Hunting Survivals

Chapter 3 follows the production of 1920s and 1930s Sapelo reports, illustrating how ideas about African survivals and the Gullah inside and outside of the academe touched down on the island and in the region. Chapter 3 investigates W. Robert Moore's, Lydia Parrish's and Lorenzo D. Turner's work in coastal Georgia and on Sapelo. Their interactions with the Islanders and their African survivals theories are also analyzed in this chapter.

The 1920s and 1930s Voodoo Craze

This chapter explores the 1920s and 1930s "voodoo craze" by examing the way that negative ideas about "Africa" and "Africans" during these years, and the prevelance of the common association between Africa and spiritual primitivism (superstitions, the belief in black magic, and dark rituals) became a prominent theme in assessments of Gullah folk's African connection. Using newspapers that circulated in popular migration destinations, films, plays, and travel writers' accounts to trace popular ideas about African survivals, this chapter charts a mounting obsession with southern black voodoo and superstition that reenergizes the debate over African survivals in the academe.

From African Survivals to the Fight for Survival

During the GGCHC meeting held on Sapelo in June 2009, when describing all of the roadblocks that the Islanders faced while trying to control, protect, and revitalize their community, Cornelia Bailey said, “I’m not here to paint a pretty picture. The picture is not pretty. It is ugly when it comes to us surviving in Hog Hammock. So we are surviving because we are survivors. We had the harshest thing called slavery and we still survived it.”...

Drums and Shadows

Chapter 4 follows the production of Drums and Shadows, illustrating how ideas about African survivals and the Gullah inside and outside of the academe touched down on the Sapelo Island and in the region. This chapter chronicles the feud that ensued between Granger, national Federal Writers' Project administrators, and the scholars who were consulted about the study.

The Misremembered Past

For the past twenty years, on the third Saturday in October, scores of visitors have flocked to the ferry headed for Sapelo Island, Georgia, to partake in the annual Cultural Day festivities. The fund-raising festival hosted by the Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society always attracts tourists who eagerly anticipate an encounter with ...

Gone but Not Forgotten

Chapter 6 explores the legacies of 1920s and 1930s studies within the Gullah revival and the land battles raging throughout the region. This chapter recounts the marriage of low country blacks' newly embraced Gullah identity, and their fight for the survival of coastal black communities like Sapelo. Chapter 6 investigates cultural preservation and historic preservation—ideas that became deeply contested categories as Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commissioners and Gullah communities try to define their past and plan their future.

Reworking Roots

Chapter 5 discusses the legacies of 1920s and 1930s studies within the Gullah revival and the land battles raging throughout the region. Chapter 5 unearths the origins of the revival, analyzes the lull that proceeds it, and explores the new meaning of "Gullah" that takes shape during the 1970, 1980s and 1990s in the wake of the Black Studies Movement.

From Wild Savages to Beloved Primitives

This chapter investigates the emergence of Gullah folk in the national imagination by exploring the convergence of the shift from Victorian thought to modernist thought during the World War I era; the advent of the social sciences; the Harlem Renaissance; the Great Migration; and the successes of Julia Peterkin's Gullah novels. Together, these phenomena, and the new strand of primitivism that took root as a result, are presented as essential forces that contributed to the reimagining of the value of black people's African heritage.