Here's the second book opf our Gullah adventure! New trials and twists for our named one, as she and the Gullah find their way along the precipices of life. But sure to check out her website at wonderchild.blog-city.com to stay current with all of her adventures!

Book Two promises to apply the ideas and world view of the Gullah community to the national and international setting, laying out its challenges and its responses. The details are compelling! Don't forget to tell us what you think! You are a part of the community!We write for you--tell us how we are doing!

Book Two

Prologue

Wisdom 7:6, 7,10-21
There is for all mankind one entrance into life, and a common departure. Therefore I prayed, and understanding was given me;

I called on God, and the spirit of wisdom came to me.

Those who get it obtain friendship with God,

Commended for the gifts that come from instruction.

May God grant that I speak with judgment and have thought worthy of what I have received, for he is the guide even of wisdom and the corrector of the wise?
For both our words and we are in his hand, as are all understanding and skill in crafts.

 For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, to know the structure of the world
and the activity of the elements;
the beginning and end and middle of times,
the alternations of the solstices and the changes of the seasons,
 the natures of animals and the tempers of wild beasts,
the powers of spirits and the reasonings of men,
the varieties of plants and the virtues of roots;

Some things are secret I have learned and some are plain . . .

Revelation 21:3-4, 7

See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them as their God;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away."

 
Those who overcome will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.

By Henry Timrod, born in Charleston, 1829, from his poem, “The Lily Confidante”:

Like the dewdrop in my bosom,

Be thy guileless language, youth;

Falsehood buyeth falsehood only,

Truth must purchase truth.

"As thou talkest at the fireside,

With the little children by --

As thou prayest in the darkness,

When thy God is nigh --  

"With a speech as chaste and gentle,

And such meanings as become

Ear of child, or ear of angel,

Speak, or be thou dumb.

"Woo her thus, and she shall give thee

Of her heart the sinless whole,

All the girl within her bosom,
And her woman's soul."

Damali Marie Chou Rhett

At first Damali’s light blended in with the regular days. A Yoruba student was among those who first felt a sign for this infant born during the storming snow. One day, I gathered up a note and a poem he wrote and left in my mailbox at Howard among the campus notices. "Children are the profit of the world," he wrote in Yoruba, and congratulated me. He offered traditional praise poem. Did he know the deeper echo, underlying Gullah history?

 By three months, everybody cradled her and she ended up aisles from us at Don Cherry's loft concert in DC. Cherry had just returned from years of study with master musicians in West and Southern Africa, and was teaching a master class. He was playing an African lullaby on piano, a beautiful, haunting memory, for the local musicians and the thirty or so of us in the audience.

During her toddler years, she was always the target of weekend photographers at various street fairs at Adams Morgan photographed her dancing, lifting a drink, biting into an international dish, basking in her own charisma. On Sundays, we walked to Heller's. We could see the crowds from the window with string-tied boxes of pastries. I always managed to get the Hispanic woman who could ring the math totals in her mind no matter what the order; it became a game between us, between sly, laughing smiles.

 Later, when her hometown of Washington, D.C.  was the murder capital of the United States--so busy and furious that the Army assigned surgeons to local hospitals where the trauma conditions, gunshots, and types of wounds exceeded those seen and treated in combat--she traveled home alone after school, carrying only a single referee’s whistle on a nylon rope around her neck.

 If the risks seem unnecessarily high—remember the Army says the city created warlike conditions--it wasn't. Daytime travels across D.C. seldom resulted in death, and the many child nappings that were going on were in neighborhoods with long walks and abandoned buildings on devastated blocks. Our neighborhood was a small working class enclave, with everyone knowing each other by name, visiting often in each other’s homes, and meeting at Mr. Al's, who ran the busy corner store, the center of opinion and information for the community. The frantic fears that the killings and child nappings unleashed didn't disturb the good order of our neighborhood, until one day after a car caught on fire, a body of a young male was found in the car parked behind the Catholic school, at the foot of the stairs on the hill. The next month, one block over, one morning a body was found on the front steps of the school, but the janitors managed to hose away the bloodstains before the children came in their uniforms.

