The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On) and detail from painting. J.G.W. Turner, oil on canvas,1840. Collection Museum of Fine arts, Boston. Photo: public domain.

The water brought European settlers and enslaved Africans to the Americas. The ocean water, now warmed by a changing climate, stirs up more powerful hurricanes like Helene, which lashed out at Asheville, NC, and other parts of southern Appalachia in an unprecedented hit for a mountainous area. The October 2024 hurricane caused 104 verified fatalities, seven people are still missing, and mudslides and wreckage of the built environment stretched across six states. 

Water has been a significant “give and take” force in the natural and cultural histories of the southeastern coastal United States. In Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess, water is a critical environmental element that author Kendra Hamilton examines and integrates with ideas and information from various fields.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, American studies — the Western world’s first fully interdisciplinary university degree program — was birthed by books such as Marx’s Machine in the Garden,  Kouwenhoven's Made in America, and Smith’s Virgin Land.  “To read ‘Virgin Land’ is to experience a deep intellectual excitement,” wrote one reviewer.  

The excitement stirred up by these and other foundational works of American studies was based on their fresh approaches to understanding familiar aspects of American culture. Their sophisticated analytical methods drew on a wide range of sources, including popular culture, giving them more relevance than single discipline approaches in addressing important questions about national identity and the nation’s place in the world.  

And now Kendra Hamilton’s Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess will have a similarly thought-provoking and catalytic impact on Southern studies and African American studies.

Fourth of July celebration, 1939, St. Helena Island, South Carolina. (The building today houses the Gullah Grub restaurant.) U.S. Department of Agriculture (public domain)

Hamilton loves complex investigation but abhors dry exposition. Her talents as a writer of creative nonfiction and poetry add originality to her scholarly voice and her background as a full-time newspaper reporter gives her the chops to write with maximal lucidity. Her forays into environmental anthropology encompass not only biological adaptations but also cultural practices, social structures, economic systems, and political processes shaped by the intricate relationship between humans and the biosphere. Hamilton integrates this approach with linguistics, cultural criticism grounded in postmodernist theories as well as cultural and southern history, making the book a scholarly tour de force that offers a wealth of seminal insights on the Gullah Geechee applicable to American studies in general and African American studies in particular.  

From a birthright bred at her Gullah Geechee grandmother’s knee, Hamilton’s  assumes the authority to develop her own anthropological and geological nomenclature and embellish existing names for purposes of place-making.

  Placeholder Image: requesting photo of Kendra’s Gullah grandmother with young Kendra, or separate photos of them.

For example, the coastal plain and barrier islands stretching from the Carolinas, through Georgia, to northeastern Florida, and conventionally referred to as the “Lowcountry” and the “sea islands” become the “Gullah Geechee coast” in Hamilton’s vocabulary. Designated by an act of Congress in 2006 as a“cultural heritage corridor” managed by the National Parks Service, Hamilton elevates the corridor to a seminal region of cultural geography.

“African creolization” and “Afro Creole” are the more specific terms she uses for processes of “syncretism.” The Gullah Geeche melting pot is a blend of African, European, and indigenous peoples’ cultures.  Alternative nomenclature is not just compensation for the deprivations of racial oppression, it has strong explanatory authority. When rice historian Richard Porcher says, “Without rice, the city of Charleston as we know it today would not exist,” he affirms the authority of Hamilton’s exacting historiography and anthropology. 

 Zora Neale Hurston exemplified how the European elements in the Gulluh Geechee melting pot got mixed up with “cool.”

Children just getting born were going to hear about Addison, Poe, De Quincey, Steele, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley from me, leaning nonchalantly over my desk.

In the chapter on Zora Neale Hurston, the renegade queen of southernmost Geechee culture, the reader can imagine Hamilton delighting in Hurston’s signifyin’ power when Hurston recalls her younger self imagining her older self as an English professor: “Children just getting born were going to hear about Addison, Poe, De Quincey, Steele, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley from me, leaning nonchalantly over my desk.”

African roots of “cool.” In a Zora Neale Houston autobiographical story, when the  young Zora was dreaming about a future self, she envisioned students like herself being enraptured by her older self’s  profuse professorial nonchalance. She would be especially erudite as she lectured to her class, leaning over her desk with laid-back attitude. Very “cool” (as a coming generation would say). Art historian Robert Farris Thompson explored the African roots of the "cool” concept and said that it has deep connections to aesthetic and philosophical ideas found in West African cultures, particularly the Yoruba of Nigeria. The Yoruba itutu refers to a quality of inner peace and the ability to maintain composure in the face of challenges as well as a sense of style, charisma and effortless charm.  (Ecollective graphic with mask identified with Idia, mother of Oba Esigie; Benin Kingdom, Nigeria, 16th century; ivory, iron and copper wire; British Museum collection. Photo: public domain via Wikimedia Commons.)

