Suggested Link: Gullah | On America’s Atlantic Coast, up above Florida, the owners of a small property have decided to sell. The ad doesn’t look like much … an isolated island block in the bush, … yours for just two and half million, American dollars that is.
Sounds pricey, but we’re talking position, position, position. The Sea Islands, off the Carolina and Georgia coasts, are fast becoming some of America’s most desirable real estate.
The islands are home to the country’s sixth wealthiest town. They’re also home to a people known as “The Gullah” … descendents of former slaves from Africa who regard the Sea Islands as their homeland.
Many of them still live on the same plantations their ancestors won in the civil war.
And as Tim Lester reports, they’re now in danger of losing them to a new master … the developer and his dollar. |
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| Sea island scapes/wharf | Lester: Saturday morning in a small hall on the coast of Georgia, and the Spauldings are gathering for a thirty minute ferry ride into family history. | 01:30 |
|
| James: I feel great. It just brings back the memories, bring back all the memories to me. | 01:53 |
| Group on boat | Lester: It's a journey James Spalding last made as a 20 year old in 1946, to Sapelo Island, home for him as a child and generations before him, all the way back to their tortured departure from west Africa. | 02:05 |
|
| The Spauldings are among many thousands of Americans now reclaiming a culture carved on another continent, and preserved with centuries of isolation, on the so-called Sea Islands, that dot America's southern Atlantic coast. | 02:21 |
|
| Music |
|
| Marquetta and Lester walk along beach | Marquetta: Well, whenever I come here I feel rejuvenated, I feel like I've joined with my ancestors, because whenever I look out on the Atlantic, I can still here their voices, I can still feel their spirits. So it's a place I like to come to and meditate. | 02:42 |
|
| Lester: She carries the title ‘ Queen Quet’. Marquetta Goodwine traded Manhattan and university degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science - for a mission on the South Carolina and Georgia islands, where slave traders brought her ancestors. | 02:56 |
|
| Marquetta: Out there in the Atlantic itself, you would have seen slave ships docked, because what they would do is leave the slave ships out at that distance and then take us off -- the cargo, the human cargo off, and put us on flat bottomed wooden boats to bring you into the plantations, and then people would be brought off in chains. | 03:12 |
| Marquetta addresses school children | Marquetta: They are celebrating, they are at home, they are on the continent. What continent am I talking about? Kids: Africa. | 03:31 |
|
| Marquetta: Okay, so now they are still at home in the motherland, in Africa… |
|
|
| Lester: Appointed as both monarch and mouthpiece for her people, she wages her battle in schools, at public meetings, in the media, to reinvigorate traditions lost to most black Americans, but still alive here. And known as Gullah. |
|
| Super: Marquetta Goodwine Gullah-Geechee Queen | Marquetta: Well, out of the population of people of African descent in America in general, the estimate some five hundred to seven hundred and fifty thousand that are Gullah. They still speak our language, carry on the traditions, carry on the spiritual practices and so on. And live in our homeland, which is the Sea Islands and roughly 30 miles inland to the mainland. | 03:58 |
| Dance classes | Drum music | 04:18 |
|
| Marquetta: Rhythm. Everything's about rhythm and it's about celebrating Gullah culture. |
|
|
| Lester: The rhythm extends to a unique Gullah dialect, combining African languages with English, and as you'll see, it's even there as they pray. |
|
|
| Drum music |
|
|
| Lester: Unmistakable faces of Africa. In the way they greet one another, even in the food many still eat -- a culture bridging the Atlantic. | 04:48 |
|
| Marquetta: So many times people don't want to discuss our culture and who we are, because then to even say who we are means that you have to go to the past, because the past is the present for us. Most of us still live on the very plantations where our ancestors were enslaved to work cotton, rice and indigo. | 05:00 |
| James gets off boat | Lester: And so it is on Sapelo Island. Many on the Spauldings' bus tour are making their first visit. | 05:21 |
| Stanley driving | Stanley: People lock their doors, you know. Vehicles, keys stay in it. | 05:29 |
|
| Lester: But Stanley Walker is part of a tiny community that lives here, on land their ancestors worked for the slave owner, a man from whom many slaves took their name -- Thomas Spaulding lived in the big house. |
