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Time To Think...

  • Writer: Alfred Heath
    Alfred Heath
  • Sep 27, 2023
  • 10 min read

Updated: Sep 29, 2023

As I've been settling into my new home in Savannah, GA, new discoveries and insights have emerged that link my personal family heritage to important events in American History for those 80% of us Black Americans with African-American ancestry that runs back to slavery and the post-Civil War Era. To some of you, that may sound like recapitulating "the same old story." If so, See ya. For me, it's an angle that kind of blew my mind and added poignant meaning to my paternal great-grandfather's leading an exodus of extended family and parishioner (and a couple dozen other families) fellow former slaves from New Bern, North Carolina to Middletown, New Jersey to settle on his newly purchased land stretching from Red Hill to Old Country Road. In other words, It feels worth writing about. Maybe it's worth reading about too. You be the judge.


My backyard ends along the bank of a branch of the Little Ogeechee River, which meets its big brother/sister the Ogeechee River at a fork along the North Georgia Coast just south of the Savannah River. It's a breathtaking view, and probably the reason I was willing to get a mortgage for more than I'd originally planned. That view hasn't gotten old yet, and by the time it does --if it ever does-- I expect to be firmly in the same category, so it'll still be good company even if tediously familiar.


The sun rises on the horizon on the other side of the river and can be quite spectacular on a clear morning. Our own private viewing. At pre-dawn, you can mostly only hear a variety of birdsong, cicada leg rubbing, and squirrels squawking (yes, squirrels, and they can get downright noisy), although a couple-four times a day a train on one of the two intersecting tracks about half a mile northeast of the river will announce itself with a whistle before showing up to traverse my picture-postcard view. I suppose it'd be more idyllic if it was a steam engine puffing white billows of cloud and transporting wheat and hay bails instead ofcontainers with Amazon next-day deliveries, but it's still a strangely welcome interruption of my early-morning communion with Mother Nature.



I haven't found a better way to take a moment (or a dozen) to ponder life or take a break from it than to gaze into this tree-framed, houseless distance, over the reflecting river; over the cordgrass marsh and the mostly-tree-lined horizon. (Veterans Parkway is in the distance, but inobtrusive at about a mile away). You really feel like you're being granted a precious moment of contemplation, either of the beauty before you, or of whatever is on your mind (or on your heart). You have time to think and to feel.


We were on the porch enjoying time with friends Ellen* (whom we've known since adolescence) and her husband Don* last year, enjoying the mild November weather when we noticed wasps hovering around a corner of the roof of the covered patio.


*Dap Ellen and Don: a delightful and gracious pair of fellow human beings who have lived in Savannah since roughly 2010. During a period in 2020 when we were "new-home shopping," and considering it as a relocation prospect, we called Ellen. She gave us what I consider to have been the most enthusiastic, heartfelt, and convincing sales pitch I've ever heard. We were sold on checking it out, and once we both got to stay with them on a vacation/check-out-Savannah trip and wander around the city, Savannah's beauty, friendliness, progressiveness, and culture closed the deal. So THANK YOU, Ellen and Don!


Now back to the story...


Don mentioned that we could paint the underside of the patio roof sky blue and it would keep the wasps from trying to nest. He noted that this was a common practice in the region. I took note of this to research and take action on later. After all, who wants wasp nests on their patio roof ceiling, right?


The topic came up again when we were at the airport preparing to see my partner Lois off on a flight back to the States from the UK. It was a great price with a budget airline, and at the airport we realized how they managed the great price. There were HUNDREDS of people waiting to check in for multiple flights to multiple destinations, and 1 person to check them all in. It got a little better after about 45 minutes, with 2, and eventually three agents at separate check-in counters. The good news is that we met a friendly couple in line who are "grave site tourists": they visit famous cemeteries and tombs all over the world. Somehow, while chatting with them and telling our story, Lois mentioned our beautiful backyard and our intention to paint the patio roof interior light blue to deter wasps. They informed her that the color is actually "Haint Blue," a "Gullah" word for the color, and that their intention to ward off unwelcome guests was not about wasps at all.


With the help of the internet, I confirmed that haint blue was actually intended to ward off evil spirits --"haints"-- from coming into Gullah homes! In the West African shamanic religious beliefs that they brought with them after being kidnapped and sold as slaves, ghosts and other spirits could not cross bodies of water. So the ceilings of porches and patios were painted to look like water. Interestingly the word "haunt" in English is taken from the Gullah word "haint."