The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor was designated by the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Act, passed by Congress Oct. 12, 2006. Map: North Carolina Gullah Geechee Greenway/Blueway Heritage Trail Project

When we saw James Melvin’s Tender Mercies painting, we were reminded of a similar view of Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina (in a photo shown later in this essay) where Africans were held before being sold into slavery. We imagined the beauty of Sullivan's Island beach enveloping the African souls in a sacred, timeless cradle. (Photo courtesy Aspire Gallery, Norfolk VA. (Repro permission pending.)

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (American, 1876 – 1958)
Mending a Break in a Rice-Field Bank, from the series, A Carolina Rice Plantation of the (Eighteen) Fifties, ca. 1935,  watercolor on paperboard (pre-conservation), Gibbes Museum of Art.  (Requesting reproduction permission.)

Left: crossing swamp scene in the 2023 movie adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple novel. (Still photo sourced from Oprah Winfrey Films). The Gullah Geechee corridor extends across the swampy coastal area of Georgia where Walker’s story is set. The movie’s director says that the swamp setting dramatically highlights Shug Avery’s first appearance at the juke joint in this New York Times “Anatomy of a Scene.”

Below left: Oyster and fish vendors, Charleston, S.C. 1870s. Photo source: Gullah Geechee Heritage in the Golden Isles, courtesy of The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

A native of Charleston, S.C., with family roots in a “centennial farm” continuously owned-and-operated in a little place in the state called “Ninety-Six” ever since its purchase by freed black people during Reconstruction. 

Hamilton was educated at Duke University, Louisiana State University, and the University of Virginia where she earned a PhD in English with specialties in American Studies, especially Southern and African American studies. 

That Hamilton would be a poet, politician, gardener and community activist, in addition to being an essayist and scholar was preordained by her Gullah Geechee heritage. Gullah Geechee people are quick to notice when signifyin’ turns into hubris and default to grace. 

In Charlottesville, Virginia, where she lived and taught for many years, Hamilton was the first black woman elected to City Council. She also founded the Episcopal Church’s Bread and Roses initiative, which supported two community garden ministries as well as a commercial canning kitchen as a community resource and business incubator.

Kendra Hamilton’s conjoined selves -– Gullah geechee gurl and  prodigious scholar–- are not a contradiction in terms. 

Hamilton has a long record of doing work at the intersection of environmental ecologies and culture. Bookended by “Water/Table” in 2004, an installation of Carolina Gold rice plants that created a temporary wetland in the center of the city, and concluding with the design for “Alicia’s Garden” on that site, Hamilton worked with the Spoleto Festival USA’s Places with a Future Artists’ Collaborative on a series of projects highlighting Charleston’s environmental history and the role of embattled Gullah Geechee communities within it.

She is certified as a master gardener, trained in bio intensive farming practices , and has taught ecofeminist approaches to community building and ecological conservation in college-level, service learning courses. See this article, for Kendra Hamilton’s account of her current life and outlook on a  “five-acre farmette” near Clinton SC.    (This sentence will link to Kendra’s “Second Summer” article.)

Water is ongoing cyclical change
water, gas, ice … water, gas, ice… .
likewise in Gullah Geechee thought
water be the changing same
everyting wa' gwine 'round, come 'round….

The Gullah Geechee “de wata bring, de wata tek” saying has dual origins:  (1) a declaration of resistance:  “The water brought us here, the water will take us away,” as noted in the historical marker photo, above right, and (2) the cyclical nature of traditional Gullah thought.

The legend of the Ibo insurrection and mass suicide in the water off the coast called “Ibo Landing took wings as it morphed into a liberating belief in the unshackled minds of enslaved bodies – that some black people flew home to Africa. The declaration of resistance continued to develop  into urban legends, literature and music without the explicit reference to Africa:

At 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday of February, 
1931, I will take off from Mercy and fly away
on my own wings. Please forgive me. I loved you all.

Suicide note written by insurance agent in Toni Morrison’s novel, The Song of Solomon.

Nonchalant, cool, subtly sassy hauteur is Hurston’s response to having to insinuate herself within white readers’ lowered expectations of black people in general and southern black women in particular. Hurston slyly highlighted “her audience’s ignorance while situating her tale within an alternative Afro-creole geography of conjure, a heterotopia” with “subversive possibilities,” says Hamilton.

Readers can jump around the Romancing the Gullah book to get an overview of Hamilton’s masterful orchestration of her ideas, materials and tools.  And the reader can go straight to the Porgy and Bess section where Hamilton reveals that her grandmother knew the real Porgy, Samuel Smalls.  An amputee or paralytic gambler and pimp, who sang robustly while zipping around town in his goat cart and always circling back to the Bull Pen, a den of iniquity on Long Alley, Sam Smalls was a much more colorful, larger-than-life character than his fictional counterpart. 

