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Home Remedies, Herb Doctors, and Granny Midwives
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12320 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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1 / 1987 |
4,138 Words |
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Vennie Deas-Moore
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My mother approaches to relax in the chair behind me. Her hair is silver, but her build and stamina are that of a person years younger than herself. My sons love to visit their grandmother in the village of McClellanville - our family home for generations - despite the abundance of mosquitoes and horseflies almost large enough to ride.
My hometown is a small hamlet on one of the Sea Islands. These islands are found off the Atlantic coast, beginning just north of Georgetown, South Carolina, and running south to the Florida border. The estimated 1,000 islands along this stretch of coast are separated from the mainland by marshes, alluvial streams, and rivers. The outermost islands are bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and are as far as twenty miles or more from the mainland.
Many Sea Islands are small and uninhabitable; yet Johns Island, just below Charleston, South Carolina, is the second largest island in the United States (the largest being New York's Long Island). Since the islands are separated from the coast by tidal estuaries, they have not been accessible until fairly recently except by boat and hand-propelled ferry.
Before the bridges and highways were built and paved in the 1920s and 1930s, a trip from Georgetown to McClellanville, twenty miles apart, involved three ferry rides - across the South Santee River, the Santee's North Fork, and the Sampit River. The narrow dirt roads across the river that led to our humble dwelling were only slightly above sea level. During the rainy periods, the roads were inundated and impossible.
The isolation of this village and its small black community of slave descendants meant the influence of the urban white culture was minimal, well into the 1940s. Even in the modern era, many dietary, medical, and cultural practices can be traced back to African ancestors who had to adapt their ways of life to slavery and a strange environment. Gullah, a Creole language still heard today on the Sea Islands, is part African and part seventeenth-century English. Blacks with roots in various parts of Africa communicated by speaking Gullah both with one another and with their white masters. The semitropical coastal area north of McClellanville was settled by French Huguenots in the late 1600s and was originally designated as St. James' Parish. McClellanville was developed by planters in the mid-nineteenth century, for social as well as health reasons. For much of the year, in those days, only slaves lived on the malaria-ridden plantations; come summer, their owners headed for the coast and settled their families in townships such as McClellanville.
Over 200 years ago, my family was brought to these coastal plains from the Grain Coast off the Gulf of Guinea in Africa. Unlike many other immigrant cultures that migrated to these shores and then moved freely in the New World, African cultures had to adapt to new situations. Slaves were forced to give up many tribal customs and to live in close quarters with numbers of other tribal groups having different languages and customs. Going from a free environment to an enslaved environment, they also were introduced to new foods, drugs, and medical practices to which their owners subscribed.
In some ways, a new culture emerged, but in many ways, the cultures of Africa remained remarkably intact in America. "The Old People," as they are called today,
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