These enslaved West Africans and their descendants who farmed the plantations and their descendants stayed on after Emancipation and the Civil War and were granted (more like insufficiently compensated for multiple generations of unpaid labor and abuse) the land of the coastal region stretching from Jacksonville Florida to Jacksonville North Carolina and up to 30 or so miles inland. The land was abandoned as useless by the white former plantation owners who were unable to farm it without the free labor and because of the heat, humidity, and malaria-carrying mosquitos throughout the marshlands. This was why enslaving people from the coastal areas of West Africa was so valuable: not only did they know very well how to farm that kind of land; they were also genetically acclimated to the intensely hot and humid climate and resistant to malaria, also common in their homelands. This meant that they had little supervision by overseers, leaving them able to preserve their culture and language. Take, for example, these Gullah sweetgrass baskets woven in classic West African tradition still today:





The lands they occupied and owned have become known as the Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. The word Gullah seems to come from "Gola"; the name of the tribe of one of the enslaved peoples from modern-day Sierra Leone and Liberia. You mostly see the term Geechee in Florida and Georgia, and "Gullah" in the Carolinas, but they are one in the same culture and language with small variations in colloquial nuance, like anywhere else.


The Gullah Geechee have a distinct language that is part English and part West African languages and dialects (Hausa, Fulani, Igbo, Mandinka, and Yoruba and others.). The common syntax patterns and grammar of these languages dominated in the Gullah Creole language, interpreted by whites as ignorant and marginally educable slaves' attempts at English. For example, the Mandinka word misunderstood by white American slave owners: "massa," which they interpreted as a bastardized pronunciation of "master," when it was was the literal term from the Mandinka language "mansa," (properly pronounced "massa") which means "chief" or "boss."


Here's a sample of the Gullah language:

Are you still with me? The linguistic learning continues , but I'll save that for the end.


There are many major events in Antebellum and Post-Civil-War American History involving these enslaved peoples and their descendants. I won't belabor you with full details, but here are some titled links for your perusal and education:







I'll never think about Hilton Head or Myrtle Beach QUITE the same. I hope you can't either.


Suffice it to say, from the Gullah Geechee, initially left to live and farm their land and retain their West African cultural traditions and morphed Gullah Geechee Creole language; from the rebellions and skirmishes of the escaped Gullah warriors in Florida and then Oklahoma and Texas to the Igbo Landing slave ship takeover and mass suicide; to the WiIlmington Massacre, the Tulsa Greenwood Racist Massacre, and the East St. Louis Race Massacre: this is OUR American History. Not / NOT / NOT so-called "Critical Race Theory." These events happened; they stand as facts exposing one of the shadow sides of our American heritage.


If you managed to make it through those links, here is my family linkage to where I am now living:


My great grandfather Clinton Pearson Heath did indeed travel up to Middletown, NJ from New Bern, NC. If you look on a map, New Bern is just 33 miles northeast of Jacksonville, the approximate border of the Gullah Geechee Nation territory. It is another 35 miles to Wilmington. So it turns out I am a transplanted Gullah on at least my father's side of the family; Clinton's great-grandson, who has returned South and bought back a tiny parcel of the Gullah Geechee land.


I'm left wondering about Clinton's decision to move North. After all, his father, Nathan (who our family oral history holds was from Africa) had been able to buy his own freedom and was already a freed African American working as a mechanic on the plantation where he'd been enslaved, according to the 1860 Census (slaves were considered "property" and were accounted for on the tax roles; not the Census. His wife and children including Clinton and brother Calvin, were still on the tax roles, still slaves). Nathan was free before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862


I figure Clinton must have planned the migration to New Jersey for some time. He traveled to New Jersey once free, and worked on Edwin Beekman's farm (my classmate from grade school through high school, Stephen Smith, is Edwin's great grandson. Trippy, right?). He saved his earnings, bought the acreage, returned for his ex-slave family and neighbors, and established a settlement in the Red Hill area of Middletown.



I can't help believing there is untold story here. People immigrate for all sorts of reasons, and there was indeed a mass migration of African Americans to the North to escape the poverty, deprivation, cruelty, rape, and lynching of Black men and women that was rife in the South. But Clinton, Calvin, their families and all of the fellow former slaves they led to New Jersey only missed the Wilmington Massacre by a decade, after which there was mass flight from the Gullah Lowlands for fear of being slaughtered by enraged and entitled whites. Did he see the writing on the wall 15 or 20 years early? I'd love to be able to ask him that and many other questions.


