LowCountry Africana : University of Georgia Press: Excerpts

University of Georgia Press

Gullah Folktales from the Georgia Coast
Charles Colcock Jones Jr.

In 1888, Charles Colcock Jones Jr. published the first collection of folk narratives from the Gullah-speaking people of the South Atlantic coast, tales he heard black servants exchange on his family's rice and cotton plantation. It has been out of print and largely unavailable until now. Jones saw the stories as a coastal variation of Joel Chandler Harris's inland dialect tales and sought to preserve their unique language and character. Through Jones' rendering of the sound and syntax of nineteenth-century Gullah, the lively stories describe the adventures and mishaps of such characters as "Buh Rabbit," "Buh Ban-Yad Rooster," and other animals. The tales range from the humorous to the instructional and include stories of the "sperits," Daddy Jupiter's "vision," a dying bullfrog's last wish, and others about how "buh rabbit gained sense" and "why the turkey buzzard won't eat crabs." MORE

Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia

by Art Rosenbaum

Keeping African traditions alive through dance, song, and percussion, the ring shout is the oldest known African American performance tradition surviving on the North American continent. MORE

Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia

by Betty Wood

Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870
by Paul A. Cimbala

Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment
by Willie Lee Rose

Just seven months into the Civil War, a Union fleet sailed into South Carolina's Port Royal Sound, landed a ground force, and then made its way upriver to Beaufort. Planters and farmers fled before their attackers, allowing virtually all their major possessions, including ten thousand slaves, to fall into Union hands. MORE

Black Politicians and Reconstruction in Georgia: A Splendid Failure
by Edmund L. Drago

This widely hailed study examines the reasons behind the quick demise of Radical Reconstruction in Georgia. Edmund shows that a primary factor was, ironically, the extraordinary fairness on the part of the state's black leaders in dealing with their former masters. MORE

Cumberland Island: A History
by Mary R. Bullard

Cumberland Island is a national treasure. The largest of the Sea Islands along the Georgia coast, it is a history-filled place of astounding natural beauty. With a thoroughness unmatched by any previous account, Cumberland Island: A History chronicles five centuries of change to the landscape and its people from the days of the first Native Americans through the late-twentieth-century struggles between developers and conservationists. MORE

Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes
Georgia Writers' Project
Introduction by Charles Joyner

Set against the background of the antebellum slave trade, Drums and Shadows traces the persistence of African heritage in the culture of blacks living on the Georgia coast in the 1930s. In the later years of the depression, members of the Georgia Writers' Project visited and interviewed blacks, many of whose grandparents, smuggled into slavery as late as 1858, had passes on the customs and beliefs of their African past. MORE

Lines in the Sand: Race and Class in Lowcountry Georgia, 1750-1860
by Timothy James Lockley

Lines in the Sand is Timothy Lockley's nuanced look at the interaction between nonslaveholding whites and African Americans in lowcountry Georgia from the introduction of slavery in the state to the beginning of the Civil War. The study focuses on poor whites living in a society where they were dominated politically and economically by a planter elite and outnumbered by slaves. Lockley argues that the division between nonslaveholding whites and African Americans was not fixed or insurmountable. Pulling evidence from travel accounts, slave narratives, newspapers, and court documents, he reveals that these groups formed myriad kinds of relationships, sometimes out of mutual affection, sometimes for mutual advantage, but always in spite of the disapproving authority of the planter class. MORE

Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition in Coastal Georgia
by Art Rosenbaum

The ring shout is the oldest known African American performance tradition surviving on the North American continent. Performed for the purpose of religious worship, this fusion of dance, song, and percussion survives today in the Bolton Community of McIntosh County, Georgia. Incorporating oral history, first-person accounts, musical transcriptions, photographs, and drawings, Shout Because You're Free documents a group of performers known as the McIntosh County Shouters. MORE

Under the Guardianship of the Nation: The Freedmen's Bureau and the Reconstruction of Georgia, 1865-1870
by Paul A. Cimbala

The Freedmen's Bureau, established by Congress in 1865, was born of the expansion of federal power during the Civil War and the Union's desire to protect and provide for the South's emancipated slaves. Established in Georgia during late 1865 and 1866, the Bureau was positioned to play a crucial role in the implementation of Reconstruction policy, translating directives, laws, and constitutional guarantees into the new reality promised by emancipation. MORE

Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia
by Betty Wood

In Women's Work, Men's Work, Betty Wood examines the struggle of bondpeople to secure and retain for themselves recognized rights as producers and consumers in the context of the brutal, formal slave economy sanctified by law. Wood examines this struggle in the Georgia lowcountry over a period of eighty years, from the 1750s to the 1830s, when, she argues, the evolution of the system of informal slave economies had reached the point that it would henceforth dominate Savannah's political agenda until the Civil War and emancipation. MORE