Day 4 in Gullah Country: E Done Learn a Heap of Ting, Enty?

By Erika Dyson

March 15, 2004

To get to the Penn Center on St. Helena Island from Charleston, take route 17 south towards the ocean. It's an easy trip, about one hour and 45 minutes on smooth highways through small towns, made easier since the 1960s by low bridges that now span the marshes and waterways separating the mainland from the island.

St. Helena Island natives and Gullah speakers Annette Teasdale (left), Ruth Reynolds (middle) and Earnestine Atkins (right) perform a "shout," a spiritual song and dance. Photo: Chris Karmiol

If you are traveling by bus, you can enjoy the passing of small churches and aging gas stations from your high perch above the traffic. You may be able to spot the white exclamation point of an egret sticking up out of the bulrushes or detect the deep currents wending their way from the ocean beneath swaying marsh grasses.

When you cross onto St. Helena, you will be deep in Gullah/Geechee territory, land occupied by descendents of the West African slaves who worked the rice, indigo and cotton plantations on the Sea Islands from North Carolina to Florida. Most Gullah/Geechee people still speak Gullah, a Creole of French, English, Spanish and West African words, a linguistic record of centuries of struggle to communicate among captives who often shared as little language with each other as they did with their captors and slaveowners.

Rev. Johnie F. SImmons discusses language, culture and heritage at the Penn Center on St. Helena Island. Photo: Anne Lilburn

When you get to St. Helena, most likely you won't know when you meet a Gullah person, as most switch easily between Gullah and English depending on who they are talking to. But Gullah is not only a language. As local artist the Rev. Johnie F. Simmons says:

"I live Gullah, I grew up Gullah."

You will know you have arrived when you reach the Gullah Grub restaurant, a white clapboard building on your left and one of the only restaurants on the Island. Take a right at Gullah Grub and you are headed past the Brick Baptist Church onto the Penn Center campus.

People have taken this road to the Penn Center for many reasons over the last century and a half. Following the Civil War, the Center was the Penn School, started by two missionaries who arrived on St. Helena by boat from the North to teach reading and writing to the children of freed slaves. Their students came to them on foot, crossing the island by dirt roads and foot paths kept clear by use.

In the twentieth century, Penn School became Penn Community Services, an organization dedicated to serving the Sea Islanders and preserving their culture. Over the last sixty years, this has meant providing health care, education programs for local children, a museum for Gullah/Geechee history and culture, and land use and environmental training for local landowners. With the coming of the bridges and paved roads to St. Helena, the need for the land program has increased, as developers and rising taxes threaten to undermine Gullah land ownership across the Sea Islands.

We traveled to the Penn Center this morning to find out about an additional part of the Center's history. In the 1950s and 1960s the Center served as a retreat for leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was one of the only places at that time in the South where white and black Civil Rights leaders could meet together.

Blue bottle tree at the Indigo House at the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, which sells quilts, crafts and artwork. Photo: Anne Lilburn

Once we arrived, it was clear why King considered the Center a refuge from the pressures of his political life. Simple white buildings connected by gravel drives and worn paths are spread out over 50 acres of trees and dangling Spanish moss. The air smells of pine needles and ocean, and heavy traffic on the road that cuts through the campus would be considered a trickle anywhere else.
We spent the first part of our day in the museum, browsing the old photos and artifacts from the Penn School, and looking at paintings and wood burnings of the Rev. Johnie F. Simmons, a retired Baptist minister whose work depicts his experience growing up Gullah on St. Helena Island.

After a presentation on the history of Penn School and the Gullah/Geechee people by museum curator Annette Teasdale, the group split up to wander the grounds. A couple of folks took the hike down to the river past the house built for Dr. King by the Center in the 1960s.

Others crossed the street to the Ibile Indigo House, where textile artists Arianne King Comer and Adesola Falade create intricate batik designs on clothing, wall hangings and quilts using indigo that they process themselves.

We gathered again after lunch under the trees for a panel discussion with four Gullah residents of St. Helena. Each spoke about some aspect of their spiritual upbringing on the island, interweaving memories of "prayer houses" and baptisms with demonstrations of hymn "raising" and Gullah language.
Earnestine Atkins, 66, whose family goes back several generations on St. Helena, spoke of the centrality of the prayer house to Gullah people, especially before cars were readily available to residents.

The exterior of a praise house still in use on St. Helena Island. Praise houses were centers of meeting and worship for plantation slaves. Photo: Chris Karmiol

"The prayer house was where community people would worship because the church was too far away," she explained. "My mother would say, always walk the grass down, always walk tress down so it won't grow. The trails were everywhere. Now with cars, you won't see trails anymore."

"The prayer house was a time of getting together, of religious services," added Reverend Johnie Simmons, who admits to being almost as old as Atkins. "If you have any problem - get together - pray about it. If you have any sickness - get together - pray about it. Learn the value of it: the Bible, Lord's Prayer. Listen and learn from those that know, the elders and the teachers."
Simmons, Atkins and Robert Middleton, 75, Penn School class of 1949, described other practices of Gullah spirituality, such as "seeking" in the woods to receive God's call to be baptized.

The interior of the praise house on St. Helena Island pictured above. Photo: Chris Karmiol

"Baptism is a very important part of religious service because it gives you a new feeling, acceptance. It makes you a part of. Without the baptism, we'll not throw you away, but if you're not baptized you'll not feel a part of," explained Simmons.

Ruth Reynolds, a older lifelong resident of St. Helena, led all assembled in a fast hymn and Atkins broke into an impromptu demonstration of a "ring shout," another traditional Gullah practice with African roots.

The day at Penn ended with a tour around the island in our bus. Robert Middleton came along to point out the Baptist Churches and few remaining praise houses. We drove through sections named for slaveholding families and streets named for the Gullah families that lived on them. After dropping Middleton back at the Center, we headed out past the Gullah Grub restaurant toward the marshes and numbered, anonymous highways.