“Back in my youth in the 1940s and 1950s, we had five Geechee communities on Sapelo and more than 450 people. Today, we have one community left and fewer than seventy people; and I fear for the survival of my people on this island. We have very little of our own land left.”1
Cornelia Walker Bailey
The Bailey Family and Belle Marsh
The Jones Family had officially owned Belle Marsh on Sapelo Island, “all sixty acres or more of it,” since 1885. Ada Jones married Gibb Walker—another local of Sapelo Island—and Ada and Gibb were the parents of Hicks Walker, Cornelia Walker Bailey’s father.2 Though there were no written records to tell how long her father’s family had lived on Belle Marsh before 1885, Hicks Walker believed they had lived there for a long time, because a few French words had been passed down in their family vernacular. Because of this, Bailey’s father believed that “someone in his family may have been in bondage to the Frenchmen when they were on the North End [of Sapelo Island, where Belle Marsh is located] in the late 1700s.” However long it was, this was the land that Bailey, her father, her grandparents, and their ancestors before them knew well.
In case you missed it on the Land and Sea page, here is a quote of Bailey describing the land:
“…the most beautiful marsh you’d ever want to see … The high tides on Sapelo are so big that on an especially big tide like a spring tide, when you looked outside, the whole marsh would be white with water. Absolutely white with water … We had beautiful white egrets and ibis that draped themselves in the trees, so many seagulls they could block out the light when they flew over you … There was usually a gentle breeze blowing so we had a saltwater smell all the time. On high tide, you’d smell the salt more and on low tide, you’d get a whiff of the sea and everything in it. Either way, the smell meant home to us. “Just smell that marsh,” Mama would say proudly. “It smell’ so marshy.””4
Cornelia Walker Bailey
Then, in 1949, Cornelia Walker Bailey’s father decided to build the family a new house on their land. As soon as he began work, the white manager on the island came around to see what he was doing. After weeks of prodding, then coercion, and finally a very thinly veiled threat, the island manager convinced the family to abandon the new house and their land on Belle Marsh, or Bailey’s father would lose his job. Instead, the family built a house on and moved to the community of Hog Hammock, which today is the only remaining Geechee community on Sapelo Island. Cornelia Walker Bailey remembers the day her family moved out of Belle Marsh:
“Papa didn’t say nothing as we drove away, not a word. He just looked…and he kept on looking till he couldn’t see Belle Marsh no more… Belle Marsh was the first black community on Sapelo that was closed, but it wasn’t the last, and Papa was never quite right again.”5
Cornelia Walker Bailey
This story, this loss of land, may be unique to Cornelia Walker Bailey’s family; but this scenario was not. This scenario played out dozens of times on Sapelo and on the other Gullah Geechee lands throughout the Lowcountry.
Daufuskie Island and Gilliard Farms
“The woods on Daufuskie are slowly being cleared, and the land on both ends of the island is now being developed, with big houses springing up. Many of the herbs and roots that we knew and used are slowly disappearing, and the native knowledge of their use is disappearing with them.”6
Sallie Ann Robinson
Between 1940 and today, the Gullah population on Daufuskie has gone from 1,000 people to less than 100 people according to Georgia Public Broadcasting by NPR.7 While the island has lost its Gullah population, it has developed a 1,050-acre private community of rental homes, that includes “a clubhouse, several restaurants, a pool, 29 holes of Rees Jones golf and other amenities.” There is also an odd assortment of villas, condos, and rental cottages.8
The Gullah and Geechee who live on the Sea Islands aren’t the only ones losing their land. Matthew Raiford talks about how part of his family’s plot—on the mainland, just outside of Brunswick, Georgia—was “sold off by a distant cousin who felt no kinship.”9 Due to how Gullah Geechee property has passed through so many generations, plots of family land can have dozens of owners who are the descendants of the original landowners. Each one of those dozens has a right to part of the land, even if they no longer live there, have never been to the place and may not have ever met their distant relatives who still do live there. Disingenuous developers have become expert at exploiting these situations, and that is how many Gullah and Geechee people have been losing their ancestral lands, piece by piece.10
The piece of land Matthew Raiford lost in this sale is where his great-grandmother’s house sits. Built with a deep porch “to catch the cross breezes” and a wood-burning stove where she made hot buttermilk griddle cakes—the ones that inspired Raiford’s recipe “Buttermilk Griddle Cakes with Muscadine Jelly,” talked about on his page on this website. The house holds a lot of his family’s history within it, but Raiford says the house is now “worse for wear” since the sale, because the new owners don’t take care of it.11 Anyone who has had to watch the slow decline of a place full of love and memories, without the ability to take action to save it, will know how much sadness this causes.
