Coming Through: Voices of a South Carolina Gullah Community from WPA Oral Histories

By Genevieve C. Peterkin, Charles W. Joyner and Genevieve W. Chandler

Oral histories of formerly enlaved people and their families along the South Carolina coast

Coming Through marks the first complete publication of these interviews with former slaves and their descendants living in the Waccamaw Neck region of South Carolina as collected by Genevieve W. Chandler as part of the WPA Federal Writers Project. Between 1936 and 1938 Chandler interviewed more than one hundred individuals in and around All Saints Parish, a portion of Horry and Georgetown counties located between the Waccamaw River and the Atlantic Ocean. Her subjects spoke freely with her on topics ranging from slave punishment to folk medicine, from conditions in the Jim Crow South to the exploits of Brer Rabbit.

A teacher, artist, writer, and later museum curator, Chandler had no formal training as an oral historian or folklorist, yet the sophistication of her work as documented here anticipates developments in these fields of study a generation later. Her detailed descriptions add social context to folktales, and her careful and systematic renderings of the Gullah language have since been praised as foundational work by Creole linguists. Chandler's Gullah-speaking African American informants range in age from the 9-year-old George Kato Singleton to 104-year-old Welcome Bees. A biography of each subject accompanies the interviews. Collectively these interviews form an intimate portrait of a fascinating subculture of the Carolina coast and the Sea Islands as shared with a remarkable woman who has special access to converse with the people of this traditionally insular world. Moreover they provide an unparalleled firsthand account of the African American experience in South Carolina in the words of those who lived it.

The volume is edited by Chandler's daughter, Genevieve C. Peterkin, and two scholars, Kincaid Mills and Aaron McCollough. The three have carefully established the texts of the interviews in a manner that highlights Chandler's skills as a field linguist and have supplemented the texts with revealing documentation. The collection is enhanced with a foreword by Charles W. Joyner, Burroughs Distinguished Professor of History at Coastal Carolina University; appendixes respecting the WPA project and the nuances of Gullah language and culture; and photographs of the subjects taken by renowned photographer Bayard Wootten—many published here for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781643364117

Book preview

Coming Through

Genevieve Chandler interviewing Ben Horry at his home in Murrells Inlet. Photograph by Bayard Wootten. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill

Coming Through

Voices of a South Carolina Gullah Community from WPA Oral Histories collected by Genevieve W. Chandler

edited by Kincaid Mills, Genevieve C. Peterkin, and Aaron McCollough

foreword by Charles W. Joyner

©2008 Robert Kincaid Mills and Genevieve C. Peterkin

Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2008

Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2023

www.uscpress.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

32 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:

Coming through : voices of a South Carolina Gullah community from WPA oral histories / collected by Genevieve W. Chandler ; edited by Kincaid Mills, Genevieve C. Peterkin, and Aaron McCollough ; foreword by Charles W. Joyner.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-57003-721-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. African Americans—Waccamaw River Valley (N.C. and S.C.)—Interviews. 2. Gullahs—Waccamaw River Valley (N.C. and S.C.)—Interviews. 3. Freedmen—Waccamaw River Valley (N.C. and S.C.)—Interviews. 4. African Americans—South Carolina—Interviews. 5. Gullahs—South Carolina—Interviews. 6. Freedmen—South Carolina—Interviews. 7. Community life—Waccamaw River Valley (N.C. and S.C.)—History—Anecdotes. 8. Waccamaw River Valley (N.C. and S.C.)—Biography—Anecdotes. 9. South Carolina—Biography—Anecdotes. 10. Oral history—Waccamaw River Valley (N.C. and S.C.) I. Chandler, Genevieve W., 1890–1980. II. Mills, Kincaid, 1969– III. Peterkin, Genevieve C. (Genevieve Chandler), 1928– IV. McCollough, Aaron.