|
| Spaulding plantation house/Stanley | Stanley: Bad spirits in the plantation house. You can't hardly get nobody there that want to stay in it, you know. | 05:48 |
| Spaulding plantation house | Lester: In civil war turmoil 140 years ago, the slaves won much of this land. And their families have held it since. | 05:59 |
| Stanley driving | Stanley: And everybody wondered what I was going to do. I told them I'm going to do what I do best, and that's talk. And I been talking ever since. | 06:09 |
|
| Lester: Above rattles in his 20 year old Dodge van, Stanley talk in part about how hard it is to find a wife on Sapelo. Everyone's family. |
|
|
| Stanley: Yeah, by the time I got to start dating, you know, like no, you can't talk to this one, because your grand daddy, great grand daddy has a cousin that married her great, great, great so and so. And oh, man! On and on. | 06:24 |
|
| Lester: He talks too of the most pressing topic here -- developers with big chequebooks. | 06:43 |
|
| Stanley: Yes, they are slowly coming over here. They going eventually end up chasing everybody out. And I'll be standing on the dock one day tell my grandkids, you know, I used to live over there. I remember the area I used to play in and stuff like that. It's coming. | 06:48 |
| Cornelia and Ben | Cornelia: So this is important to us. It's like Custer's last stand almost, you know. We can see the wagons circling, and we don't want them to circle. | 07:04 |
| Cornelia and Ben | Lester: Cornelia Bailey and Ben Hall are cousins in Hog Hammock, population 70. The nearest thing Sapelo has to a capital, and the last Gullah settlement on any of the Georgia islands. | 07:13 |
|
| Cornelia: We grew up with being told that a poor person have three things going for them -- and that's God, your word and a piece of land. | 07:27 |
|
| Ben: They came and sacrificed, they bled, they died for this land. I feel like it's a birthright that I have, and that I should never get rid of it myself. | 07:38 |
| Hog Hammock | Lester: But who'd take Hog Hammock from them? Here they insist there any number of faceless dealers on mobile phones circling Sapelo. | 07:53 |
|
| Ben: Because they're there, constantly trying to buy property in the community. Cornelia: Constantly. | 08:05 |
|
| Ben: See, we know they're not buying it just to keep it natural, like it is. Because they're in the business of development. |
|
| Beach scenes | Music | 08:22 |
| Hilton Head resorts | Lester: If you doubt developers could warm to Hog Hammock, look at what they've done on other Sea Islands. Like Hilton Head -- they've engulfed it. On this island alone, 24 golf courses, centrepieces in a wildly wealthy playground for some of America's most affluent. | 08:33 |
| Lester and Michael | Michael: Almost every home on the island is either facing a fairway or green, or on a lagoon , everything round here is built on golf. | 08:56 |
|
| Lester: Annual membership to this golf club is $70,000. |
|
| Michael Dontje Hilton Head Home Builders Assn. | Michael: I'm a golfer, I get out as much as I can. But it's just really a very pleasant place to play. | 09:13 |
|
| Lester: Harbourtown is just one of four golf courses inside what they call a gated community, or ironically, a plantation. All behind security. |
|
| Michael Super: Michael Dontje Home Builders Association | Michael: At this plantation for example, the public can come in. They pay a fee, and they're monitored when they're in here. It gives people a sense of security, plus the fact that the architectural standards are very high here. | 09:32 |
|
| Music |
|
| Hilton Head homes | Lester: Hilton Head is so pricey it subsidised police and fireman to live nearby. Otherwise they, like the Gullah people, would never afford it. | 09:54 |
|
| But new wealth has built out this small island with what's now ranked America's sixth wealthiest town. The average home here fetches three and a half million dollars -- double Beverley Hills prices. | 10:06 |
|
| But for all their effort, Hilton Head's developers couldn't keep Gullah culture. |
|
|
| Marquetta: As I drive over the asphalt and the concrete, I can hear my ancestors crying out from beneath it. | 10:27 |
| Marquetta | I can feel a lot of spirits that are un-rested there, because a lot of gravesites have been disrupted for people to put golf courses, and tennis courts, and clubhouses and things that are for recreation and no preservation. | 10:34 |
| Michael | Michael: Unfortunately growth and development I don't think has been terribly sensitive to them. | 10:50 |
|
| Lester: It's pushed them out. |
|
|
| Michael: It's pushing them, it has pushed them slowly into one section of the island. |
|