The other thing --a poignant irony-- that sticks out in my mind is the way the land he bought was grabbed by the State of New Jersey (at least 100 acres (including the strip of land centered at Highway 35 and Harmony Road on one side, Kings Highway on the other) from his sons and daughters in order to pave Highway 35. That's right. The state then sold the land they confiscated on what is now the other side of Hwy 35 to developers to make a housing development and a massive Sears/Roebuck store with about a 15-acre parking lot.


And to add insult to in jury, most of the rest of the land was stolen in a shady real-estate land grab in the early 70s by exploiting the spiritual aspirations of my great Aunt Bertha, a M.S. Nurse educator and devoted yogin, by the New York Yogi Gupta Society. She offered Yogi an acre of land during an audience with the him. It would be to establish a shrine to the Society and her ancestors. Apparently the Yogi Gupta heard her say he could have all of it that was not occupied, and immediately thereafter sold it to developers. Dozens of acres in a prime patch of Middletown. It was in court for several years while the developers continued to build, complete and sell a housing development, a bank, a Gold's Gym, and a large Shoprite strip mall. Bertha ended up with an undisclosed sum, and retained ownership of the mall property only, with the owners of the buildings and parking lot on a 99-year lease (Oh, and she got her "shrine": a metal plaque on a podium at the far corner of the strip mall's sidewalk, and streets named after her and our family in the development). Yours truly is not a recipient of any of that green, unfortunately --and I'm not privy to the amount--, but I don't doubt it is a small fraction of the land's market value at the time of the theft.



So with all they'd been through, even with what I believe was his foresight into what was going to go down in Gullah Geechee land regarding their safety, autonomy and landownership, Clinton and his descendants ended up suffering a similar fate in New Jersey with their Middletown/Redhill acres. White Folks smelled money. Once air conditioning was invented, there were loopholes to be found. Once there was the excuse of a state highway, there were loopholes to be found. Once there was a way to get the rest of that Middletown land, there were loopholes to be found. God bless America. Yeah, buddy...


The end of my part of this story is this: With all of this American and family history showing up on my doorstep, I still wanted to know where the name of the river behind my house came from. So I went to the internet yet again, and got what seemed like very unsatisfactory non-answers:



Just who were the Yuchi? And the Muscogee (Creek) Indians?


You don't find out until you dig a little deeper, linguistically and in the historical records: https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=en&text=Yuchi&op=translate


Here is an excerpt from The African American Experience and the Creek War, 1813-14: An Annotated Bibliography (Task Agreement Number P16AC01696; Under Cooperative Agreement Number P13AC00443 Between The United States Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service Horseshoe Bend National Military Park and Auburn University):


"... J. Leitch Wright, Jr.'s Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People (1986) focused on ethnic differences among Creeks (Muskogee vs. non Muskogee divisions), but the most significant part of his work focused on race. He noted that "representatives of the three 'races' were readily discernible among eighteenth-century Muscogulges" and devoted a chapter to "Black Muscogulges" with most of the emphasis on African Americans among the Seminoles following the Creek War... "


So where did the word "ogeechee" actually come from? Here's what 'authoritative sources' propose:


I submit that the "indians" whom after this river is named were escaped Gullah Geechee African slaves or their descendants, living and fighting alongside the Indigenous Creek Tribes against a common enemy. That does seem like a leap, given the above-stated research, but my final piece of linguistic evidence comes from Google Translate when I type in the word 'ogeechee':




Well, that wasn't hard. Hmmm... I wonder how the historians of the South missed it.


... Well, not really...



The procession of information about the Gullah Geechee that led to this last discovery took place over the course of three days after deciding to investigate the word 'haint." In short, my mind has been blown. I'm looking at the Little Ogeechee right now out my bedroom window. I guess I really have "come home" after all, with time to think.


P.S. Oh, and on my first visit to Savannah in 2021, I found this ABSOLUTELY DELICIOUS spicy sauce called Aunt Lillie's of Charleston 'Hab Mussy" Mustard BBQ Sauce. Pretty much addicted to it now. And as it just so happens... https://www.lilliesofcharleston.com/pages/the-gullah-culture


The 'kizmet' now complete, I'll take my leave and return my gaze to the river. With any luck --and my ancestors' blessing-- I'll be holding on to this patch for a spell...


Ka ọ dị.

 
 
 

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