 But Damali was cross-town, in a public school system ranked 51^st in the U.S., at DC's test leader, the Phoebe Hearst School, an elementary school tucked away behind Sidwell Friends, on a quiet street next to a park. She lived in two houses. She missed the murders and the blood. She was always a step ahead, never as vunerable as her father, never as rambling as her mother. The lantern children sometimes go soft, glow lightly and gently in the veiled darkness, lower their power to stay out of the glare of reality, in order to survive. 

The light: Surrounds. Finds. Surveys. Discovers. Protects. Guides. Illuminates. Connects. Embraces. The light analyzes, orders, directs, reveals, and celebrates.

The light casts its glow on human terrain, cataloguing and interpreting our experiences, making history, showing us how to keep it with us, changing it into the eternal past. The light resolves and struggles against injustice, bringing the text to fulfillment. The light illuminates the pain of our wrongdoing. The Light remains us of suffering: self-inflicted, acted out, transferred, excused--forgiven. In the arts, the light celebrates and expresses the range and meaning of emotions with love being supreme.

Rhythm as Sacred Achieves

The lantern children use music as light. Among the Gullah, the earliest of light-filled music was the spiritual. Born quietly in Gullah communities, the spirituals blossomed quickly with their physical, emotional, and spiritual messages and meditations. Spirituals were a musical diary of the slaves’ aches, pains, and healing balm. They put into song the details of the slave’s working day.  A Union colonel, Thomas Wentworth Higginson (a Unitarian minister who later edited the work of Emily Dickinson) wrote about the songs of the Gullah soldiers who made up the regiment under his command in Hilton Head, SC during the Civil War:

"The favorite song in camp was the following, sung with no accompaniment but the measured clapping of hands and the clatter of many feet. It was sung perhaps twice as often as any other. This was partly due to the fact that it properly consisted of a chorus alone, with which the verses of other songs might be combined at random.

I. HOLD YOUR LIGHT.

"Hold your light, Brudder Robert,
Hold your light, Hold your light on Canaan's shore.

"What make ole Satan for follow me so?
Satan ain't got notin' for do wid me.
Hold your light, Hold your light, Hold your light on Canaan's shore."

This would be sung for half an hour at a time, perhaps, each person present being named in turn."

This song expresses the evidence of things unseen. While we live, Canaan is hidden—it is reachable only in the passage of death. And our light, the light of inner faith, the selfless presence that allows the God of Love to imbue the named ones with tgifts of grace which are a part of the mysteries of the holy light--to hold on to this light of the Master involves, ironically, letting go. 

The lantern children don’t carry much baggage around. They often cleanse and renew with great facility. Songs are a part of the light, the renewal, the memory, the cleaning. The light has its own special senses of touch and sound. Higginson affirms this, writing about the day of jubilee, the first celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation—the very first in the U.S.—at Hilton Head: “The life of the whole day was in those unknown people's song. Art could not have dreamed of a tribute to the day of jubilee that should be so affecting; history will not believe it . . .”

The Charleston Waterfront, circa 1920

Mary Moran and the women in her family kept alive one of the most remarkable signs of the light in song. Her mother, Amelia Dawley, recorded a five-line Mende song from Sierra Leone, for Lorenzo D. Turner in 1932. A family of Gullah women from the Georgia coast taught and sang this song to the family’s children for more than two hundred years! Here is the song in English translation:

Everyone come together, let us work hard;
 The grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace.
Everyone come together, let us work hard;
     the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be at peace at once.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention,
     like a firing gun.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention,
     oh elders, oh heads of the family.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention,
 like a distant drum beat.

A local reporter, Herb Frazier wrote about the song’s survival. Herb Frazier witnessed the return of Mary Moran and eleven members of her family to Sierra Leone. There, the song of the Moran family led helicopter trip to a Mende village of rice farms in the country’s interior. This farming village had been burned and destroyed during the 1992 Civil War. But a woman of the village, Baindu Jabati, who had been captured during the war and almost killed, knew the song. Her grandmother taught it to her. Frazier witnessed these two women—one African, one American—reuniting to sing this song they shared, though separated for more than two hundred years, two continents apart. When the singing began, Moran’s family sang it with the women of the village, in the original Mende tongue.

