I had spent weeks preparing for the Gullah Geechee Junkanoo Festival at Brookgreen Gardens on September 12. Banners. Signs. Story prompts. Coloring sheets for the children. QR codes. Business cards. I thought through just about everything.
Or so I thought.
What I hadn’t planned for was people walking up to the table and simply telling me their stories.
Someone would see an old photograph and remember somebody. Someone else would start talking about a grandparent. There were memories of places, churches, families and things that aren’t always written down anywhere.
And I listened.
It reminded me why I started the South Island Gullah Geechee Project in the first place.
There are stories all around us tucked inside ordinary lives and ordinary things. A coffee jar. An old photograph. A church fan. A family saying. A place everybody used to know by a name that isn’t on any map. Sometimes all it takes is for somebody to ask.
And then there were the children. I created a coloring page for them featuring a turtle.
Cootuh. Kutah. Both spellings are used, but growing up, I heard cootuh.
I got to tell children at the festival that cootuh is a Gullah Geechee word for turtle. It was such a small thing, but I’ve been thinking about it ever since, because this is how language travels.
A child learns one word. Maybe they take the coloring sheet home. Maybe they ask somebody in their family about it. Maybe an elder says, “Oh yeah, we used to say that,” and now a conversation has started.
That’s preservation, too.
All around us, Junkanoo continued. Drums. Dancing. Singing that stopped me in the middle of conversations more than once. People gathered around indigo and art and food and music.
We sometimes talk about preservation as though its job is to keep something from moving. Put it away. Protect it. Archive it. And yes, there is a place for that work. I’m building some of it myself. But (read this carefully) culture also has to move. From mouth to ear. From elder to child. From memory to story. From one generation to the next.
That’s what I watched happening at Brookgreen.
I was proud to be there. Proud that this was happening at home, in Georgetown County. Proud to set up the South Island Gullah Geechee Project among people doing the work of celebrating and carrying Gullah Geechee culture forward.
Mostly, though, I came home thinking about all those people who stopped at my table. They confirmed something for me: people have stories they want to tell. Sometimes they are simply waiting for someone to ask. So, we’ll keep asking and we’ll keep listening.
Because a proud people should have the opportunity to tell our own stories, and we intend to.