s St. Helena Island Keeps Rich Culture Of African-American Slaves Alive

Fred J. Eckert Universal Press Syndicate

Delores Dayson was standing in a small museum on St. Helena Island, S.C. The African American wife, mother and professional woman said she had lost something long ago back home in San Clemente, Calif. But she’d found it again here, on this historic island in the South Carolina Lowcountry. What she’d found, she explained, was a sense of who she is and where she came from.

St. Helena has that effect on visitors - especially African American visitors.

The recent death of her mother brought Delores to South Carolina, and while she remained to attend to family matters, she heard about and decided to visit St. Helena Island.

“I came to South Carolina on a sad note, but after visiting here, I’m returning home rejoiced,” she says. “I feel better about myself. Everything that woman has been saying goes to the soul and is very uplifting.”

She was gesturing toward Kittie Green, owner-operator of Gullah-NGeechie Mahn Tours.

Kittie, a vivacious 52-year-old dynamo with a perpetual smile and the braided hair that displays her ancestral link to West Africa, is a woman on a mission. She and her younger sister, Marlena Smalls, both Ohio natives who moved here with no knowledge about the significance of St. Helena, are helping visitors discover an African heritage that until recently few realized still exists in the United States.

Kittie and Marlena have taken it upon themselves to be guardians of Gullah.

Gullah is the culture as well as the language of African American slaves, 80 percent of whom arrived in the United States through the port of Charleston, S.C., and nearby coastal islands.

African slaves came from many societies speaking many languages. They learned to communicate with one another and with their slave masters by forging a new, melodic, sing-song language that combines mostly English with some West African words and speech patterns.

Many of the 7,000 residents of St. Helena Island still can and do speak Gullah to one another.

A popular Gullah saying is, “Ef oona ent kno weh onna da gwine, oona should kno weh oona come from” (If you don’t know where you are going, you should know where you came from).

There is even a Gullah Bible, actually the Gospel According to Luke: “De Good Nyews Bout Jedus Christ Wa Luke Write.”

Over time, the slaves blended their African ways and traditions with Christianity and European and American customs.

The origin of the name is unclear, and the Gullah culture and language have been lost everywhere else. But because of a peculiar combination of circumstances, Gullah has survived on this sandy 5-by-18-mile island. The result is that the people who live here are perhaps the most authentically African of America’s African American population.

“Plantation owners feared malaria back in those days and only came to the island during the few months of the year that they considered to be safe,” Kittie said. “So slaves here were quite independent. Certain slaves oversaw the other slaves.”

Because slaves on St. Helena lived largely on their own, it was in their owners’ interests to keep them content, Kittie explained.

“Slave-holders around here engaged in other nontraditional practices, such as slowing down the selling off of slaves and Christianizing slaves,” she said.

“Union forces captured St. Helena Island very early in the Civil War and enabled slaves to acquire property here. Literacy education enabled the freed slaves to avoid being cheated out of their land rights.

“And there were no bridges to St. Helena Island until 1927.

“All this combined to keep the African American community here isolated and holding onto its traditional ways.”

The island is in many ways a living museum. On the large verandah of the Candied Yam Bakery in the Frogmore section of the island was a display of incredibly fine baskets. Each was a highly individual work of art hand-made by a Gullah woman.

Jery Taylor was busily at work “sewing” a basket, exactly the way women on the west coast of Africa do it. She learned the craft from her mother’s mother who learned it from her African ancestors.

Jery tied sweet grass and bull rushes in an overhead knot. This became the base of the basket. Next, layer by layer, the basket was sewn and stitched with palmetto leaves. For color, pine needles were added at intervals. It takes great skill and a long time to produce such baskets, which is why they sell at premium prices.

As in Africa, basket-making here is a family affair. Men and boys gather the materials and women make and sell the baskets.

One simple basket appeared to be beautiful and decorative, nothing more. But Jery saw in it a sense of history. It was a fanner basket, she said. Such baskets were used to separate chaff from rice in Africa, where many slaves had excelled in rice farming before they were captured and put to work making the South Carolina coastal rice plantations prosper.

The story of the fanner baskets illustrated something Delores Dayson had said earlier: “I used to think that when my African ancestors were slaves, all they did was pick cotton and work in the fields. I am so glad I came here and found out more.”

That’s the mission - filling in the “more,” telling the rest of the story - that sisters Kittie and Marlena have taken on.

I came across Kittie again at the Chapel of Ease, the striking remains of a church built by slaves before the Revolutionary War and largely destroyed by a forest fire in 1886. She was leading a group on one of her tours, standing by the church cemetery.

“Come look at this wroughtironwork - how stunning!” a woman exclaimed.

The others gathered around and raved about the workmanship. Yet another smile beamed on Kittie’s face as she explained that a slave craftsman had built that fine work long ago.

That sense of an earlier era is present while driving down the Avenue of Oaks, which like so many St. Helena roads is framed by massive moss-draped oak trees. Parts of this island look very much as they did in pre-Civil War times, including the five plain white structures scattered over the island called Praise Houses, used by slaves as churches. Three of these buildings are still in use.

The African flavor is pervasive. In some areas, houses are not set in the usual row style; rather, they are randomly scattered yet all vaguely linked to one main house. This is the West African style of placing homes of family members around the home of the matriarch.

Even cemeteries here have characteristics common in Africa, where husbands and wives often are not buried near each other. The African tradition is for children to be buried near their mother, and if a husband and wife come from different villages, they will be buried near their mothers, not each other.