The Gullah Story of Hilton Head Island
Hilton Head Island is a Sea Island that Gullah families have lived on for centuries. Today it is also home to 33 golf courses and an airport. You can take your pick of vacation home or villa, hotel or spa resort. You can spend tens of thousands of dollars to get married on the beach. There’s a Whole Foods and a Walmart.12 Since a bridge was built connecting the island to the mainland in the 1950s, the demographics have shifted from more than 50% Gullah to more than 80% white today. Gullah land holdings have gone from approximately 3,500 acres to less than 800 acres.13
In this episode of Disrupt & Dismantle, host Soledad O’Brien talks to Gullah and Geechee people whose land is being taken. The Allen family is one of the families whose land has been partially taken on Hilton Head that O’Brien speaks with. Their ancestral graveyard is the resting place of seven generations of the Allen family, including those who had been enslaved on the island. This graveyard sits adjacent to the Allen family’s ancestral land.
Yet somehow, Indigo Run—“a master-planned golf residential community”—now owns the land that the family plot sits on. When members of the Allen family wish to visit their ancestors now, they have to press a call button, and be admitted through the locked gate of the golf community (a community whose name—Indigo Run—pays homage to the crop that many who were enslaved on the island were forced to produce, which is a problem in and of itself).14
Many people outside of Gullah Geechee communities don’t know about the land that is being stolen from these communities. Many people outside of the Lowcountry haven’t even heard of Gullah or Geechee people. And, for many years, Gullah and Geechee people themselves didn’t know about specific historical facts and information about their culture that was hidden behind the walls of academic institutions. This inaccessibility of knowledge is the subject of the next webpage…
Next Page:
Footnotes
- Cornelia Walker Bailey with Christena Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 7. Available here.
- Ibid, 21.
- Ibid, 103.
- Ibid, 19-20.
- Ibid, 103.
- Sallie Ann Robinson, Cooking the Gullah Way: Morning, Noon, & Night (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 133. Available here.
- Gabrielle Ware, “Gullah Geechee Series Part Three: Preserving Daufuskie Island,” Georgia Public Broadcasting, National Public Radio, Accessed May 1, 2021, https://www.gpb.org/news/2015/01/16/gullah-geechee-series-part-three-preserving-daufuskie-island-video#:~:text=Daufuskie%20island’s%20population%20peaked%20in,and%20Hilton%20Head%2C%20South%20Carolina.
- Cele and Lynn Sheldon, “Island Is a World Apart,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 20, 2017, https://www.ajc.com/travel/island-world-apart/xpvUm8Vbrtyzuq117nc5PJ/.
- Matthew Raiford with Amy Paige Condon, Bress ‘N’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer, (New York: The Countryman Press, 2021), 12. Available here.
- Disrupt & Dismantle, season 1, episode 3, “The Battle for Black Land,” hosted by Soledad O’Brien, aired March 12, 2021, BET, https://www.bet.com/video/disrupt-and-dismantle/season-1/full-episodes/episode-103-the-battle-for-black-land.html.
- Raiford, Bress ‘N’ Nyam, 12.
- “Official Hilton Head Island, South Carolina: Vacation & Travel Guide,” Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, April 2, 2018. https://www.hiltonheadisland.org/.
- Disrupt & Dismantle, season 1, episode 3, “The Battle for Black Land,” hosted by Soledad O’Brien, aired March 12, 2021, BET, https://www.bet.com/video/disrupt-and-dismantle/season-1/full-episodes/episode-103-the-battle-for-black-land.html.
- Ibid.