ST. HELENA ISLAND, S.C. (AP) — Minnie “Gracie” Gadson claps her hands and stomps her feet against the floorboards, lifting her voice in a song passed down from her enslaved ancestors who were forced to work the cotton and rice plantations of the South Carolina Sea Islands.
It’s a Gullah spiritual, and the 78-year-old singer is one of a growing group of artists and scholars trying to preserve these sacred songs and their Gullah Geechee culture for future generations.
“I have a passion to sing these songs,” Gadson said.
On a recent summer day, her voice rang out inside Coffin Point Praise House. It’s one of three remaining wooden structures on St. Helena Island that once served as a place of worship for the enslaved, and later, for generations of free Black Americans.
Gadson grew up singing in these praise houses. Today, as a Voices of Gullah member, she travels the U.S. with others in their 70s and 80s singing in the Gullah Creole language that has West African roots.
“This Gullah Geechee thing is what connects us all across the African diaspora because Gullah Geechee is the blending of all of these cultures that came together during that terrible time in our history called the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” said Anita Singleton-Prather, who recently performed and directed a play about Gullah history.
The show highlighted Gullah contributions during the American Revolution, including rice farming and indigo dying expertise. At the theater entrance, vendors offered Gullah rice dishes and demonstrated how to weave sweetgrass into baskets.
More than 5,000 descendants of enslaved plantation workers are estimated to live on St. Helena Island, the largest Gullah community on the South Carolina coast where respect for tradition and deep cultural roots persists.
“A lot of our songs were coded, and this language is a language of survival, a language of resilience, a language of tenacity,” Singleton-Prather said, adding that despite slavery’s brutality, the Gullah people were able to thrive, “giving our children a legacy — not a legacy of shame and victimization, but a legacy of strength and resilience.”
Discovering Gullah culture and the roots of Kumbaya
Gullah culture includes art forms, language and food by the descendants of West Africans who have lived on the coasts of the Carolinas, Florida and Georgia since slavery.
“It’s important to preserve the Gullah culture, mainly because it informs us all, African Americans, where they come from and that it’s still here,” said Eric Crawford, author of “Gullah Spirituals: The Sound of Freedom and Protest in the South Carolina Sea Islands.”
For most of his life, he hadn’t heard the word Gullah. That changed in 2007 with a student’s master’s thesis about Gullah culture in public schools.
“As I began to investigate it, I began to understand that ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,’ ‘Roll Jordan Roll,’ ‘Kumbaya!’ — all these iconic songs came from this area,” he said.
Versions of these songs, he said, can be traced back to the 19th century when “Slave Songs of the United States,” the first book of African American spirituals, was recorded on St. Helena Island.
“And so my question was: ‘These songs that trace back to the 1800s — were they still being done over 150 years later?’”
He was so curious that he traveled to St. Helena, where he met the singers and began recording their music.
“These songs became pivotal,” Crawford said, sitting on the original wooden pews of the island’s Mary Jenkins Praise House. “They were forced to go to their owners’ church and stay in the balcony. But then in the evening, typically on Sunday evenings, Tuesday and Thursday, they had this space by themselves, away from the watchful eye of the owners, and they could engage in their own songs.”
At the praise houses, he said, they connected with their ancestors following West and Central African practices. Prayers and song would end with a counterclockwise dance and a “ring shout” — a rare outlet of joy for the enslaved.
These days the singers no longer rise to do the ring shout due to their age. But at a recent concert they clapped their hands in one rhythm, stomped the floor in another and swayed, singing at the island’s Brick Baptist Church.
“These singers are as close as we would ever come to how the enslaved sang these songs,” Crawford said. “That authenticity — you just cannot duplicate that.”
The Voices of Gullah goes global
He began to take the singers on tour in 2014. Since then, they’ve performed across the U.S. as well as in Belize and Mexico.
The touring band’s members include Gadson; 89-year-old Rosa Murray; 87-year-old Joe Murray; and their son, Charles “Jojo” Brown.
“I’m gonna continue doing it until I can’t do it no more, and hope that younger people will come in, others younger than me, to keep it going,” said Brown who, at 71, is affectionally called the “baby.”
His mother agrees. Sitting in her living room, surrounded by framed photos of dozens of grandchildren, she said she’ll continue singing for them.
“I hope and pray one or two of them will fall in my footsteps,” she said. “I’m leaving a legacy for them to do what I’m doing for the Lord.”
Other community members share that mission to teach future generations.
The Gullah Heritage Trails Tours take visitors through historic neighborhoods surrounded by beaches, wealthy vacation homes and golf resorts on Hilton Head Island. The tours were started by a family of 12 brothers and sisters in 1996.
“We thought it was important for people to know that Gullah people live on this island,” said Emory Campbell, 82, who helped translate the New Testament into Gullah and for decades led the respected Penn Center, one of the country’s first schools for freed slaves.
“If we don’t know who we are, we’re lost,” said Marlena Smalls, a singer and actor who for decades has been performing adaptations of Gullah spirituals for new audiences and founded the popular Gullah Festival. Her work even appeared on an SAT question about Gullah culture.
“I want to know who I am. And I want my children to know who they are and their children to know who they are. That’s why it’s important,” said Smalls, who is also known for playing Bubba’s mother in the film “Forrest Gump.”
Her adaptations of Gullah music, she said, are a way of preserving it by appealing to a mass audience. But she treasures the old spirituals, calling the group of singers, “true keepers of the culture.”
Given their age, Crawford sometimes asks himself “who will carry the torch.” He has been working to get grants so students can also start projects to preserve the songs, language and culture.
On a recent day, a group of students from Atlanta’s Morehouse College arrived at the Mary Jenkins Praise House to admire a site built in the early 1900s.
“It is a portal into the past and a window into the future,” said Tendaji Bailey, 35, founder of “Gullah Geechee Futures,” a project that focuses on the preservation of Gullah communities and cultural sites. For the past three years, he has been bringing Morehouse students to visit praise houses.
“They hear some of the prayers, some of the songs, and they always come out of that experience transformed. So, I know that there’s power in this place, still.”
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Associated Press journalist Jessie Wardarski contributed to this report.
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