| Baptist church service | Pastor: Dear Lord, you have always been with this church. You have been with this church for 142 years, dear father. We want to thank you that. Dear Lord, we really… | 11:01 |
|
| Lester: Nearby locals and some visitors and some visitors from Sapelo Island celebrate the anniversary of a local church formed in the dying days of slavery. |
|
|
| Praying |
|
|
| Pastor: Amen, amen and amen. |
|
|
Kaye Horton St. Simons resident | Kaye: There is the feeling that there will be no more left of the wonderful black heritage on this island. And we will become just another ho hum community of golf communities and gated communities. Just like the other islands. | 11:42 |
| Kaye at church service | Lester: Local resident, Kaye Houghton has joined this island's African-American community in its fight to put some land beyond wealth, arguing the new money isn't working with old ways. | 12:06 |
|
| Kaye: So they have come in not to be part of the community, but to displace the community. | 12:23 |
| Gullah festival | Music | 12:30 |
|
| Lester: Once a year, thousands travel from across the U.S. to Beaufort, South Carolina, to celebrate the survival of their links with Africa. |
|
|
| Singing/clapping |
|
| Rodriquez at festival | Rodriquez: I'm still eating some of the same food that we brought from Africa. Black eye peas, cow peas. I think it's one of the most precious things in the world to me, is to be Gullah. | 12:52 |
|
| Lester: Among those at the festival, story tellers, Vermelle Rodriquez, with the quilted account of Gullah history. | 13:010 |
| Quilts | Rodriquez: The blocks at the bottom of that quilt represent all of my ancestors; white bleached bones that are underneath that Atlantic Ocean. This time of the year, those bones begin to rise up and they're pushing the wind and the rain and the rain and the water, everything up in the atmosphere, so hurricanes, all hurricanes do start off of the coast of Africa. | 13:1913:46 |
|
| Music |
|
| Dancing | Marquetta: All the world has been very effective at burying Gullah culture. The world's been very effective at burying African culture of any sort. |
|
| Marquetta | The world has been very effective, especially of eliminating thoughts of slavery. | 13:55 |
|
| Music |
|
| Women walk with bikes | Lester: And for all the resilience in Hog Hammock, there's a feeling among residence the world is about to have its way here too. The owners of this modest bed and breakfast have broken ranks and put their property on the market. They wouldn't talk with us. Their cousin, Cornelia Bailey stopped short of using the word treachery, but leaves no doubt she's not following. | 14:06 |
| Cornelia Bailey Hog Hammock resident
| Cornelia: There will be a few of us left on this island, with a shotgun on our knees, chasing off any developers. [laughs] And we might be called activists, renegade, anything you want, but there are going to be a few of us standing there. If I can buy a pair of shoes and buy a dozen eggs and go to the doctor and pay my bills, and I got a roof over my head, what would I want to do with a whole excess amount of money that the government going to take from me anyhow. | 14:31 |
| James leaving Sapelo | Lester: For James Spaulding, the return to Sapelo is stirring. | 14:57 |
|
| Woman: Come back and visit again, right. James: Yes, I will. |
|
|
| Lester: He leaves what may be his last visit home, thinking in terms of restoration, not development. | 15:12 |
| James | James: Well, I don't think you understand, I would care very much to understand for that. I would like to see the, the ancestors you understand restore what has been here before. I really would like to see that happen again. | 15:20 |
|
| Lester: With many African-Americans now celebrating their Gullah heritage, and the places where their forebears preserved it, developers may just have to do without the land owned by the last of the Georgia Island communities. | 15:38 |
|
Michael | Michael: From a businessman's perspective, from a development type thing, it's a tremendous success. I think when you step back and you look at it as a native islander, I think there's a touch of tragedy to it. | 15:52 |
|
| Music |
|
|
| Lester: Hog Hammock or Hilton Head? To a large extent development has one out in America's Sea Islands. | 16:08 |
| Marquetta | Marquetta: We feel that if you came and saw this environment in its natural state, and thought it was beautiful, then why isn't it beautiful enough for you to leave it like that and live in? | 16:17 |
|
| Music |
|
| Suggested Link: Gullah | On America’s Atlantic Coast, up above Florida, the owners of a small property have decided to sell. The ad doesn’t look like much … an isolated island block in the bush, … yours for just two and half million, American dollars that is.