F277.W33C66 2008

305.896’073075789—dc22

2007050131

Front cover photograph: Hagar Brown by Bayard Wootten. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill

ISBN 978-1-64336-411-7 (ebook)

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Foreword:

Something More Precious: Genevieve Willcox Chandler and Carolina Folk Culture

Introduction

Welcome Bees

Will Bees

Hagar Brown

Louisa Brown

Sam Brown

Margaret Bryant (Granddaughter)

Margaret Bryant (Grandmother)

Reverend Albert and Ella Carolina

Martha Cox

Will Deas

Ellen Godfrey

Matthew Grant

Loney Noonie Heywood

Mariah Heywood

Monday Samson Holmes

Ben and Stella Horry

Bobbitt Horry

Alex Johnson

Andrew Keith

Addie Knox

Lillie Knox

Minnie Ladson Knox

Richard Knox

Thelma Knox

Zackie Knox

Cinchy Lance

Gabe Lance

Mike Maybank

Jim Moody

William Oliver

Maude Esther Lee Pickett

Reverend Aaron Pinnacle

Fred Poinsette

Carrie Pyatt

Hackless Riley

Sabe Rutledge

John Simmons

Reverend Cato Singleton

Claude Singleton

George Kato Singleton

Boss Skinner

Ella Small

Lewis Small

Liza Brown Small

Rebecca Washington

Lula White

Willis Williams

Martha Wright

Appendixes

A: Memo from Mabel Montgomery

B: Memo from Folklore Department

C: Memo from Henry Alsberg

D: Second Memo from Henry Alsberg

Index

About the Authors

Illustrations

Figures

Genevieve Chandler interviewing Ben Horry at his home in Murrells Inlet

Genevieve Chandler and Bayard Wootten visiting Emelia Holmes in the Freewoods

Welcome Bees at home

Welcome Bees

Hagar Brown: Lord bless this house and keep the soul

Margaret Bryant at her home

Reverend Albert Carolina on the front porch of his home

Loney Noonie Heywood

Mariah Heywood

Ben Horry at his home

Stella Horry at her home

Lillie Knox and Hagar Brown in the kitchen of the Chandler home

Sabe Rutledge at his farm, Oak Ridge, with his mule Bessie

Reverend Cato Singleton

Maps

Murrells Inlet and Waccamaw Neck, circa 1936

Gullah communities, churches, and homes, circa 1936

White plantations, homes, and churches, circa 1936

Acknowledgments

This book has been many years in the making, and the list of those who have contributed insight and effort is quite long. First and foremost, the editors would like to thank the residents of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. While seeking biographical information on the book’s interviewees, we received limitless hospitality in churches along the banks of the Waccamaw as well as in private homes. Special thanks to Rev. George Weathers and the parishioners of New Bethel Baptist Church on Sandy Island; Reverend Hume of Gordon Chapel, African Methodist Episcopal Church, and his parishioners; Henry Small; Peter and Rebecca Carr; Rev. Luther Alston and his wife, Annabel Alston; Mary Brown Smalls (Hagar Brown’s daughter); Sarah Deas; Albertina Elliot; Frances and Rosa Pyatt; Elizabeth Robinson; Willamena Pyatt, Wanita Pyatt; Margareet Gore; Essie Tucker; Evelina Knox (daughter of Albert and Ella Carolina, wife of Zackie Knox); Mary Ella Knox and Blondel Knox (Zackie and Evelina’s daughters); Sarah Jane Jackson (Welcome Bees’s great-granddaughter); Sadie Belamy (Sabe Rutledge’s granddaughter); Joanna Brown (Louisa Brown’s granddaughter); Vennie Deas Moore; Mrs. Richard Knox (Hagar Brown’s granddaughter); Capers Pickett; Kato Singleton (Cato Singleton’s grandson); Helen Carr; Drew Knox; Lou Nesbit; and Hattie Smalls.

The project would not have been possible without the academic encouragement and assistance of Anita Goodstein, Tam Carlson, and Don DuPree at the University of the South; Jay Mills; Ian Finseth; J. Edward Chamberlin; and Charles Joyner. Thanks to Suzanne Chapman and to Allison, Olan, and Norma Mills for their support throughout the extended project.

