Rice, bottle trees, sweetgrass baskets, "roots," wrought-iron gates, jazz ... So very many of the things most associated with Charleston culture also have roots in West Africa: the rice we eat, the bottle trees and "roots" that are the remants of a once rich and fully articulated African cosmology, the sweetgrass baskets and wrought ironwork that provided objects of use and art, the music that fed our spirits through many dark years to become the soundtrack of my childhood... They're all fading now as the conditions that nourished them change, as the spring that fed these roots slowly but irrevocably dries up...

These images of "head porterage" are taken from a 1931 cookbook. As late as my childhood, in the 1960s, country people still had the knack of this West African skill.

I grew up in Charleston, a Geechee child in a Gullah-speaking family who learned "the King's English" and became a writer. I've become an expert on the folklore and fakelore of the Gullah/Geechee Coast, an area roughly the size and population of Maryland that's centered on the sea islands and coastal plain of South Carolina and Georgia, but that extends into parts of North Carolina and Florida. Gullah, Geechee. They're words you may never had heard, words with tangled roots--Gullah referring to the Gola of Liberia's rice coast, the Angolans of the Congo River Basin; Geechee referring to the Kissi or Giggi of Sierra Leone.

The Gullah/Geechee Coast was ground zero for the U.S. slave trade. Indeed, so many Africans were dragged in chains to the Lowcountry ports of Charleston to work in Lowcountry ricefields that one historian has estimated that up to 25% of the native black population of the U.S. in 1976 could trace its ancestry to my hometown. Only one other port even came close in terms of numbers--New Orleans, Louisiana. And now that that city lies devastated by Hurricane Katrina, its population dispersed, the Gullah/Geechee Coast stands alone as the region of the United States that can claim the the most direct link to Africa in culture, in foodways, and in folkways.

A photo by Ernesto Pujol, Geechee youth making palmetto roses to sell to tourists.

The book I'm currently writing, The Geography of Desire, is intended to shine a brighter light on the story of Gullah/Geechee Coast: examining its history, its representation in art and literature, and the contemporary pressures--the runaway coastal development, the standardization that is eliminating all evidences of cultural diversity, the commodification that is turning us into Disney versions of ourselves--that endanger its survival today.

 

In 2006, I conducted a bus tour of the Gullah/Geechee Coast, under the sponsorship of the Spoleto Festival USA's Evoking History program, for a group of scholars, artists, activists, and the leadership of the Phillips and Six Mile communities, two '"freedman's communities" established in the 1870s east of Charleston's Cooper River. Our aim was to examine the challenges faced and the solutions being developed by Gullah/Geechee communities further down the coast. So we wound our way from Charleston to Harris Neck and Sapelo Island, Georgia, through Jacksonville's American Beach and south to Eatonville, Florida, home of Zora Neale Hurston--not to mention the Hurston museum and festival.

The images from Sapelo Island, which can only be reached by ferry and only if one has an invitation from a Sapelo Island resident, were indelible. Above, you see the custodian of Behavior Cemetery and, at right, the estate of Richard Reynolds (a.k.a., R.J Reynolds.) At Harris Neck, we met Wilson Moran, an activist and local historian whose grandmother, Amelia Dawley, many years ago sang a song in Mende to the linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner, allowing him to prove the relationship between the Gullah/Geechee tongue and Africa.

 

 

 

 

Images from American Beach, Florida, and the Ritz Theatre/LaVilla Museum in Jacksonville.

(For more information or to book your group for a tour of the Gullah/Geechee Coast, please contact kendra@kendrahamilton.com.)

In 2004, I joined an interdisciplinary group of artists at the Spoleto Festival USA under the leadership of Mary Jane Jacob. As an independent curator, Mary Jane had an international reputation for working outside the museum "box" even before she pioneered an important movement in site-specific art in the early 1990s with "Places With a Past"--also at the Spoleto Festival.

Mary Jane's practice, developed over nearly two decades, has been to bring collaborative teams of artists together to think deeply about place and create under a joint signature. In 2004, she brought together a team with Southern roots and shared interests in history and the natural world: architect and designer Walter Hood, originally from Charlotte, North Carolina; conceptual artist and photographer Ernesto Pujol, born in Cuba, but a former cloistered monk at Mepkin Abbey in Monck's Corner, South Carolina; visual artist Frances Whitehead, born and raised in Richmond, Virginia; and me, the Geechee girl, the bearer of local knowledge.

The result of our joint labors was Water Table, a meditation on the fate of water in a city like Charleston--where it is both precious and completely unregarded. Very subtly, the installation wove together themes of slavery, science, and the environment. Using more than 3,000 Carolina Gold rice plants, we created a temporary wetland in the middle of the city, attracting herons, frogs, and throngs of Spoleto festival-goers who participated in conversations about race and the city's history that we convened around the table.

A series of historical maps at the street level contextualized the experience of the Water Table.

A procession of sea blue chairs at the entrance to the installation.

 

 

THE MEMORY OF WATER

Charleston, S.C., June 2004

The image on the slide looks just like Holland
Blond marsh, wheeling gulls, a brassy sky above
Widen the picture frame enough, all the pieces fit
Even the wanderer I’ve become may find a place.

Blonde marsh, wheeling gulls, the sky brazen overhead
And a house with a grape arbor I can’t seem to find.
The wanderer I’ve become not yet at the place
Of repose—not final, of course, just a sense of home.

It’s the time of green grapes at the house that I can’t find.
I wonder if the porch swing is still there?
She’s gone to her repose while I’m still seeking home.
Only the smell of marsh lingers—you could never mistake it.

I wonder why the porch swing would still be there
When nothing else I knew has remained the same?
Oh, the smell of marsh, of course—no one could mistake it,
An acrid, fetid reek? I say the smell of life.

But clearly, nothing else has remained the same.
A smooth expanse of asphalt swallowing the wild.
And we roar past, windows sealed against the reek—life
Is so much more than being stuck in traffic.

A smooth expanse of asphalt has swallowed the wild,
Though beneath are streams, miles of pipe, some of it collapsed.
Stuck in traffic no one hears the soft suck and sputter
Of water, the creaking gulls as they bob on the waves.

The city slowly calcifies over streams, miles of pipes.
The city builds new bridges over the water.
Is this a story that has an end or just keeps repeating?
Widen the picture frame enough, all the pieces fit.

And from a great distance, it all looks just like Holland.

[written for and performed at the opening of the installation; later published in The Goddess of Gumbo, Word Press, 2006]

 

 

 

An enormous map reveals the relationships between water and development. The yellow areas of the map show impervious surface, the green and blue indicate the natural world.

A panoramic view of two of the three sections of the Water Table.