Sounds pricey, but we’re talking position, position, position. The Sea Islands, off the Carolina and Georgia coasts, are fast becoming some of America’s most desirable real estate.
The islands are home to the country’s sixth wealthiest town. They’re also home to a people known as “The Gullah” … descendents of former slaves from Africa who regard the Sea Islands as their homeland.
Many of them still live on the same plantations their ancestors won in the civil war.
And as Tim Lester reports, they’re now in danger of losing them to a new master … the developer and his dollar. |
|
|
|
|
|
| Sea island scapes/wharf | Lester: Saturday morning in a small hall on the coast of Georgia, and the Spauldings are gathering for a thirty minute ferry ride into family history. | 01:30 |
|
| James: I feel great. It just brings back the memories, bring back all the memories to me. | 01:53 |
| Group on boat | Lester: It's a journey James Spalding last made as a 20 year old in 1946, to Sapelo Island, home for him as a child and generations before him, all the way back to their tortured departure from west Africa. | 02:05 |
|
| The Spauldings are among many thousands of Americans now reclaiming a culture carved on another continent, and preserved with centuries of isolation, on the so-called Sea Islands, that dot America's southern Atlantic coast. | 02:21 |
|
| Music |
|
| Marquetta and Lester walk along beach | Marquetta: Well, whenever I come here I feel rejuvenated, I feel like I've joined with my ancestors, because whenever I look out on the Atlantic, I can still here their voices, I can still feel their spirits. So it's a place I like to come to and meditate. | 02:42 |
|
| Lester: She carries the title ‘ Queen Quet’. Marquetta Goodwine traded Manhattan and university degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science - for a mission on the South Carolina and Georgia islands, where slave traders brought her ancestors. | 02:56 |
|
| Marquetta: Out there in the Atlantic itself, you would have seen slave ships docked, because what they would do is leave the slave ships out at that distance and then take us off -- the cargo, the human cargo off, and put us on flat bottomed wooden boats to bring you into the plantations, and then people would be brought off in chains. | 03:12 |
| Marquetta addresses school children | Marquetta: They are celebrating, they are at home, they are on the continent. What continent am I talking about? Kids: Africa. | 03:31 |
|
| Marquetta: Okay, so now they are still at home in the motherland, in Africa… |
|
|
| Lester: Appointed as both monarch and mouthpiece for her people, she wages her battle in schools, at public meetings, in the media, to reinvigorate traditions lost to most black Americans, but still alive here. And known as Gullah. |
|
| Super: Marquetta Goodwine Gullah-Geechee Queen | Marquetta: Well, out of the population of people of African descent in America in general, the estimate some five hundred to seven hundred and fifty thousand that are Gullah. They still speak our language, carry on the traditions, carry on the spiritual practices and so on. And live in our homeland, which is the Sea Islands and roughly 30 miles inland to the mainland. | 03:58 |
| Dance classes | Drum music | 04:18 |
|
| Marquetta: Rhythm. Everything's about rhythm and it's about celebrating Gullah culture. |
|
|
| Lester: The rhythm extends to a unique Gullah dialect, combining African languages with English, and as you'll see, it's even there as they pray. |
|
|
| Drum music |
|
|
| Lester: Unmistakable faces of Africa. In the way they greet one another, even in the food many still eat -- a culture bridging the Atlantic. | 04:48 |
|
| Marquetta: So many times people don't want to discuss our culture and who we are, because then to even say who we are means that you have to go to the past, because the past is the present for us. Most of us still live on the very plantations where our ancestors were enslaved to work cotton, rice and indigo. | 05:00 |
| James gets off boat | Lester: And so it is on Sapelo Island. Many on the Spauldings' bus tour are making their first visit. | 05:21 |
| Stanley driving | Stanley: People lock their doors, you know. Vehicles, keys stay in it. | 05:29 |
|
| Lester: But Stanley Walker is part of a tiny community that lives here, on land their ancestors worked for the slave owner, a man from whom many slaves took their name -- Thomas Spaulding lived in the big house. |
|
| Spaulding plantation house/Stanley | Stanley: Bad spirits in the plantation house. You can't hardly get nobody there that want to stay in it, you know. | 05:48 |