Special thanks are due to the siblings of Genevieve Sister Chandler Peterkin: June Hora, Tom Chandler, Bill Chandler, and Joseph Corky Chandler. Theirs are the best mullet fries, clam bakes, and oyster shuckings in the lowcountry.

Thanks to the staff of the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, who hosted and indulged the editors over a number of weeks and diligently retrieved every last box from the inventory of hundreds of boxes of WPA material in the archives. Special thanks to Beth Bilderback of the library for her assistance.

Bayard Wootten’s beautiful and stirring photographs, which grace the cover and pages of this book, were for a time lost to the world. Thanks to the Wootten family for not throwing away all those dusty plates, negatives, images, and papers and for generously donating them to the North Carolina Collection of Photography of the Wilson Library at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At UNC, Wootten’s materials came into the care and custody of photographic archivist Jerry W. Cotten. Jerry helped us find the long-lost Murrells Inlet photographs. Thanks also to Keith Longiotti who now curates the Wootten collection.

Thanks to librarians, archivist, and document packrats everywhere for caring for all those dusty boxes and shelves full of paper. Thanks to Major McCollough and David Michaels for producing the exceptionally detailed maps. Thanks, finally, to Alexander Moore, Karen Beidel, Pat Callahan, and everyone at the University of South Carolina Press, and to our indexer, Linda Webster.

Foreword

Something More Precious:

Genevieve Willcox Chandler and

Carolina Folk Culture

Sometimes I wonder if the so-called sophisticate hasn’t lost something more precious than he has gained with all his culture and education, all his conveniences, and his complicated way of living.

Genevieve Willcox Chandler

I came down to Murrells Inlet in the summer of 1969, fresh from research in the Library of Congress. I threaded my way down the narrow main street, lined with boat landings and seafood restaurants, and turned into Genevieve Willcox Chandler’s yard. I had read her interviews from the 1930s with former slaves on the rice plantations along the Waccamaw River in South Carolina, which she had conducted as part of the WPA Federal Writers’ Project. And I had listened to some of the field recordings John A. Lomax had made in her front yard for the Library of Congress Folksong Archive in 1936, 1937, and 1939. She had gathered some of the finest singers—black and white—from Murrells Inlet, Pawleys Island, and Sandy Island to sing their traditional songs into Lomax’s recording machine. Now I drove into her yard, and into her life, full of questions about those years and those people—the ex-slave and dispenser of folk wisdom Hagar Brown, the great singer of spirituals Lillie Knox, and others of her friends who had been dead for a generation.

Summer days on the South Carolina coast are hot and long; but a soft, cooling breeze often wafts in across the salt marsh in the late afternoon, bringing relief to those who live beside the inlet. It is a good time to sit in the shade of the live oaks, sipping iced tea and enjoying the view, sharing stories with friends. How often during the following decade Miss Genevieve sat with me in the low afternoon sun at the edge of Murrells Inlet, talking into my tape recorder, dredging up the memories and hopes of time onto the surface of consciousness, sharing in story the history and folklore of her narrow strip of native soil between the Waccamaw and the Atlantic. She told of the masters and the slaves on the rice plantations; of the slave trickster John and his continual sparring for advantage with Ole Maussa; of the animal trickster Buh Rabbit and his continual sparring for advantage with Buh Gator and Buh Bear; of haunts, hags, and plat-eyes; of the folk wisdom of the Gullah proverbs, the haunting beauty of the Gullah spirituals, and the rich expressiveness of Gullah speech.

She had seen more than eighty of such summers, and with a playful twinkle in her mischievous eyes, she proved to be a model of ageless and witty intellect. She spoke expansively, merrily, eloquently. In the last decade of her long life, she became my teacher and my friend. I brought my own students to meet her and to learn from her wisdom. From 1969 until her death in 1980, I cherished the rich memories she shared with me out of a long lifetime of priceless experience.

