Spring 2021 Gullah Geechee Virtual Research Tour

Talking to the Dead is an ethnography of seven Gullah/Geechee women from the South Carolina lowcountry. These women communicate with their ancestors through dreams, prayer, and visions and traditional crafts and customs, such as storytelling, basket making, and ecstatic singing in their churches. Like other Gullah/Geechee women of the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, these women, through their active communication with the deceased, make choices and receive guidance about how to live out their faith and engage with the living. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant emphasizes that this communication affirms the women's spiritual faith--which seamlessly integrates Christian and folk traditions--and reinforces their position as powerful culture keepers within Gullah/Geechee society. By looking in depth at this long-standing spiritual practice, Manigault-Bryant highlights the subversive ingenuity that lowcountry inhabitants use to thrive spiritually and to maintain a sense of continuity with the past.

The essays, which range in coverage from the founding of the Georgia colony in the early 1700s through the present era, explore a range of topics, all within the larger context of the Atlantic world. Included are essays on the double-edged freedom that the American Revolution made possible to black women, the lowcountry as site of the largest gathering of African Muslims in early North America, and the coexisting worlds of Christianity and conjuring in coastal Georgia and the links (with variations) to African practices.

A historical analysis of the Gullahs of South Carolina, and an imaginative and suggestive treatment of slave religion and social cohesion, "A Peculiar People" Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among The Gullahs examines the components that provided the Sea Island slave population with their cultural autonomy and sense of consciousness. The elements of community, religion, and resistance are examined in relationship to this unique people. Margaret Creel traces three successive importations of slaves into the South Carolina coastal region, addressing each as a distinct period. She argues that the large numbers of slaves imported between 1749 and 1787 came predominantly from Senegambia, the Gold Coast, and Liberia. The majority of the Gullah population came from these areas of West Africa. Combining anthropological and historical studies with observations, reports, manuscripts, and letters relating to the Gullahs, the book creates an original and exceptionally fascinating analysis of Gullah culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Nancy Roberts's Southern Ghost Lore Revival--Exhumed and Improved for Fearless Readers
Nancy Roberts has often been described to as the "First Lady of American Folklore" and the title is well deserved. Throughout her decades-long career, Roberts documented supernatural experiences and interviewed hundreds of people about their recollections of encounters with the supernatural. This nationally renowned writer began her undertaking in this ghostly realm as a freelance writer for the Charlotte Observer. Encouraged by Carl Sandburg, who enjoyed her stories and articles, Roberts wrote her first book in 1958. Aptly called a "custodian of the twilight zone" by Southern Living magazine, Roberts based her suspenseful stories on interviews and her rich knowledge of American folklore. Her stories were always rooted in history, which earned her a certificate of commendation from the American Association of State and Local History for her books on the Carolinas and Appalachia.