One of Damali’s most memorable early signs was Damali making her bed one winter Saturday; listening to Coltrane's "My Favorite Things." She couldn’t have been more than four or five.

At four, on the plane trips to grandparents, traveling as an unescorted minor with a change of planes, she never failed to ask for a window seat.

At eight, she was authorizing security clearances for the Legislative Black Caucus Weekend. Also by eight, spices were her specialty and cooking was her solstice for all.

As a fifth grader, she lead all the city's six graders in the Math counts contest, and finished in the VA-DC-MD regional top ten.

Before and after school, she worked as a crossing guard at one of the city’s busiest intersections. A block off Wisconsin Avenue at a cross street with quick stops and people committing California rolls all afternoon in their hurry to get nowhere or home. She smiled as each group of first, second, third, or fourth graders gathered to a full stop, awaited her signal as she darted into traffic with her reflector belt and hand help stop sign, nodding when it was safe for the little ones to cross. The groups crossed, safe, secure, over and over, for the 180 days of school. And her poster won the safety contest, too. It was a bit disconcerting, to watch her with only a belt and a sign, a fierce pride and careful timing tackle the multitude of drivers in the world's most powerful city. She seemed so skinny and frail. Yet as I watched (which was seldom, I could not bear it often), she had a laser's edge about her work--keen, no second guesses, each stop fresh, marked by the rhythm of small feet set toward learning or home.

The praise house was a Gullah institution that echoed with the rhythm of learning feet in worship. Here the shuffle steps and handclaps collectively known as the shout came to life on the boards, as the praise house became the drum. The praise house was the dwelling house of the living spirit, invoked and touched by the music offered by celebrants whose tradition depended solely on its practice. Like so many Gullah experiences.  It is without theory or description, without instruction except by participation, without insight except by experience. It is articulated in the songs it offers in praise. In the Carolina lowcountry, a few of these praise houses still stand.

 
St. Helena’s Praise House

By junior high, Damali had a band of her own, two preschoolers from a family in the neighborhood to play with and tutor. She walked them around the block in the afternoons, reviewed primary colors, and read stories. A Mother’s Helper, she answered questions and fixed them snacks. She was a big sister, welcome in this house where the mother was a lawyer, and the family accepted a multi-ethnic relationship.

I refer to myself as pilgrim. I journey the earth as its devotee, earnestly visiting out of my space and place to share in the bounded joy of others as they eat, worship, and play. I have become close to the ground, smelling its dry thin dust stirred by the breezes, inhaling its rich wet loam as the rainfall pelts its surfaces, puddles, and twists in.

But as a child, I sought the sky. I loved to play moonlight games with friends. We chanted songs with rhythms under the indigo sky. We ran, laughing in the darkness, learning its ways.

Memory was for slipping the fixed, for guideways across the boundaries, for embedding choices. Memory was like digging in the dirt, finding onyx waiting to be polished and carved.

Memory touched the feet of Gullah dancers in Harlem at a Westside club called the Jungle in the 1920’s, where founder of the stride piano style, the famed James P. Johnson, played for weekend crowds. These dancers, many of them dock workers from the Carolina lowcountry, had a strange way of marking time with their feet. They would swing their feet in a circular step, syncopating the rhythm, and moving their bodies in counterpoint. Johnson polished this rhythm and composed eight Charleston” rags” to fit the steps he saw—his music admittedly followed their feet! His compositions carved out in sound the rhythms they were making with their dance steps.

One of these Charleston rags was used in the musical, “Running Wild,” in 1923, and created an unmatched dance craze. The “Charleston” was legendary in the 1920’s. A Massachusetts dance hall collapsed from the rhythm set by its dancers, injuring fifty people. The poet, James Weldon Johnson, said the dancers in the show “did not depend wholly on the orchestra--an extraordinary jazz band-- but had the major part of the chorus supplement it with hand and foot patting. The effect was electrical and contagious. It was the best demonstration of beating out complex rhythms I have ever witnessed; and, I do not believe New York ever before witnessed anything of just its sort.”