Genevieve Willcox Chandler’s major contribution was her important collection of the oral history, folklore, and speech patterns of the people who lived along the Waccamaw River on the upper coast of South Carolina. As a field-worker for the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, she was a pioneer in the study and collection of folklore and oral history and in the fields that are now called creole linguistics and sociolinguistics. While she was not professionally trained in any of these fields and did not analyze her material in an academic fashion, in many ways she anticipated developments in these fields by a generation. Scholars now recognize in her full descriptions of the social context of folklore the work of someone far ahead of her time. Scholars in creole linguistics have praised her careful rendering of the nuances of Gullah, the creole language of the African Americans on the Sea Islands and nearby mainland of coastal South Carolina. Many of those specimens of folklore and oral history, along with fascinating snatches of conversations captured in her Methodist shorthand, would be acclaimed as found poetry and analyzed as sociolinguistics by later generations. Her field, as a WPA field-worker, was All Saints Parish—that portion of Horry and Georgetown counties that lies between the Waccamaw River and the Atlantic Ocean.

She was born in Marion, South Carolina, on May 21, 1890. Her family moved to Murrrells Inlet in 1910, when her father purchased Wachesaw plantation on the Waccamaw River and the Hermitage at Murrells Inlet. Her achievements were by no means limited to folklore, oral history, and creole linguistics. She was also an artist, a teacher, a museum curator, and a writer of fiction. Her achievements in any one of these careers would warrant a claim on our attention. That she was a success in all of them is extraordinary. Furthermore there was an underlying unity in the diversity of her accomplishments, for each of her careers was an expression of her love and understanding of the Waccamaw region, its people and their folklife.

As a teacher, she established South Carolina’s first night school for illiterate adults near Murrells Inlet in addition to teaching eight grades during the day. This adult-education project was a precursor of the statewide system developed by her friend Dr. Wil Lou Gray. At the time there were no schools for African Americans at Murrells Inlet, and the segregation laws of the state forbade the education of blacks in the schools set aside for whites. So Genevieve Chandler taught adult literacy classes to blacks in her own home, seated around her kitchen table (making it, as the old spiritual calls it, the Welcome Table). She taught similar classes for white adults in the schoolhouse. Her respect for those who were no longer slaves but not fully free either—and for their rich folk culture—was recognized and appreciated in the black community.

As a young teacher, she also was a pioneer in outdoor drama. She and her mother produced Hiawatha, based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, as an outdoor pageant in Murrells Inlet in 1915. It involved virtually the entire community, with proceeds going to the local school.

During the time she worked with the Federal Writers’ Project, she became a successful writer of fiction. Her short stories, based on the folklore of the African Americans who lived along the Waccamaw, were published in Scribner’s Magazine, Mademoiselle, and Southwestern Review. An intensely sympathetic approach to her characters and their culture characterized all her work.

When Archer M. and Anna Hyatt Huntington developed four plantations they had purchased along the Waccamaw into a sculptural and botanical garden in the late 1930s, they hired Genevieve Chandler as curator of the Brookgreen Gardens museum, a post she held until 1963. Upon Chandler’s retirement, Beatrice Proske of the New York Hispanic Society said of her that she gave the stranger passing through, unaware of the country or the life around him, a sympathetic insight into its character and history (Columbia State, undated 1963 clipping).

She accomplished all this while teaching Sunday school and playing the organ at Belin Methodist Church and raising a family. Her husband, Thomas Mobley Chandler, died in 1936, leaving her with five children, ranging in age from eighteen months to eleven years.

She was perhaps best known in her last years as an artist. She had studied painting as a young woman at Flora Macdonald College in North Carolina, at the Art Students League in New York, and privately in England; but she set aside her brushes at marriage in 1922 and did not pick them up again until 1962. Soon her watercolors, pastels, charcoals, and pen-and-ink drawings—depicting the scenery and folklife of the Waccamaw region she knew so well—were widely exhibited.

