By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  Paul, by moving to General’s Island, was entering the land of the Gullah—a people who had forged, while drawing from their varied West African linguistic and cultural traditions, a distinctive African American culture and pattern of speech. Paul was himself, of course, already a part of this Gullah community, but he had been living on its margins. Savannah moderated and inevitably diluted the strength of Gullah culture for the black men and women who lived within its urban environment. The city had too many whites and the power of European culture was all too clear, even as one looked across the river from the slave settlement on Hutchinson Island. City blacks, especially those born and raised in the city, were famously different from country blacks—they were wiser in the ways of whites and more acculturated into white patterns of thought and behavior. But McIntosh County was another matter. The white population was barely a fourth the size of the black community, and many of the whites were clustered in the little village of Darien, and others spent the summer and fall months of the sickly season away from their plantation homes. Such isolation from whites and their European American culture provided the geographical and social space for the blacks of the Lowcountry to shape their own folkways and cultural traditions.23

  For Paul, General’s Island was consequently an immersion into one of the strongest centers of Gullah culture. The name “Gullah” most likely came from a corruption of the word “Angola,” but it had come to refer to all of the Africans and their descendants who lived in the Lowcountry, the coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia. Their Gullah language had slowly evolved out of several sources: the diverse languages of West Africa, an English pidgin that had long been used on the coast of West Africa for trading, and the English of Lowcountry whites. Through a complicated process of language formation, the isolated slaves of the Lowcountry had grafted, generation by generation, the vocabulary of whites onto the shared grammatical structures of West African languages. The result was a distinct Gullah language. To be sure, some African words survived—da or na for “mother,” tata for “father,” li for a “child.” And there were translations into African-style equivalents, so that “to speak” was to “crack one’s breath,” “to envy” was to “long eye,” and “to cry” was to “eye water.” But it was the deep grammar of Gullah, more than anything else, that linked it to the diverse languages and cultures of African homelands. The language consequently reflected both the isolation of the Gullah and their connections to swirling currents linking Europe and Africa with the Americas. The ways in which the Gullah people saw and interpreted the world around them, the ways in which they endured their suffering and responded to their oppression, and the ways in which they met the contradictions and mysteries of human life were all carried and expressed by their language.24

  Most whites not raised in the Lowcountry had difficulty understanding Gullah and thought it was simply “bad English.” And even among the Gullah themselves, young people, more acculturated to white ways, sometimes had to struggle to understand the language of older generations. Years after Paul traveled to General’s Island, a former slave who had lived on neighboring Butler’s Island remembered that “Sebral uh dem hans wuz bery old people. Dey speak a funny language an none uh duh res of us couldn hahdly ununstan a wud dey say.” As one who lived and worked in Savannah, Paul may have had some difficulty himself in understanding the country blacks. Ironically enough, however, the Gullah he heard on General’s Island and in isolated McIntosh County was not some lone phenomenon without a language family. He would discover, after a much longer journey to unexpected places, an Atlantic Creole that echoed the vocabulary, intonations, and grammar of the Gullah people of the Lowcountry.25