The piano piece, “The Carolina Shout,” composed by Johnson was a standard for all pianists of the day. Duke Ellington said it was the cutting piece used to display virtuoso skill. Charleston’s Jenkins Orphanage Band was the first American band to display their jazz skills in Europe, traveling to England in 1896. The listening crowds blocked London’s streets.

That’s how Gullah history gets twisted up. Folks minds “running wild.” And the answer they looking for right before them. When the Charleston became a big deal, then its origin became a big deal. When it gets big, people want to take it away from the little man. They create their own myth, which by its denial shows their contempt. Scholars suggested the dance began in the West Indies. Others declared it to be a traditional African step. Where do correct ideas come from? They don’t fall from the sky. They aren’t innate in the mind. They follow social practice.  Everybody overlook the man that wrote the music. Ignore what he say. And the dancers, too. Jazz begins in Charleston. They ignore that too.

Making the leap to another time, another Gullah song deserves a valued place in the annals of American independence. When William Moultrie returned to his plantation after leading 900 men to the first victory of the Revolutionary War at Sullivan’s Island, defeating the “seemingly invincible” British Navy and Infantry, 200 Gullah men surrounded him as he arrived, singing an African war song, and performed a warrior’s dance in celebration.

Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel, whose report we depend on, says, as these Gullah men honored him, Moultrie cried like a child.

Handmade Gullah Doll (circa 1930’s), in the collection of the Middle Passage Museum, Gulfport, MS

The Four Pillars

The Gullah community recognizes four pillars as the foundation of human community: family, work, education, and faith. The four pillars of family, work, education, and faith bind the community and its people into a tapestry of life that covers every field and way. These four pillars are deeply embedded into the bedrock of life, fed and nourished by the living waters. They are the guideposts for the Gullah community’s crossings and journeys. These pillars are the beacons of progress. For years, the oral tradition embraced the Gullah ways. The oral tradition hid the secrets of Gullah resistance; it protected the ways of Gullah success. The four pillars were sturdy but silent. Without essays, written documents, or explanations, the Gullah philosophy, worldview, and modes of understanding and way-making flourished and nurtured, as Tao does, without a name.

A Gullah crew, working on rice trunks

Lord lend me your walking shoe as I cross the lonesome valley. Walk with me children, and see a great day when the stars refuse to shine, what shall I do, when I done done what you tell me to do? Set the welcome table for those who came over in the storm? For in the dungeon, I asked who shall be first and who shall be last? I asked my Lord to help me if he please, praying all day and night, down on my bended knees. Looking back in wonder, my soul rises and roams, seeking a city, don’t you see, where I a poor pilgrim can call heaven my home. There I gotta house what ain’t make with hands. So I'm pressing on, pressing on--mother gone, father gone, and running on to see what I can see. What is this that won't let me hold my peace? Good news? The chariot's coming? Better draw level in the lowlands. Better make it in. 

Winnowing rice, circa 1911

These pillars enable the beloved to overcome the death of its people and the demolition of its ideas. These four pillars enabled the Gullah community to withstand the most egregious slaps and raps towards its character and humanity.

The four pillars of the Gullah community have survived the skeptics' debates about the Dogon's knowledge of unseen stars and planets in the heavens, the decrees of the Church denying the existence in the Gullah of their souls. They have survived the journey through the Middle Passage in which the wholesale murders of the Gullah were merely a cargo loss. They have survived the measurement of the skulls of Gullah people as scientific proof of their inferiority, school spankings for speaking Gullah language, and genocide by their own brothers and sisters who forgot the First Principles.

In Charleston, the four pillars survived the treadmill and its spiked steps, the bruises of the tightening rope, the sting and searing bite of the lash, the singe and bubbling blisters of the fire when the elite slaves who were the cooks (and principally females) were accused of unwitnessed arson, found guilty, and burned alive.

