Taking Back Knowledge: How Gullah Geechee Chefs are Reclaiming Their Histories

“The first to question the representation of slaves in Carolina rice fields as unskilled laborers was historian Converse Clowse, who revealed the importance of African skills in colonial ranchings and agriculture. See his Economic Beginnings in Colonial South Carolina, 1670-1730 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971).”¹

Judith Carney, historian

What is historiography?

It wasn’t until the year 1971 that the first historian argued for the importance of African agricultural knowledge within the historiography of the U.S. South, and specifically rice cultivation. Historiographies are basically the history of history. They are composed of the academic writings on a certain subject, somewhat like a timeline of the scholars who have studied and published on the subject and how their ideas have changed over time with new evidence or by looking at old evidence in a new way.

The issue is: the only people who have the time and resources (and, one might argue, inclination; academics need to work on their prose) to follow historiographical trends closely are academic historians. Academic historians do important and rigorous research, but by and large they write this research into academic journal articles and academic press publications that are not intended for or read by general audiences. 

So it is not surprising that Cornelia Walker Bailey didn’t learn about this information, first published in 1971, until almost two decades later in 1989…

“It was in Africa that I learned…”

In 1989, Cornelia Walker Bailey was invited to be part of a Gullah Geechee delegation that was visiting Sierra Leone as guests of then-president Joseph Momoh. Momoh had visited the Sea Islands in 1988 and “he was so struck with the similarities he saw between Gullah people in the Sea Islands and people in his country that he invited a delegation of Gullah people to visit Sierra Leone as guests of his government.”²

Bailey’s visit stayed with her for the rest of her life, and she dedicated an entire chapter of her memoir to it, describing many of the heartfelt interactions she had on the trip and how incredible she found the land and its resemblance to her home of Sapelo Island. “The terrain is similar, the seabirds are similar, the fish are similar—the similarities are just out of this world.”³

During this trip, historians and other scholars who had been studying Gullah Geechee culture, language and history for decades presented to the delegation. Bailey speaks for six entire pages about the things she learned there that she hadn’t known before, starting many of the paragraphs with “It was in Africa that I learned…” The knowledge she learned included information about African mastery over rice and how the ancestors of the Gullah Geechee were chosen specifically for their agricultural knowledge, but she also learned about many other things scholars had learned over the previous decades, but hadn’t ever shared with Gullah Geechee communities.

“We sat there, very quiet, listening to every word, thinking these professors know more about us than we do about ourselves because so much of what they were saying was totally new to us…We were grateful but felt so let down that we had to come thousands of miles to finally learn who we were. I was angry that I didn’t learn these things in my own country. This knowledge should have been in our heads when we went to Africa.”⁴

Cornelia Walker Bailey

This episode highlights the gaping divide between the work that scholars do and the information reaching stakeholder communities whose past and present are tied to that information. When Gullah Geechee people finally realized this, they were the ones to take up the mantle of educating their communities and the rest of the country about who they are and what they have given to the world. Bailey said about the lectures they received in Africa: “…we hung onto every word. We had to remember everything so we could tell people at home.”⁵

Cornelia Walker Bailey wrote her memoir in the year 2000 and it was at the vanguard of books centered around Gullah Geechee knowledge, history and experience that were written for non-academic audiences, and many were written by Gullah and Geechee people themselves. The Library of Congress’ Gullah/Geechee History and Culture Research Guide lists forty-seven print resources for general readers on the subject. Of those books, thirty-three of them were published after the year 2000.

Included on this list are Vertamae Smart Grosvenor and Sallie Ann Robinson’s cookbooks, along with Cornelia Walker Bailey’s memoir.⁶ This highlights how the Gullah Geechee themselves have been the ones to surge forward, making sure new generations have access to the histories and knowledge of their heritage. Vertamae Grosvenor writes in the Introduction of her cookbook about the things she didn’t know growing up, but that she had learned since and would go on to share with others in the pages of that cookbook:

“Home was where “yenna come nyam” meant “come and eat.” I didn’t know that nyam was an African root word used throughout the diaspora. I didn’t know there were cultural reasons why we were big rice eaters, that there were African retentions in the way Grandma Sula made okra soup, in the way Granddaddy made baskets, or in the way Mr. Knowels cast his net in the river. What did I know from African retentions or diaspora?”⁷

Vertamae Smart Grosvenor

Like Bailey, Grosvenor learned about the history of her Geechee culture—a history that hadn’t been shared with her or her community for many years—and then determined to teach others about it herself. Grosvenor, along with others, found great success teaching about the Gullah Geechee culture through a somewhat unassuming medium: food.

Solutions in Cookbook Form

“A cookbook can serve simply as a compendium of recipes or it can offer a story of a people and a place.” ⁸

Matthew Raiford

Food is a uniquely portable and immersive piece of culture, utilizing every human sense. Though traditional Gullah and Geechee cuisine is “slow food,” made with ingredients sown and caught from the land in a ritual as old as their ancestors, the recipes that Grosvenor, Raiford and Robinson share in their cookbooks still give a point of connection into their culture for outsiders.⁹ This point of connection can be an entry point, a beginning step into a deep journey of learning about and understanding a culture different from their own, while also eating outrageously good food. Through this journey, outsiders can come to appreciate the connections that Gullah and Geechee communities have with their past, their culture, and their land, all of it seen through the lens of food.

More than that, these Gullah Geechee chefs are using their storytelling cookbooks to celebrate their histories, showcasing the knowledge that was kept from their communities for so long. Through these storytelling cookbooks, Gullah and Geechee people are reestablishing ownership of their histories. Instead of these histories living in dusty and dryly written academic tomes, they now come alive in colorful, engaging, accessible cookbooks written by Gullah and Geechee chefs. By writing the stories of their ancestral knowledge of rice next to delicious recipes that anyone and everyone can see and read, cook and eat, these Gullah Geechee chefs are bringing their histories to life and opening them to even more people.

And scholars can lend a hand…

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Footnotes

1. Judith Ann Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation In the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 180.
2. 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), 299. Available here.
3. Ibid, 304.
4. Ibid, 315.
5. Ibid, 310.
6. “Print Resources,” Gullah/Geechee History and Culture, Library of Congress, accessed May 1, 2022. https://guides.loc.gov/gullah-geechee-history/books
7. Vertamae Grosvenor, Vertamae Cooks in The Americas’ Family Kitchen (San Francisco: KQED Books, 1996), 16. Available here.
8. Matthew Raiford with Amy Paige Condon, Bress ‘N’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer, (New York: The Countryman Press, 2021), 20. Available here.
9. Kendra Hamilton, “The Taste of the Sun: Okra Soup in the Geechee Tradition,” Callaloo 30, no. 1 (2007): 78.