  Paul could see and hear all around him the evidences of a Gullah culture that was both distinct and related to this wider Atlantic world. On some days when he and Jack needed lumber and supplies, Gullah boatmen carried them into Darien in a long canoe. Six or eight men, paddling in rhythm, pushed the canoe through river currents and sang in rich Gullah tones their boatmen songs—songs that echoed a West African world transplanted and adapted to life along the Altamaha and its hinterlands. And on some nights, when the work of the day was done, Paul and the others from Hutchinson Island gathered around bright-burning fires to hear stories with deep West African connections. All around them in other settlements such stories were being told, and they no doubt made their way into the evening hours on General’s Island as well—stories of the spider Anansi, the trickster who won by guile, not strength, or of the trickster Buh Rabbit, who used his wits to get the best of powerful figures like Buh Wolf, Buh Alligator and Buh Bear. And arriving with these stories were their traveling companions, Gullah proverbs, which also moved from settlement to settlement. Polished by their telling and retelling, the proverbs carried Paul and his companions into the inner world of ancestors. They revealed in a few memorable lines the accumulated wisdom and warnings of those who had gone before in Africa, and of those who had developed strategies for surviving in the Georgia Lowcountry. You should keep your promises, for “anybody wuh gwine back on eh prommus, an try fuh harm de pusson wuh done um a faber, sho ter meet up wid big trouble.” And you should always be a faithful friend, because “en yet [it doesn’t do], in dis wul, fuh man fuh ceive [to deceive] he fren.” Some stories and proverbs warned blacks to always be careful around whites, while others taught them how to trick a master or mistress. And some stories rose up out of the toil and pain of bondage and told of the deep longing of a people for freedom and a remembered homeland. A former slave who lived near General’s Island remembered popular stories of slaves flying back to Africa. “Duh slaves wuz out in duh fiel wukin. All ub a sudden dey git tuhgeddu and staht tuh moob roun in a ring. Roun dey go fastuhnfastuh. Den one by one dey riz up and take wing an fly lik a bud . . . back tuh Africa.”26

  Sometimes when the sun had set and the moon was high and the people had a little time for themselves, the Gullah danced. Gathering in the open space of a settlement, illumined by their evening fires, they danced the snake hip and buzzard lope, the camel walk and fish tail. Young Paul—he was twenty-four when he arrived on the island—no doubt knew the popular dances and songs of Savannah blacks, but these dances in the isolated settlements around Darien reflected more clearly and vigorously the rhythms and cultural style of West Africa. Still, however exotic they may have seemed to Paul with his city ways, the Gullah dances had English names, and those names—no less than the styles and rhythms of the dances—shaped their character and meaning. Paul was living, after all, on General’s Island, and the dances of the Gullah settlements were being danced on the sandy soil of Georgia plantations, not in a distant home across the Atlantic. In Georgia, the dances could be subversive of white authority, and they often aroused anxiety and sometimes disdain among white planters. Whites worried that dancing could stir strong and dangerous emotions among their slaves, for dances had stories to tell and were an alternative to the disciplined and orderly world that owners tried to create in order to keep slaves submissive. Their dances, one nearby planter complained, “are not only protracted to unseasonable hours, but too frequently become the resort of the most dissolute and abandoned, and for the vilest purposes.”27

  To be sure, some owners and plantation managers, seeking to be wise as serpents, encouraged dancing in the settlements. Twenty years before Paul moved into the settlement at General’s Island, Roswell King, the overseer of the neighboring Butler’s Island plantation, had ordered a dozen fiddles. They were to be a diversion for the people and to keep them from thinking about and acting on more serious matters. “I must” he wrote the owner, “try to break up so much preaching as there is on your Estate. Some of your Negroes die for the Love of God and others through feir of Him. Something must be done. I think Dancing will give the Negroes a better appetite for sleep than preaching.”28

  But Paul would have heard not only the music of fiddles coming across river waters and marshes. On clear nights when the moon was bright and the win
d was still, the often haunting sound of banjoes would have come from the settlements around Darien, and perhaps would have risen irrepressibly within the settlement on General’s Island. Drawing from a variety of West African and Caribbean traditions, Gullah craftsmen had created their own Lowcountry banjoes. They dried a gourd, cut an opening in it, stretched a cat hide across the opening, added a wooden stick neck, and attached horsehairs for strings. And then they played their music and the people danced their dances. And their rising music and their ecstatic dances poured from their hearts and memories and told, often in powerful and mystical ways, of their world by the dark waters of the Altamaha.29

  Above all, however, Paul would have heard drums. They were like nothing he had ever heard in Savannah with its rush of many people and rumbling wagons and creaking carts. But here in the great loneliness of McIntosh, the drums sounded and their messages flowed not only across river currents and marshes to General’s Island but also through inland swamps and forests, isolated settlement to isolated settlement, and even from mainland settlements out to the sea islands. And in reply came sea-island messages surging back above the murmur of the tide and swelling surf to tell their stories and make known well-disguised intentions. Whites were often alarmed by these slave drums, for they talked across plantation boundaries, and their messages rolled over white efforts to control slave talk—Who knew, whites wondered, what secret and threatening plans might be announced by these talking drums?30

