The Soul of the Sea Islands
Prepare to be enchanted
I believe there’s magic in our sea islands, where time moves as slowly as a wisteria vine. Once across the Cowan Creek bridge and onto St. Helena’s, I start to imagine the shrimp boats in Forest Gump, the plantations in the North and the South, and the antebellum mansions seen in The Big Chill and Prince of Tides. I envision Southern ladies in big skirts and men in their classic bow ties.
Just a short distance from historic Beaufort, the winding road eases across acres of swirling sweetgrass and dusky marsh. Crabbers prowl the golden marsh with dip nets, while shrimp boats move through waters with their nets spread wide like angels’ wings.
Whispers of tea olive, sweet jasmine, and salty breezes perfume the air. Could this be the last frontier along our coastal terrain? I don’t know, but at least for today, I’ll inhale deeply and listen for the soft patois of the Gullah language to fall gently on my ears. Sometimes, I can almost hear the echoes of cannon fire from long ago, far away in the pine forests beyond the road. I never tire of coming this way in search of history and treasured moments in time.
Before me, an island so steeped in soulful beauty that it must surely move artists to greatness and writers to tears.
Ghosts and haints and things that go bump in the night are as common as the time-worn shrimp boats docked in Village Creek.
Development has crept in, but some things remain constant. The beauty of the great blue herons with their wings spread in flight, still soaring over oceanfront mansions and manicured golf links. Yet, if you look carefully, you will see descendants of slaves weaving their sweetgrass baskets and selling them under an umbrella by the side of the road. On occasion, you can discover a family or two deep in the moss-covered live oaks selling fresh shrimp from the back of a rusted pick-up truck - some of the sweetest ocean fresh shrimp you will find anywhere.
Most out here are the Gullah folks, descendants of West African slaves who toiled on the rice, indigo, and cotton plantations and helped shape the rich culture of this place we cherish - Lowcountry.
Over 250 years ago, a barefoot legion of West Africans, well over a hundred thousand strong, came ashore in Charleston and Savannah. They came from Sierra Leone, the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, and other places from afar. They knew how to farm and survive off the land and the sea. Fishing, clamming, and growing familiar things like okra, tomatoes, and rice were just part of who they were. Building boats, tilling the good earth, and hunting wild game had always been a way of life for them. They knit together nets, wove African baskets, and endured.
These wetlands were once a rich rice-growing region. For over two hundred years, the economy here was based on rice: to know the Lowcountry was to know Carolina Gold Rice. Back then, rivers were as essential to rice culture as today’s highways are to tourism. Broad and smooth, they floated barges heaped with Carolina Gold, a rice variety prized in Europe, making wealthy the planters who lived along the river banks. Some folks still call it the caviar of the early 19th century.
History lives here in the rivers and marshes of St. Helena Island. One can envision slaves of long ago toiling in rice fields singing those gospel hymns. In a remarkable feat of human labor and engineering, slaves cut thousands of acres of trees, dug stumps, and drained the land by building a series of levees, canals, and floodgates.
From the crucible of slavery, these Gullah-Geechee descendants shaped a culture and a distinctive cuisine based on rice that has flourished through the ages.
Pat, you bring me a new appreciation of the Lowcountry. Thank you.