Boundaries, fissures, flows

“The low country is a gateway of terrestrial riverine and marine flows. Water connected this countryside not just to cities like Charleston and Savannah but also to the Caribbean and a broader global empire of trade.” — Keith Cartwright

Gullah Geechee phenomena are part of an intertwined whole emanating from what Hamilton calls the “third space” between European and “Othered” (i.e., the African and Amerindian “Other”) origins. And to investigate this space, she is mapping a topological “third space” onto the region’s land and waterscapes. Gullah refers to sea island folks; Geechee to mainland dwellers. The fissures occur in the divisions and confluences of race that construct and eviscerate all notions of purity in the myths of Southern identity.

In the “Landscape and Lineage” chapter of her book, Hamilton quotes (as shown below) from Keith Cartwright’s Sacred Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern Time book.

The boat scene in Julie Dash’s film, “Daughters of the Dust,” is a poignant moment representing human-marine ecologies. As the Peazant family prepares to leave their island home for the mainland, the scene captures the tension between tradition and change, Gullah and Geechee and beyond, and the shift from a life deeply intertwined with nature to one that is more industrial and disconnected from these natural rhythms.

In considering the flowing “languaging of landscape,” Hamilton says “that geechee talk developed in a physical third space, an island-to-inland environment that was literally littoral (i.e., the part of a river, lake, or ocean close to the land). This is a deceptive geography both between the shores of bodies of water … and yet also within the marshes and dense swamps, locales that are neither solid nor earth nor water but a shifting landscape of both.”  

South Carolina’s “backwater” country spanned  peninsulas and junctions of rivers such as the Congaree and Wateree. And rising above all of the inland waterways in Gullah Geechee memory is the Combahee, the river where Harriet Tubman led the gunboat raid that liberated almost 800 enslaved people on June 2, 1863. 

Waterways, not roads, were  primal in the evolution of the coastal plain, explains Hamilton, in fueling the brutal domination of land and people in what she calls “the nation state of rice.” It was here “on the prison farms known euphemistically as ‘plantations’ that Carolina gold rice was cultivated by growers who had developed their expertise back home in the Senegambia of West Africa. She calls the lowlands a “nation state” because of the staggering scale of colonial and antebellum prosperity in the capitals that rice built.”

The fabled, doomed “nation of rice” with its grand plantations, was watered by enslaved black people who built the canals and mended the water breaks in the fields. Hamilton traces the rice nation’s almost invisible traces in the contemporary rural landscape and its golden reification in the “imperialist nostalgia”of the Charleston Renaissance of writers and artists who paralleled the Negro Renaissance centered in Harlem and DC during the same interwar period.

The book’s environmental anthropology is most prominent in the chapter titled “Toward a Triangular Topos: Landscape and Lineage on the Gullah Geechee Coast,” though it weaves its way through other parts of the book and includes the port of Charleston and the waters surrounding Sullivan’s Island where the enslaved Africans disembarked from the Atlantic passage.  

Because, among ports of entry in the United States, Sullivan’s island and the port  of Charleston processed the most Africans, Hamilton says that the region is the veritable cradle of African creole civilization.

May most tender mercy pervade Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina.  When we saw this photo, we were inspired by the James Melvin painting shown above to envision “tender mercies” assuaging the memory of enslaved Africans on Sullivan’s Island beach. This photo of the actual beach by Lee Keadle, https://commons.wikimedia.org

During a conversation with Hamilton, the Ecollective editors learned that Gullah Geechee land-and waterscapes inspired the spirituals “Down by the Riverside” and “Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore.”

In addition to waterways, environmental aspects of Romancing the Gullah include discussion of the “pastoral” elements of Geechee Gullah life. 

After noting that Jean Toomer’s pastoral sensibility shapes his Cane collection of sketches published in 1923, Hamilton demonstrates her own pastoral poetics in pointing out the economics and exploitation of sugar cane production that incorporates a creative paraphrasing of Toomer’s pastoral and atmospheric allusions. 

Of the cane that is sugar and the title of Toomer’s book, she says that the cash crop “... evokes a tragic landscape: layering images of the sugar lands of South Carolina or Georgia or Louisiana – whether plants undulate tall and green over vast acres in the height of summer or lay chopped, supine and burning after harvest, columns of smoke mounting to a blood-soaked sky in late fall … .”

Hamilton also interprets the “pastoral” concept in unexpected ways. In referring to the novel, Porgy,  which like the stage play, “Porgy and Bess,” is set in a teeming Charleston tenement, she says that in the southern pastorals of the Charleston Renaissance, it “is time – the sense of a glorious past contrasted with a fallen present – that serves as the productive site of creative tension.”   The sense of a glorious pastoral past was one of plantation life where the livin’ was easy, fish were jumping and the cotton and rice reeds were high (if you weren’t the servant singing that lullaby).

The “fallen present” came with the demise of rice production in South Carolina because rice plantations couldn’t survive without enslaved labor.  

Kendra Hamilton (Photo: Presbyterian College)

Cycles of give and take

To be inserted: conclusion outlining next steps for illuminating and developing what Hamilton calls the Gullah Geechee “shadow canon.” 

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