African customs and African American history come together at Penn Center, a National Historic Landmark. The South’s first school for former slaves, it was established by abolitionists only a year after the Civil War began. Today, it houses a modest cultural museum with photographs and artifacts for the general public and a library of African American books and oral histories for scholarly research.

Penn Center was a favorite retreat for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights struggles of the early 1960s. King enjoyed the serene ambiance of the island and mapped strategy here for his historic 1963 march on Washington. It is believed that he may have begun drafting his classic “I Have a Dream” speech while visiting St. Helena.

But St. Helena is not all history and scholarship. Some days on the island, and always during the Gullah Festival over Memorial Day weekend and the Heritage Days festival the second weekend in November, you can catch performances by Gullah storytellers.

They are of the ageless African mode, delightful tales of the weak outsmarting the strong, reminiscent of the universally beloved Gullah folktales that we all recognize as the Brer Rabbit tales.

An entertaining and educational Gullah experience is a performance by Marlena and her Hallelujah Singers, which includes not only great singing, but also an excellent cultural program explaining Gullah.

Their first CD, “Trilogy,” is scheduled for release this month. If you find yourself thinking you’ve heard them before, you probably have. They appeared in the movie “Forrest Gump,” parts of which were filmed on St. Helena Island.

For the film, Marlena directed the choir, arranged the gospel songs and even played the role of Bubba’s mother. When Forrest Gump introduced himself to her, she uttered the memorable line, “Are you crazy, or just plain stupid?” Kittie also appeared in “Forrest Gump,” playing Bubba’s grandmother. On her tours she points out shrimp boats and locations used in the film.

Kittie and her family operate the Gullah House Restaurant to preserve and promote Gullah cuisine (“mahn” and “oomen” differentiate the men’s and women’s restrooms in the restaurant, and “okra” and “gumbo,” she says, are African words). While dining there, I noticed that there are no photos on the walls of the many celebrities who have eaten here: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, Sam Neill, Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon, among others. Kittie shrugs her shoulders.

“I’m into Gullah culture,” she says, gesturing toward the Gullah paintings, sculptures and crafts that decorate the restaurant. She helps sell the artwork for local artists.

“What does Gullah mean to you?” I asked Kittie.

She pondered the question a moment and then said, “For me, Gullah is a sort of coming home, a reconnection with my heritage.”

Just as it was for Delores of San Clemente.

Just as it is for so many others who visit St. Helena Island and discover here treasures of African roots.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO Nearby Beaufort - a 15-minute drive away is a popular destination in its own right and offers a wide selection of accommodations and restaurants. For more information about St. Helena and the area, call the Beaufort Chamber of Commerce at 803-524-3163 or write to 1006 Bay St., P.O. Box 910, Beaufort, S.C. 29901. Gullah-N-Geechie Mahn Tours conducts two-hour tours of St. Helena Island several times daily (adults $15; children $12). Extended and customized tours are available and they can make other area travel arrangements as well - golf, fishing, tennis, accommodations. Call 800-647-5573 or write to P.O. Box 1248, St. Helena Island, S.C. 29920. The Hallelujah Singers perform regularly in the area when they’re not on tour. Admission is $15. Check locally for times and places because they vary. More information and tickets are available from the Beaufort Chamber of Commerce. Rate at the modern 45-room Royal Frogmore Inn, the only hotel on St. Helena, is $43 for a double. Call 803-838-5400 or write to P.O. Box 370, St. Helena Island, S.C. 29920. The Gullah House Restaurant, next to the Royal Frogmore, is the only area restaurant specializing in Gullah cuisine. A wide selection of other types of food is also available. Shrimp Shack offers fresh seafood caught from the owner’s family boats. Their shrimp burger is a specialty worth trying. Tip: Stock up on fresh shrimp before heading home. A good place to check out is the Gay Sea Food Co., a local family-run outfit that operates Shrimp Shack and supplied the shrimp for scenes in “Forrest Gump.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: IF YOU GO Nearby Beaufort - a 15-minute drive away is a popular destination in its own right and offers a wide selection of accommodations and restaurants. For more information about St. Helena and the area, call the Beaufort Chamber of Commerce at 803-524-3163 or write to 1006 Bay St., P.O. Box 910, Beaufort, S.C. 29901. Gullah-N-Geechie Mahn Tours conducts two-hour tours of St. Helena Island several times daily (adults $15; children $12). Extended and customized tours are available and they can make other area travel arrangements as well - golf, fishing, tennis, accommodations. Call 800-647-5573 or write to P.O. Box 1248, St. Helena Island, S.C. 29920. The Hallelujah Singers perform regularly in the area when they’re not on tour. Admission is $15. Check locally for times and places because they vary. More information and tickets are available from the Beaufort Chamber of Commerce. Rate at the modern 45-room Royal Frogmore Inn, the only hotel on St. Helena, is $43 for a double. Call 803-838-5400 or write to P.O. Box 370, St. Helena Island, S.C. 29920. The Gullah House Restaurant, next to the Royal Frogmore, is the only area restaurant specializing in Gullah cuisine. A wide selection of other types of food is also available. Shrimp Shack offers fresh seafood caught from the owner’s family boats. Their shrimp burger is a specialty worth trying. Tip: Stock up on fresh shrimp before heading home. A good place to check out is the Gay Sea Food Co., a local family-run outfit that operates Shrimp Shack and supplied the shrimp for scenes in “Forrest Gump.”