She was not a prophet without honor in her own country. Adger Brown wrote of Chandler’s watercolors in the Columbia State, South Carolina’s capital city newspaper, that they had a combination of vigorous structure and design and a delicacy of execution which makes them unique. He added that those qualities were each a reflection of her own personality, one of basic strength and vigor, but mellowed by sensitivity and grace (November 22, 1964).

Her interviews with former slaves on the rice plantations constitute one of the most important sources extant for the understanding of slavery. Unlike depictions of slavery emanating from the records of the masters and of the masters’ guests, these interviews are firsthand evidence of slavery from the perspective of the slaves and their experience. As one of the interviewees, Ben Horry, said to Genevieve Chandler, I been here! I seen things! I tell you. Thousand of them things happen but I try to forget ’em.

There are, to be sure, a number of objective difficulties in using such sources. They may reveal as much of the time in which they were recorded as of the slavery era. Aged and penniless, struggling to survive during the Great Depression, the former slaves may well have looked back too fondly upon a time when it was the master’s responsibility to provide for those too old to work. Moreover the racial etiquette of segregation prevailing in the 1930s did not encourage them to tell whites anything that might disturb them. The climate of fear was evident in Stella Horry’s response to Genevieve Chandler’s inquiry as to why she did not have electricity in her house, now that the rural electrification program had run power lines past her door. White folks run me [off] if I do that! she replied. It is surely a mark of Genevieve Chandler’s rapport with African Americans in the Waccamaw region, however, that Stella Horry did not hesitate to confide her fear of white opinion. Nor did the former slaves hesitate to tell Genevieve Chandler of both kindnesses and atrocities they had personally witnessed or experienced in slavery. Both kinds of evidence must therefore be taken into account.

It would be difficult to overestimate Genevieve Chandler’s folklore collection, comprising such genres as folk speech, proverbs, folktales, ballads and songs, and folk belief. These are the means by which human beings preserve their memorable experiences and offer comments—sometimes in good-natured humor, sometimes in bitter satire, sometimes in outright protest—on the trivial and the transcendental in their efforts to create a life of meaning and dignity. Her folklore collection is rooted in the real hungers, the real needs, and the real struggles of the people of the Waccamaw, taken verbatim from life itself.

In this collection of Genevieve Willcox Chandler’s work, her specimens of folklore, her oral history interviews, and her examples of Gullah conversations have been lovingly and painstakingly assembled by the editors: her daughter Genevieve Chandler Peterkin, Kincaid Mills, and Aaron McCollough. They have searched both extensively and intensively, patiently combing through WPA files in South Carolina and in Washington in order to establish a definitive inventory of her collections. Housed in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress, her interviews and folklore collections were long unavailable to the general public. Some of her folklore collections were never sent to Washington at all. A few of her interviews have since been published in facsimile reference volumes for scholars, but most of those in this collection are published here for the first time. In addition Mills and Peterkin searched through the photographs of Bayard Wootten of Chapel Hill, recently donated to the University of North Carolina. This collection is enriched by many photographs taken as she accompanied Genevieve Chandler on some of her interviews. Many of them are published here for the first time.

At my age, Miss Genevieve said at seventy-five, you’re just beginning to know how to live. A dynamo of energy until her final years, she did not separate her careers, her family, and her great love for the Waccamaw region into watertight compartments. All her careers—as artist, writer, historian, folklorist, linguist, teacher, curator—were directly related to improving the region and depicting its beauties to others. She modestly described her efforts as a desire to preserve for my children some memories of the area of the Waccamaw Neck.

But her final years were bedridden and painful. Her mind was active to the last, but her body was increasingly feeble. Her death in 1980 at the age of ninety was a release, but many have been enriched by her having lived: not only those of us who had known her, but also those of us who have known her work and those who will learn her work from this collection.

Charles W. Joyner

Introduction

You feel like you got nobody in the world but you—you one. Things don’t look changeable to you till you get over—come through.

