On Tuesday, September 19, the Georgetown County Library Friends welcomed speaker Victoria Smalls, who works as the executive director of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission. Victoria spoke to a crowd of about 50 people in the Auditorium, including many TGS students, introducing us to Gullah Geechee culture.

The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor covers those areas on the east coast of the US where rice was grown. It stretches from St. Augustine to southern North Carolina. People from tribes in western Africa were enslaved and brought over starting in the 16th century to work in the colonies where the colonists began to exploit their knowledge of rice-growing, which included skills in engineering and hydrology—especially their knowledge of canal-building and how to use rice trunks to control the flow of water.

The Gullah Geechee people have preserved much of their African heritage: basket weaving, boat building, cooking, spirituality, and their unique African creole language. Gullah Geechee developed as enslaved people from scores of different African tribes with different languages had to communicate with each other and with those who enslaved them. Victoria shared artwork from several Gullah Geechee artists, such as Jonathan Green and Natalie Daise, who have re-imagined the joy, beauty, and dignity of Gullah Geechee culture even in the face of its horrific challenges.

Victoria talked about her own family, who owned land in St. Helena after the Civil War. She was excited because she recently found an 1859 receipt from the Freedmen’s Bank in Beaufort with the names of her great-grandparents on it. She read to us in Gullah and left us with a proverb which she applies to her own life and her work of finding out more about the culture she came from: “If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know where you are going.”