Water: Cast nets on both sides of the Atlantic

On left: A boy holds a cast net in Savannah, Georgia, date unknown. Courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society.
On right: A boy throws a cast net in Cameroon, 2009.
(Left: “Shrimping.” Photograph. Savannah: undated. From Georgia Historical Society: GHS 2126-PH-01-04 pg005, James S. Silva family papers.
Right: “Fisherman” by CIFOR is marked with CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.)

“The Gullah Geechee are defined by their relationships to water. It is where we go to feed our families. It is where we return time and again to seek guidance from the ancestors… Even as a mainlander, I have always had one foot in the soil and one in the ocean.”1

Matthew Raiford

The weaving and use of cast nets was a skill that enslaved Africans brought with them to the shores of North America, and it allowed them self-sufficiency in the face of the brutality of slavery. They were able to supplement their meager diets with fresh catches from the sea, the creeks, and the brackish waters where fresh and salt meet. This skill and self-sufficiency were passed from generation to generation, and it is knowledge that is still used by Gullah Geechee community members today.2

“The value of self-sufficiency in food supply is an integral aspect of the Gullah food system.”3

Josephine Beoku-Betts, scholar of sociology and women’s studies

Josephine Beoku-Betts spent many hours with women on the Sea Islands learning about their foodways and storytelling. Also interesting is that Beoku-Betts is originally from Sierra Leone, one of the West African countries with the closest relationship to the Sea Islands. She adds to her comments about self-sufficiency the importance of the intergenerational transfer of this knowledge. Speaking about Maisie Gables, a 70-year-old “lively and active” woman from the Sea Islands, Beoku-Betts said:

“When I interviewed Miss Maisie, as she was called, I did not know that our scheduled appointments conflicted with her plans to go fishing with her five-year-old granddaughter, whom she was teaching to fish… By transmitting these skills, which are part of collective memory, the senior generation of Gullah women fosters and sustains cultural identity intergenerationally, thus broadening the base of cultural knowledge in the community.”4

Josephine Beoku-Betts

Even more than that, today the weavers of cast nets—who still use the same techniques passed down by their ancestors—and the fishermen who throw the nets are mirroring the exact actions of untold generations of their families. This skill was passed down through their generations, and can be traced back to the shores of the African continent. It’s as if the weaving and casting of these nets is a piece of the past within the present. Sallie Ann Robinson of Daufuskie Island puts it poetically:

“The descendants who cast for shrimp today in the local creeks perform this task with the same grace as performers in a traditional dance.”5

Sallie Ann Robinson

Next Page:

Culture and Storytelling
From baskets to sacred lore, what has been passed down from generation to generation.

Footnotes

  1. Matthew Raiford with Amy Paige Condon, Bress ‘N’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer, (New York: The Countryman Press, 2021), 79. Available here.
  2. “The Gullah Geechee,” Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, accessed March 22, 2021, https://gullahgeecheecorridor.org/thegullahgeechee/.
  3. Josephine A. Beoku-Betts, “We Got Our Way of Cooking Things: Women, Food, and Preservation of Cultural Identity Among the Gullah,” Gender & Society 9, no. 5 (1995), 540.
  4. Ibid, 541.
  5. Sallie Ann Robinson, Cooking the Gullah Way: Morning, Noon, & Night (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 4. Available here.

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