Zackie Knox, Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

Zackie Knox’s thoughts on coming through represent his humble assessment of transformative experiences that helped to shape his own personal life as well as the broader life of the community in which he lived. These thoughts supply a fitting initial glimpse into the range of individual and communal highs and lows chronicled in this book. The interviews collected here document the aspirations, anxieties, joys, and tribulations of the individuals who made up the Gullah community of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, in the late 1930s. They also present many of the routines and habits of communal life among those people at that moment in history.

Most basically, to come through is to undergo a spiritual conversion—to be born again—which (in Knox’s account, at least) alleviates one’s sense of powerlessness and isolation. Coming through (like the similar notion of catching sense, or becoming aware of one’s social obligations) signals the experience of group belonging so fundamental to the Gullah worldview. The following introduction offers an account (part historical, part anecdotal) of the various, connected efforts and circumstances that brought the book about. Undoubtedly the primary effort belongs to Zackie Knox and his fellow informants. If any may be credited with the true authorship of this book, they should be, for the details of their lives make up the book’s most clearly demonstrated content. These details were solicited and written down by Genevieve Willcox Chandler, whose presence in the interviews is often (though not always) muted by a detached style.¹ Chandler’s efforts were sanctioned and supported by the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), and the collation, annotation, indexing, and computer transcription were done over the course of several years by the editors: Genevieve C. Peterkin, Kincaid Mills, and Aaron McCollough. Insofar as the institutional, cultural, and personal backstories are not made immediately available by the primary texts—the interviews themselves—in this collection, we have addressed them here in the introduction. We hope that this part of the textual apparatus, along with the biographies and footnotes, will provide readers an informed starting point for working with the materials that make up the book’s larger enterprise. Likewise we hope the information here may stimulate further refinement of the complicated historical conversation it presumes to enter. Ultimately we mean in this book for the voices of Zackie Knox and his neighbors to be heard again and as widely as possible and, thus, to come through in the most familiar sense: to make safe passage and to be received with clarity.

A Brief History of the Federal Writers’ Project

The Federal Writers’ Project was a nationwide relief program—one of several branches of the massive Works Progress Administration (WPA) dedicated specifically to employing Americans whose skills and training equipped them for work in the arts and humanities. Upon being established, the FWP almost immediately began styling itself as an instrument for sociocultural curatorship and instruction. National FWP officials imagined a critical part of their job to include the uncovering of an already-present American national identity—one characterized by diversity and continuous self-renewal.²

A significant practical feature of the FWP’s program—one of particular interest for this book—was an unprecedented narrative-recording effort performed by field-workers like Genevieve Chandler. This effort was only unprecedented, however, in terms of scale. Its true origins may be found in slightly earlier historical and cultural contexts. One such precedent was the antebellum slave narrative, with its inherent critique of social practice, which often capitalized on tense prewar sentiment and the abolitionist politics of its mostly white readership. In the years preceding the Depression, the once-popular genre lost some of its attraction as a salable literary form. This ebb has been attributed to shifting popular tastes following the Civil War, as well as to a concurrent surge of racist attitudes within academic circles, culminating in 1918 with the publication of Ulrich B. Phillips’s book American Negro Slavery.³ The slave narrative did persist, however, as a literary genre throughout the late nineteenth century. Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, published in 1901, stands as an influential and extremely popular turn-of-the-century instance. Furthermore novels like James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (first published anonymously in 1912) drew heavily on tropes and themes common to the slave narrative genre. Thus the FWP initiative may be viewed as a part of continuing social and literary conversations. The autobiographical life histories that began emerging in the late 1920s and early 1930s were brought to light in large part by African Americans themselves, and this in itself represents a significant contribution. Interested in a history that had been obfuscated, distorted, or ignored by men like Phillips, a new wave of scholars sought to produce more-responsible and more-reliable surveys. Advances in anthropology and sociology offered new tools for documenting African American history, while renewed white interest in African American cultural forms such as jazz suggested that the popular climate was becoming more agreeable.⁴

