Making Gullah

A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination

Melissa L. Cooper

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781469632681, 9781469632674
• eBook ISBN: 9781469632698
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

During the 1920s and 1930s, anthropologists and folklorists became obsessed with uncovering connections between African Americans and their African roots. At the same time, popular print media and artistic productions tapped the new appeal of black folk life, highlighting African-styled voodoo as an essential element of black folk culture. A number of researchers converged on one site in particular, Sapelo Island, Georgia, to seek support for their theories about “African survivals,” bringing with them a curious mix of both influences. The legacy of that body of research is the area’s contemporary identification as a Gullah community.

This wide-ranging history upends a long tradition of scrutinizing the Low Country blacks of Sapelo Island by refocusing the observational lens on those who studied them. Cooper uses a wide variety of sources to unmask the connections between the rise of the social sciences, the voodoo craze during the interwar years, the black studies movement, and black land loss and land struggles in coastal black communities in the Low Country. What emerges is a fascinating examination of Gullah people’s heritage, and how it was reimagined and transformed to serve vastly divergent ends over the decades.

Chapter 1. From Wild Savages to Beloved Primitives

Gullah Folk Take Center Stage

No veils of civilization hide the stark realities of love, birth, death, from their eyes, but they find happiness in the present instead of looking for it always in tomorrow and again tomorrow or in something still to be discovered. . . .

On large plantations, where Negroes are in tremendous majority, the field hands have few contacts with white people and no need to amend their speech or give up the customs and traditions of their African ancestry.

—Julia Peterkin, Roll, Jordan, Roll

Four days after Christmas in 1928, dozens of Sapelo Islanders gathered around an oxcart on a dirt road that snaked through live oaks covered in Spanish moss and waited for the white man who was filming them to tell them what to do next. They had already sung “Old Time Religion,” “Steal Away to Jesus,” and performed a rendition of the minstrel tune that was named the Kentucky state song that year—“My Old Kentucky Home.”¹ Each time the camera rolled, the filmmaker directed the Islanders to sing while riding in, or walking alongside, the oxcart. The solemn choral group likely included some of the men Howard Coffin hired to build roads, prepare crops, man his sawmill, tend his cattle, work in his greenhouse, or build boats and other structures. Likewise, several of the women in the chorus were either paid by Coffin to work in his shrimp and oyster cannery or in his fields, or were members of the domestic staff who cooked his meals and cleaned his mansion.² Even though the filmmaker captured several “takes” designed to look like mundane and typical Sapelo scenes, that day was anything but ordinary. That day, Sapelo Islanders found themselves in front of cameras, recording equipment, and in the presence of a small crowd of newspaper reporters because their boss had recruited them to entertain the most powerful white man in Jim Crow America, President Calvin Coolidge.

Of course President Coolidge’s sojourn to the island made headlines in national newspapers, but articles chronicling the details of his trip also introduced Sapelo Islanders to the nation. Reports described the men, women, and children, who were descendants of the freedmen and freedwomen who fought for land on the island, as the 250 “negroes who” gratefully showed “their allegiance” to Coffin—the man who “permitted” them to remain on the “romantic and picturesque” island when he purchased it in 1912.³ News stories recounted the president’s and the millionaire’s hunting excursions led by “‘Old Pete’ Morgan, native black guide” during which “negro beaters” flushed birds from the brush so that Coolidge and Coffin could easily shoot their prey.⁴ Reporters wrote about Mrs. Coolidge’s attempts to befriend the island’s black children so that she could record them with her motion picture camera.⁵ And several papers featured the “sea island rodeo” that the island’s blacks performed on the beach to amuse the president and his entourage as one of the trip’s highlights. Articles announced that during the rodeo “excited negroes,” “the youthful descendants of African slaves” rode wild steers “bareback” on the beach, while “groups of negro girls . . . vied with each other in singing the spirituals of their race and gospel hymns.”⁶ Together, these brief descriptions presented Sapelo Islanders as a unique population of simple and exotic southern black folk.