| Spaulding plantation house | Lester: In civil war turmoil 140 years ago, the slaves won much of this land. And their families have held it since. | 05:59 |
| Stanley driving | Stanley: And everybody wondered what I was going to do. I told them I'm going to do what I do best, and that's talk. And I been talking ever since. | 06:09 |
|
| Lester: Above rattles in his 20 year old Dodge van, Stanley talk in part about how hard it is to find a wife on Sapelo. Everyone's family. |
|
|
| Stanley: Yeah, by the time I got to start dating, you know, like no, you can't talk to this one, because your grand daddy, great grand daddy has a cousin that married her great, great, great so and so. And oh, man! On and on. | 06:24 |
|
| Lester: He talks too of the most pressing topic here -- developers with big chequebooks. | 06:43 |
|
| Stanley: Yes, they are slowly coming over here. They going eventually end up chasing everybody out. And I'll be standing on the dock one day tell my grandkids, you know, I used to live over there. I remember the area I used to play in and stuff like that. It's coming. | 06:48 |
| Cornelia and Ben | Cornelia: So this is important to us. It's like Custer's last stand almost, you know. We can see the wagons circling, and we don't want them to circle. | 07:04 |
| Cornelia and Ben | Lester: Cornelia Bailey and Ben Hall are cousins in Hog Hammock, population 70. The nearest thing Sapelo has to a capital, and the last Gullah settlement on any of the Georgia islands. | 07:13 |
|
| Cornelia: We grew up with being told that a poor person have three things going for them -- and that's God, your word and a piece of land. | 07:27 |
|
| Ben: They came and sacrificed, they bled, they died for this land. I feel like it's a birthright that I have, and that I should never get rid of it myself. | 07:38 |
| Hog Hammock | Lester: But who'd take Hog Hammock from them? Here they insist there any number of faceless dealers on mobile phones circling Sapelo. | 07:53 |
|
| Ben: Because they're there, constantly trying to buy property in the community. Cornelia: Constantly. | 08:05 |
|
| Ben: See, we know they're not buying it just to keep it natural, like it is. Because they're in the business of development. |
|
| Beach scenes | Music | 08:22 |
| Hilton Head resorts | Lester: If you doubt developers could warm to Hog Hammock, look at what they've done on other Sea Islands. Like Hilton Head -- they've engulfed it. On this island alone, 24 golf courses, centrepieces in a wildly wealthy playground for some of America's most affluent. | 08:33 |
| Lester and Michael | Michael: Almost every home on the island is either facing a fairway or green, or on a lagoon , everything round here is built on golf. | 08:56 |
|
| Lester: Annual membership to this golf club is $70,000. |
|
| Michael Dontje Hilton Head Home Builders Assn. | Michael: I'm a golfer, I get out as much as I can. But it's just really a very pleasant place to play. | 09:13 |
|
| Lester: Harbourtown is just one of four golf courses inside what they call a gated community, or ironically, a plantation. All behind security. |
|
| Michael Super: Michael Dontje Home Builders Association | Michael: At this plantation for example, the public can come in. They pay a fee, and they're monitored when they're in here. It gives people a sense of security, plus the fact that the architectural standards are very high here. | 09:32 |
|
| Music |
|
| Hilton Head homes | Lester: Hilton Head is so pricey it subsidised police and fireman to live nearby. Otherwise they, like the Gullah people, would never afford it. | 09:54 |
|
| But new wealth has built out this small island with what's now ranked America's sixth wealthiest town. The average home here fetches three and a half million dollars -- double Beverley Hills prices. | 10:06 |
|
| But for all their effort, Hilton Head's developers couldn't keep Gullah culture. |
|
|
| Marquetta: As I drive over the asphalt and the concrete, I can hear my ancestors crying out from beneath it. | 10:27 |
| Marquetta | I can feel a lot of spirits that are un-rested there, because a lot of gravesites have been disrupted for people to put golf courses, and tennis courts, and clubhouses and things that are for recreation and no preservation. | 10:34 |
| Michael | Michael: Unfortunately growth and development I don't think has been terribly sensitive to them. | 10:50 |
|
| Lester: It's pushed them out. |
|
|
| Michael: It's pushing them, it has pushed them slowly into one section of the island. |