  Still, in spite of white opposition, the drums were built and kept in the settlements, often concealed. In the area around General’s Island, a man would kill a raccoon for the supper pot, then dry its hide and stretch it across a hollow cypress log to create a drum with its own distinct sound. Sometimes a drummer beat a call to a dance and sometimes to a funeral. When dancing was the intent, the beat was fast. When a death was announced, the beat came long and slow. One former slave remembered: “Right attuh duh pusson die, dey beat um tuh tell duh udduhs bout duh fewnul. Dey beat a long beat. Den dey stop. Den dey beat anudduh long beat. Ebrybody know dat dis mean somebody die. Dey beat duh drum in duh nex settlement tuh let duh folks in duh nex place heah.” No wonder whites feared what secret things the drums might say or what plans they might make known.31

  Paul would not have been surprised to hear the drums announce a nighttime slave funeral—such funerals were also the general practice in Savannah. Daytime, after all, was a time to work for the master or mistress or overseer; nighttime was the time when slaves could bury their dead. Slave carpenters made simple pine coffins, and Paul, no doubt, had been learning from Jack how to construct these final beds.

  Among the Gullah, the body of the dead was placed in the coffin as soon as the box was built. Then when the evening sun had set over the marsh and rice fields, the mourners took up the filled coffin and, under starlight and moonlight and by the light of fatwood torches, they made their way to the slave burying ground. There they opened a grave in the sandy soil, and there they gazed for the last time upon their friend or loved one whose face was forever fixed in death. They nailed the lid on the coffin and lowered the body into the ground and into the deep anonymity of a slave cemetery. Then singing and praying, the mourners began to march around the grave, tossing sandy soil over the coffin and into the wide-gaping earth. Once the grave was covered, the people brought some possessions of the deceased, a few things from among the few things a slave may have claimed to own—perhaps a pail and dish, maybe a piggin, bottle, and spoon, or even a little mirror or an old cup. They placed them on the grave and warned one another that these fragile reminders of a slave’s life were not to be disturbed: “The spirit need these,” a former slave declared years later, “jis lak wen they’s live.” The living and the dead were close to one another, and Gullah graves, though real and deep, did not hold the spirits of their dead. “Duh spirit,” another explained, “nebuh go in duh groun wid duh body. It jis wanduh roun. Dey come out wen duh moon is noo.”32

  Paul most likely heard on the island stories of ghosts wandering the countryside. He would have been no stranger to such stories, for ghosts were said to move quietly along the backstreets and alleys of Savannah, frightening whites as well as blacks. On General’s Island and the surrounding plantations, ghosts sometimes appeared when a person walked at night along a lonely stretch of road. The white sand of the road provided a dim path leading into the darkness. Cypress and black gums, oaks, and Spanish moss loomed overhead and cast their shadows—shadows that conjured in their shape and movement the appearance of a spirit traveling the same road. “They peah jis as nachral as anybody,” said one Lowcountry resident. “Most of them ain got no heads. Jis go right along down the path.”33

  More threatening than the wandering spirits were witches—a neighbor or friend might be one; it was not easy to tell. Witches, like ghosts, were no strangers to Savannah, and Paul may even have encountered one before his move to General’s Island. Certainly some whites in the city seemed no more immune to them than blacks. But witches seemed to prefer life in the isolated settlements of the countryside to the orderly grid of streets and squares in Savannah. A witch or hag could, after slipping quietly into a cabin at night, change identity by hanging up her—or his—human skin behind a door. Then, with a new, terrifying appearance, the witch would pounce upon a victim’s chest and ride it hard until the victim awoke terrified, fighting for breath as if being suffocated. Sometimes a witch would become an animal in order to do its victim harm—a buzzard or a cat, or perhaps an alligator hiding on the bank of a swampy creek, waiting to grab the leg of its prey at some unexpected moment—not unlike a leopard man of a remembered African homeland. When the identity of a witch was discovered, the accused was feared and sometimes punished by the Gullah community.34