It is no surprise that Howard Coffin, who loved slave songs, arranged for Sapelo Islanders to sing for his guests.⁷ In 1928, many Americans believed that primitive musical exuberance was a distinct racial trait bequeathed to American blacks by their African ancestors. All of the newspapers that reported on Coolidge’s trip wrote about Sapelo’s singing blacks: they sang for the president after a luncheon, they sang at the rodeo, they sang “work-songs” that “roused the President before 6 o’clock,” and they sang for “the President’s entertainment while a speaking motion picture film was made.”⁸ Surely, many of the Islanders who performed for Coolidge and his entourage were pleased to have the president in the audience of onlookers observing their craft, but their willingness to perform should not be interpreted as a sign that they were content with Coffin’s domination and impressed by his wealth, status, and power. In fact, evidence of their discontent can be found in the same musical tradition that was exploited during Coolidge’s visit. “Pay Me Money Down” was a popular work song among coastal Georgia blacks by the 1920s.⁹ The song’s refrain, “Pay me, Oh pay me, Pay me or go to jail,” echoed the anxieties that blacks who “owed” debts to wealthy whites suffered. Sapelo Islanders added a very telling verse to the work song as it traveled throughout the region: “Wish’t I was Mr. Coffin’s son . . . Stay in the house an’ drink good rum.” Blacks on nearby St. Simon’s Island contributed a verse that featured their “big boss.” “Wish’t I Mr. Foster’s son . . . I’d sit on the bank an’ see the work done.”¹⁰ These lyrics are a clear critique of the racial hierarchy that limited their life chances. When Islanders sang that they wished they were Coffin’s or Foster’s son, they were acknowledging freedoms, wealth, luxuries, and power that Jim Crow denied them; they were articulating their frustration with the social structure that forced them into grueling work routines and debt that threatened their freedom.¹¹

Unquestionably, Sapelo’s singers entertained the president in part, because they had to, but a larger question looms. Why did the reporters and filmmakers who accompanied the president find them so intriguing? Idealized romantic southern plantation scenes featuring happy blacks—like the ones described in “My Old Kentucky Home” verses—were familiar by 1928.¹² This trope could have easily encouraged the reporters and filmmakers in the president’s entourage to paint Sapelo Islanders as essential accessories to Coffin’s plantation oasis. But by 1928, the American cultural landscape was overflowing with new stories about black southerners like Sapelo Islanders that could have easily contributed to Coffin’s guests’ fascination with the black people who lived on the island. In fact, one white fiction writer’s stories about blacks who lived on a coastal plantation in the Low Country were so popular that she emerged as the first southern writer to win a Pulitzer Prize. The same year that Coolidge visited Sapelo, Julia Peterkin’s third book featuring “Gullah” characters—Scarlet Sister Mary (1928)—was published. The book was a best seller by June 1929, and a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel a few months later. In as much as Julia Peterkin’s novels offered the nation a way to imagine southern blacks like Sapelo Islanders—populations who became known as “Gullah folk”—the stories that she wrote gained popularity partly because of larger shifts in the way that Africanness, blackness, and southernness were imagined.

The 1920s and 1930s marked major transitions in America’s racial landscape. Racial segregation was at an all-time high, but the post–World War I era was also witness to a variety of countervailing cultural influences. The period saw the mass migration of southern blacks to northern cities; a shift from Victorianism to modernism; and heightened exploration of black spaces encouraged by the New Negro Black Arts movement. These phenomena cultivated fantasies among white and black Americans about blacks and their Africanness, justified racism, encouraged exoticism, spurred American modernists, and were central to the black arts movement. Understanding these trends and examining Julia Peterkin’s reintroduction of Gullah folk within the context of the period is crucial in order to make sense of Sapelo Islanders’ emergence as a population whose culture was worthy of collection, documentation, examination, and exploitation.

Julia Peterkin Introduces Gullah Folk to the Nation

No one researcher or writer did more to push “Gullah folk” to the center of the nation’s consciousness during the 1920s and 1930s than Julia Mood Peterkin. She was born on Halloween in 1880 in Laurens, South Carolina, and was raised by her father, who was a doctor, and her black nurse Maum Patsy, after her mother died.¹³ It was Maum Patsy who taught Peterkin how to speak “Gullah” and ignited in her a spark of curiosity about the inner world of the blacks around her.¹⁴ After she graduated from Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and married William George Peterkin a short time after in 1903, she became the mistress of her husband’s Lang Syne plantation.¹⁵ There, she transformed her fantasies about the five hundred blacks who lived and worked on their two-thousand-acre plantation into characters in the fictional works that made her a historic literary figure.¹⁶