|
| Baptist church service | Pastor: Dear Lord, you have always been with this church. You have been with this church for 142 years, dear father. We want to thank you that. Dear Lord, we really… | 11:01 |
|
| Lester: Nearby locals and some visitors and some visitors from Sapelo Island celebrate the anniversary of a local church formed in the dying days of slavery. |
|
|
| Praying |
|
|
| Pastor: Amen, amen and amen. |
|
|
Kaye Horton St. Simons resident | Kaye: There is the feeling that there will be no more left of the wonderful black heritage on this island. And we will become just another ho hum community of golf communities and gated communities. Just like the other islands. | 11:42 |
| Kaye at church service | Lester: Local resident, Kaye Houghton has joined this island's African-American community in its fight to put some land beyond wealth, arguing the new money isn't working with old ways. | 12:06 |
|
| Kaye: So they have come in not to be part of the community, but to displace the community. | 12:23 |
| Gullah festival | Music | 12:30 |
|
| Lester: Once a year, thousands travel from across the U.S. to Beaufort, South Carolina, to celebrate the survival of their links with Africa. |
|
|
| Singing/clapping |
|
| Rodriquez at festival | Rodriquez: I'm still eating some of the same food that we brought from Africa. Black eye peas, cow peas. I think it's one of the most precious things in the world to me, is to be Gullah. | 12:52 |
|
| Lester: Among those at the festival, story tellers, Vermelle Rodriquez, with the quilted account of Gullah history. | 13:010 |
| Quilts | Rodriquez: The blocks at the bottom of that quilt represent all of my ancestors; white bleached bones that are underneath that Atlantic Ocean. This time of the year, those bones begin to rise up and they're pushing the wind and the rain and the rain and the water, everything up in the atmosphere, so hurricanes, all hurricanes do start off of the coast of Africa. | 13:1913:46 |
|
| Music |
|
| Dancing | Marquetta: All the world has been very effective at burying Gullah culture. The world's been very effective at burying African culture of any sort. |
|
| Marquetta | The world has been very effective, especially of eliminating thoughts of slavery. | 13:55 |
|
| Music |
|
| Women walk with bikes | Lester: And for all the resilience in Hog Hammock, there's a feeling among residence the world is about to have its way here too. The owners of this modest bed and breakfast have broken ranks and put their property on the market. They wouldn't talk with us. Their cousin, Cornelia Bailey stopped short of using the word treachery, but leaves no doubt she's not following. | 14:06 |
| Cornelia Bailey Hog Hammock resident
| Cornelia: There will be a few of us left on this island, with a shotgun on our knees, chasing off any developers. [laughs] And we might be called activists, renegade, anything you want, but there are going to be a few of us standing there. If I can buy a pair of shoes and buy a dozen eggs and go to the doctor and pay my bills, and I got a roof over my head, what would I want to do with a whole excess amount of money that the government going to take from me anyhow. | 14:31 |
| James leaving Sapelo | Lester: For James Spaulding, the return to Sapelo is stirring. | 14:57 |
|
| Woman: Come back and visit again, right. James: Yes, I will. |
|
|
| Lester: He leaves what may be his last visit home, thinking in terms of restoration, not development. | 15:12 |
| James | James: Well, I don't think you understand, I would care very much to understand for that. I would like to see the, the ancestors you understand restore what has been here before. I really would like to see that happen again. | 15:20 |
|
| Lester: With many African-Americans now celebrating their Gullah heritage, and the places where their forebears preserved it, developers may just have to do without the land owned by the last of the Georgia Island communities. | 15:38 |
|
Michael | Michael: From a businessman's perspective, from a development type thing, it's a tremendous success. I think when you step back and you look at it as a native islander, I think there's a touch of tragedy to it. | 15:52 |
|
| Music |
|
|
| Lester: Hog Hammock or Hilton Head? To a large extent development has one out in America's Sea Islands. | 16:08 |
| Marquetta | Marquetta: We feel that if you came and saw this environment in its natural state, and thought it was beautiful, then why isn't it beautiful enough for you to leave it like that and live in? | 16:17 |
|
| Music |
|