Gullah Culture has four Pillars:  work and family, education
and faith

 Why “tek cyear ob“ the story of the Gullah people?  The National Trust for Historic Preservation listed Gullah culture in 2005 as one the nation’s ten endangered landmarks. This was the first listing of a human cultural preserve rather than a physical site. Gullah culture joined Vermont in the nation’s top ten. (Vermont is in danger of being overrun by giant Wal-marts; its towns, way of life, and the beauty of its physical scale destroyed.) But Gullah is woefully misunderstood. Outsiders are still trying to be its masters. Buying its land, changing its communities, altering its image through a strategy of romantic myth and and benign neglect. The current descriptions suggest the Gullah are quaint, local, limited, isolated, closed, slow and shut away, rigid, or a surviving anachronism. The more powerful fact is that the Gullah are—and always have been--dynamic, powerful, visionary, interrelated, extraordinarily creative, secretive, progressive, multi-talented, international, and deeply connected to the grace of God and his gifts.

A member of the Yanomani community from Brazil, the last pre-industrial people living in Brazil’s rain forest, describes the need to rethink Gullah, its beliefs, forces, proofs, methods, history, communities, talents, individuals, larger connections, and worldview:

“Why do we want to shape our own image?,” a griot of the Yanomami, Brazil’s last natives of the rain forest asked. “Because you don’t know our forest and houses. You don’t understand our words. We could end up disappearing before your very eyes without you realizing it. (Emphasis mine.) That’s why, if we remain forgotten by you, hidden like the turtle of the forest, we will suffer.”

Blindness and invisibleness--ignorance and destruction—benign intentions--are what the Yanomani—and the Gullah—face. Light is the tool that animates the living. Light combats neglect and indifference. Light is a symbol for wisdom. It represents goodness, power and knowledge, truth. As its highest expression, the Gullah believe man and women are a reflection of divine being--a reflection of the divine light whose source is the invisible triune God.

For a long time, the Gullah people were "invisible" (a la Ellison) because their vision shines brightly through their works rather than their name. The Gullah believed in blending in rather than standing out. They achieved goals without explaining their methods. Now the lantern children must turn the light on Gullah culture itself, to preserve and renew it. Gullah is under attack. It could end up disappearing before your very eyes without you realizing it.

The African Presence

As it preserves its American roots, the Gullah lantern also shines on its African roots, to reveal the origin of way of its thinking, its institutions, its history, its patterns and responses, its transformed faith.

Charleston’s Henry Brown’s grandparents were born in Africa. Born in 1857 a slave, Henry Brown talked to Augustus Ladson about his African-born grandparents in the 1930’s as a part of the WPA Writers Project to interview ex-slaves.

 “I was nicknamed during the days of slavery, they called me Toby,” Brown says. “My grand pa and grand ma on my pa side come right from Africa. They tell us how they was stolen and brought here. They was anchored on Sullivan’s Island w’ere they been feed like dogs. A big pot was use’ for cooking. Everybody went to the pot with the han’s an’ all eat from the pot.”

Anna Scott, from Dove City, SC, described her return to Africa. She returned with her parents as a part of the American recolonization movement. She interviewed at age 91. The interviewer recorded her story in third person.

“The entire family joined an expedition to West Africa. There were 650 in the expedition, and it left in 1867. Anna’s stepfather (her father had been the owner of an adjourning plantation, her mother part Cherokee) Elias Mumford settled in Harper Cape, and immediately began an industry that was to prove lucrative. Oysters were “large as saucers’ and these were gathered, and the shells burned to extract lime. Mixed with native clay, her father made brick. He also cut trees for lumber. He constructed houses. One brought him $1100. He also cashed checks for the missionaries at a discount and added to his wealth. After eight years, her family returned to America, and she purchased a house with the money left from her father’s African transactions.”

Damali was the chair for the Delta's 2003 Kwanzaa program at the Contee Cullen Library, a city branch in Harlem. How uncanny is her sense of tradition! The Harlem branch is named for a distinguished poet of the Harlem Renaissance, an academic poet who surveyed racial themes, a poet who married W. E. B. Dubois' daughter in the wedding of Harlem society. Countee Cullen was also the branch where an unidentified Langston Hughes read to Toni Cade Bambara as a child. Hughes often wrote of Africa.

As the proverb says, "All nations are proud when their kin thrive."