Playing the role of a caged, delicate plantation mistress did not satisfy Julia Peterkin. For twenty years she focused her energies on becoming a good plantation mistress, which involved acquainting herself with the life habits of the black people who worked for her.¹⁷ The task left her empty. When she was forty years old, she found herself trying to fill the void that the “stillness” of country life left her nursing with piano lessons.¹⁸ But busying herself with piano did not fill the void because she was not good at it. She was, however, good at telling her instructor Henry Bellamann—the dean of the School of Fine Arts—stories about her black charges at Lang Syne. Her stories were so entertaining that Bellamann decided to teach her how to write instead of how to play chords.¹⁹ And right away she found relief from the gnawing abyss. The time that she spent with Bellamann and his aspiring bohemian friends sealed Peterkin’s commitment to trying her hand at writing stories.²⁰ Giving vent, in writing, to the agonies of decades of plantation life, was cathartic. Peterkin explained that “Among the Negroes” on Lang Syne she “saw sickness and death and superstition and frenzy and desire,” her eyes looked “on horror and misery,” and “the things stayed with” her and she “had to get rid of them.”²¹ Believing that she had penetrated the veil that separated white life from black life in the South, and convinced that she could channel black people’s thoughts and emotions, Peterkin wrote their stories, and literally took on their voice (her short stories and novels were all composed using what she understood to be an authentic Gullah dialect).

The tales that Peterkin wrote about the blacks who lived on the fictional “Blue Brook Plantation” in Green Thursday (1924), Black April (1927), Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), Bright Skin (1932), and—her attempt at ethnography—Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933) codified the cultural world of Gullah folk. The Gullahs of Blue Brook were imaginary composites of the blacks she encountered on Lang Syne and on Murrells Inlet and Waccamaw Neck—the South Carolina seaside communities where she spent her summers.²² Peterkin’s Gullah folk were isolated from the outside world and had a unique connection to their African ancestors that she described in her books: “The black people who live in the Quarters at Blue Brook Plantation believe they are far the best black people living on the whole ‘Neck’. . . . They are no Guinea negroes . . . or Dinkas. . . . They are Gullahs with tall straight bodies, and high heads filed with sense.”²³ Blue Brook’s Gullahs were artifacts of the antebellum era; they remained on the old plantation and worked its soil long after their ancestors’ masters and their white descendants had abandoned the “big house” and moved on. Suspicious of modernity and opposed to “Book-learning” because it “takes people’s minds off more important things,” Peterkin’s Gullah folk consumed themselves with work, pleasure, and daily survival.²⁴ The main characters in Peterkin’s stories struggled through epic personal conflicts (love, death, sickness, and loss). But their lives were ruled by supernatural phenomena: “God” or “conjure” (voodoo) was responsible for everything that happened to them. Blue Brook folk like Killdee and Rose in Green Thursday, Si May-e in Scarlet Sister Mary, and characters such as Maum Hannah (an elderly midwife) and Old Daddy Cudjoe (the plantation’s conjure man) who appeared in several Peterkin stories, navigated life’s challenges by working with or struggling against prevailing supernatural forces. Peterkin’s Gullah can be found performing ring sh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Prologue: The Misremembered Past
• Chapter 1. From Wild Savages to Beloved Primitives: Gullah Folk Take Center Stage
• Chapter 2. The 1920s and 1930s Voodoo Craze: African Survivals in American Popular Culture and the Ivory Tower
• Chapter 3. Hunting Survivals: W. Robert Moore, Lydia Parrish, and Lorenzo D. Turner Discover Gullah Folk on Sapelo Island
• Chapter 4. Drums and Shadows: The Federal Writers’ Project, Sapelo Islanders, and the Specter of African Superstitions on Georgia’s Coast
• Chapter 5. Reworking Roots: Black Women Writers, the Sapelo Interviews in Drums and Shadows, and the Making of a New Gullah Folk
• Chapter 6. Gone but Not Forgotten: Sapelo’s Vanishing Folk and the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor
• Epilogue: From African Survivals to the Fight for Survival
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index