Johns Island is one of South Carolina's sea islands, home to a weather system--of sun, heat, and rain--that grew in successive turns, the world's most sought after rice, cotton, tea, and now vegaetables (lettuce, tomatoes, string beans). That weather brutalized the people who worded under its cruel, blazing heat, its relentless sun, enduring its swarms of gnats, wasps, and mosquitoes, survining its crawling ants, weevils, snakes. the men and women who walked through its brairs, thornes, and marshes and bogs. From its old-growth forests, African slaves carved out and build America's most productive plantations. This large population of Africans, isolated by water, renewed by birth and by Africans imported from the Atlantic slave trade, created the most unique culture and language of America's slaveholding communities, a culture and language known as Gullah.

These sea islands and its Gullah language is more than a sing-song thythm of melodies that delight a visitor's ear. Gullah is more than the satisfying taste of a hot okra soup, or the now popular dish of shrimp and grits. These islands and its language and culture is a world unseen,a asystem of sensing, experiencing, thinking about, and celebrating living with and in this world. It is expressed and identified as a daily system of manners, speech, and cooking and music. It is also a system of medicine and healing, of star glazing, of neogotiation and persausion, of moral decisions It is a system shaped particularly by Maerican slavery, but has ancient roots.

It is a wisdom tradition that adapted itself to Christianity, taking root in the tradition of prayer.

Prayer celebrations were imprtant forms of worship on Johns and the other sea islands which extend to the coast of Georgia. These gatherings took near the edges of the forests and swamps, at nights, the crowds abutting the fields. Steamy hot in the summers, the chill of ice needles blowing in the winter's wind, in every season, the moonlight fell among those who prayed. Later, they prayed in praise houses, small, boarded structures where the very intimacy of the prayer pointed to the immediate: praise God, invoke his preseence, petition his help, seek his providence.  Gather his strength and mercy, and share the light of his love.