Soldiers in Freedom’s Army

The camera has marginalized the old class of lantern children who were global trailblazers. Now the path to the light is the role of celebrity. The camera is an enemy, an attack weapon of massive destruction whose target is intelligence. It is a passive neutron bomb leaving only the body intact, with reason or conscience. The bloody genocide in the Sudan is no longer talked about in barbershops, or shared on the playgrounds or the school steps, places where the style of language and thought was once blunt and vital without false hope or false images or false bravado.

The old Gullah poetry was freedom-filled and real. From the Baraka/Neal anthology, Black Fire:

We will not die for nothing.
Not anymore.
Our deaths shall be noisy and beautiful to the swing.
And deep
Evenly spread all over; without a wrinkle or a tear.
We shall die properly, all at once!
....
We shall go spirits first,

Or:

Get this now!
Listen to the stomp and thunder of the long trip home
Here we come down our own uterus
Paid in cash.
No more lay-ways.

Its memory spilled into the world as poetry. And set up a pattern of call and response.  A dialectic of obligation. Cato, or perhaps, Jemmy, first used this pattern.  Standing in a field near the Stono River, 12 miles south of Charleston early Sunday morning, September 9, 1739, and Cato issues a call, holding a pennant and playing a single drum. Soon 20 men showed up, all Angolans (“Gullah”). The first recorded Gullah armed resistance to slavery began. The assembled slaves attacked Hutcheson's store at the Stono River bridge. They killed two storekeepers, capturing the store’s supply of guns and powder.  Gathering as many as a hundred recruits as they moved south, they marched toward St. Augustine, killing slave masters, but sparing an innkeeper who treated his slaves humanely. The Stono Rebellion was the largest slave uprising in the Colonies prior to the American Revolution.

Later, the colony’s Governor later made this report to London: 

I beg leave to lay before your Lordships an account of our Affairs, first in regard to the Desertion of our Negroes . . . On the 9th of September last at Night a great Number of Negroes Arose in Rebellion, broke open a Store where they got arms, killed twenty one White Persons, and were marching the next morning in a Daring manner out of the Province, killing all they met and burning several Houses as they passed along the Road. I was returning from Granville County with four Gentlemen and met these Rebels at eleven o'clock in the forenoon and fortunately deserned the approaching danger time enough to avoid it. 

And from the records of the South Carolina House of Commons:

In September, 1739, our slaves made an insurrection at Stono, in the heart of our settlements, not twenty miles from Charles Town, in which they massacred twenty-three whites, after the most cruel and barbarous manner to be conceived; and having got arms and ammunition out of a store, they bent their course to the southward, burning all the houses on the road.

   In 1740, The South Carolina colonial assembly passed a law forbidding the playing of drums by Africans. Compelled to rely on just their voice, with only their hands and feet to add rhythm, the Gullah became world’s greatest singers. Their signature style spread across the world, beyond musical boundaries. The Gullah freed the voice to sing the rhythms of the drum. The shaking of the body, clapping of the hands--the twist and kick of the feet--brought to life rhythms that had been silenced. The voice was free, even if the slave was not. So the archives added fills, vamps, chases, ostinatos, calls, changed the melody, altered harmony, emphasized improvisation and “slipped the yoke.” 

Without drums or hymns, sometimes before July of 1822, Denmark Vesey, a carpenter, seaman, and linguist, inspired by Joshua 21, spoke with Peter Poyas, Ned and Rolla Bennett (slaves of the Governor), and Gullah Jack Pritchard. With Vesey as leader, they agreed to organize the largest resistance to slavery in American history. By relegating military tasks to twelve of the larger African ethnic groups, Vesey hoped for great success. His operation involved 12,000 Africans and country-born. Vesey’s plan sought to capture a flotilla of ships and sail to Haiti. Despite tight discipline, the plan unraveled. After brief trials, 35 Africans, including all those named, were hanged. Their graves lie unmarked in the Charleston marsh.

The Business of the Passage

Henry Laurens’ handwritten ledger, 1764

Charlestonian and Hugenot, Henry Laurens was the largest American broker and agent who ever participated in the African slave trade. His economic decision to buy and sell human beings for fees and profit was a major factor in the development of Gullah culture. It made him the richest man in America.

Laurens’ letters share