  Because wandering spirits and witches roved the woods and muddy marshes around General’s Island, the Gullah hung charms over their doors, buried them in front of their cabin steps, hid them where paths crossed, and wore them to keep sinister forces at bay. White travelers frequently reported seeing charms throughout the Lowcountry, and former slaves later reported on their widespread use in the area around Darien. Paul and the other Bayard slaves would have seen charms in Savannah, too, but charms were more visible, perhaps more necessary, in the scattered settlements of McIntosh, where spirits and witches seemed more likely to roam. A former slave who lived near Darien described the charms used in the area: “They’s made of haiah, an nails, an graveyahd dut, sometimes from pieces of cloth an string. They tie em all up in a lill bag. Some of em weahs it round wrist, some of em weahs it roun the neck, and some weahs a dime on the ankle.” Although some charms were used to guard against a witch or threatening spirit, others might be used to cure an illness, or to make a person brave or invincible in the face of danger, or to cause an enemy harm.35

  Conjurers were the specialists with charms—they knew what was needed for certain purposes and what incantations were necessary. Some conjurers were also root doctors with an intimate knowledge of Lowcountry herbs, roots, and barks. In Savannah when Paul or others on Hutchinson Island had become sick, Nicholas Bayard had sent Dr. Joseph Habersham to treat them, and he had paid him handsomely for his trips across the river to the settlement. But on General’s Island, apparently no white physician was available, and whenever Bayard slaves became sick or suffered wounds, they undoubtedly turned to root doctors for help. Though these doctors drew on West African traditions of healing, they had of necessity become familiar with the flora of the Lowcountry. They had discovered from long trial and error that chewing sweet-gum leaves or drinking a tea of marsh rosemary could cure diarrhea; that an infusion of dogwood bark helped cool a fever; that the juice of Jerusalem oak could clean hookworms and tapeworms out of a child; and that boiling the roots of Devil’s Walking Stick and drinking its tea could give a man courage and sexual prowess. Learning such secrets took time, generations, and the result was an evolving Gullah tradition of healing. Old West African assumptions about healing
, about what caused illness or misfortune, remained; but root doctors, no less than conjurers with their rusty nails and dimes, were Gullah practitioners and not West African ones.36

  Charms and conjuring could also be used against whites as a means of resistance when black rage boiled and the desire for revenge or justice could no longer be suppressed but came rushing to the surface. For a people with no military or legal power, the powers of a secret world could be invoked to hide an illicit barbeque in the woods or to defend a family from separation or to strike back at a cruel master. An experienced conjurer could create a charm intended to make a master ill or to blight a crop, or to bring misery and death into a white family. What slave owners most feared, however, were the poisonous roots and concoctions that could be slipped into foods, stirred into drinks, or dropped into a well. Stories of such poisonings were whispered by whites in plantation parlors and behind closed doors in city mansions; and over the years, more than a few slaves in the Lowcountry had been charged and executed for poisoning or attempting to poison white owners or overseers.37

  SUCH WAS THE world that Paul entered when he and the other Bayard slaves sailed the inland waters to General’s Island in 1825. He found much that was familiar, but he no doubt discovered much that was new. He was, after all, a city person and not a country fellow. He knew the sounds of Savannah—wagon wheels on cobblestone dray-ways and sandy streets, church bells and sailors’ voices, country women hawking vegetables and fishermen selling shrimp. Paul spoke in city accents, understood city manners, and practiced city ways of resisting white control. He had listened to Andrew Marshall preach, had heard the congregation of First African Baptist lift its voice and sing, and had learned where runaways hid and free blacks worked. This world of Savannah was the world that had most fundamentally shaped him. Here he had learned to think of himself as a carpenter, to carry himself upright, and to walk without the shuffle that slavery tried to teach.