Practically speaking, the true antecedents to the Folklore Project of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project date to before 1930 and the privately funded collecting of histories. Committed African American scholars emerged in the late 1920s to fill the gap in the historical record and to rectify the fallacious claims made by the apologists of racism. Working through Fisk University between 1927 and 1929, Andrew P. Watson, a student of the Polish-born anthropologist Paul Radin, began collecting life histories and conversion experiences in and around the Nashville, Tennessee, area. Charles Johnson, also of Fisk University, founded the Social Science Institute there in 1928 and dispatched staff researcher Ophelia Settle to interview ex-slaves in Tennessee and Kentucky.⁵ At the same time the historian John B. Cade was heading a similar project under the aegis of Southern University in Scotlandville, Louisiana. A later project that Cade oversaw between 1935 and 1938 at Prairie View State College in Prairie View, Texas, generated four hundred ex-slave interviews ranging over thirteen states.

Initial cooperation from the federal government came in 1934 from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) after Lawrence Reddick of Kentucky State Industrial College suggested to FERA director Harry L. Hopkins that relief funds might be routed to unemployed writers—ideally college-educated African Americans. Reddick enlisted the support of Johnson and of Carter Woodson (who is best known for having established, in 1926, Negro History Week, the precursor to Black History Month) for a pilot project employing twelve African American interviewers who collected 250 interviews between September 1934 and July 1935. A larger follow-up project was planned but never materialized. Norman Yetman attributes the project’s demise to poor organization at FERA and to shortsighted FERA regulations that obliged the employment of sorely unqualified staff.⁶

In 1935 FERA was dissolved and replaced by the Works Progress Administration. By this time direct relief had fallen into general disfavor among Americans who were eager to get back to work. The WPA, headed by former FERA director Harry L. Hopkins, oversaw the shift from direct relief to work relief and, subsequently, ushered in many of the New Deal’s most enormous public works programs. The WPA almost immediately began implementing its arts projects. The writing branch—the Federal Writers’ Project—was headed by philanthropist Henry G. Alsberg, who had formerly been a newspaperman and a director of off-Broadway plays. The central ambition of the FWP was to compile and publish the American Guide—five regional volumes as well as a national volume meant to provide a geographical-social-historical portrait of the states, cities, and localities of the entire United States.⁷ This task proved unmanageable and was eventually replaced by the production of guides to individual states. In this somewhat attenuated form though, the American Guide remained the FWP’s main focus for the life of the organization. Alsberg is credited with having expanded the FWP’s goals, however, to include other peripheral activities. Not the least of these new departments was folklore research. John Lomax was enticed away from his position as honorary curator of the Library of Congress to become the first national advisor on folklore and folkways for the FWP, and the interview method of collecting folklore and a corollary emphasis upon the collection of life-history materials, both of which [Lomax] introduced, became a hallmark of Writers’ Project research.⁸ Though ex-slave narratives were being collected independently before 1937, Washington did not back a concerted regional effort until the spring of that year. Lomax’s interest in interviews submitted that March by the Florida Writers’ Project served as a catalyst for the emphasis on exslave narratives that was to come.⁹

Also significant in the transition process from the original plan for an American guide to individual state guidebooks was the establishment of the position of editor for Negro Affairs and Sterling A. Brown’s appointment to that position. Brown was a respected poet and scholar, and he was also an African American man. He took it upon himself to ensure that FWP treatment of African American materials (including ex-slave narratives but also more general cultural information) was progressive. Brown was a vigilant critic of racial stereotypes, and as Jerrold Hirsch puts it, Brown did more than correct the work of others. His strictures became rationales for programs he and others advocated.¹⁰ Brown’s influence can be felt in the interviews conducted by Genevieve Chandler, especially in the massive number documenting the quotidian tastes, values, and interests of Depression-era African American people like Lillie Knox.

The FWP, or Federal Project Number One, officially began on April 1, 1937, with the issuance of specific instructions to individual state directors. Though Yetman claims Lomax constantly reiterated his insistence upon the importance of recording interview conversations verbatim, with no holds barred,¹¹ the official emphases of interviewing practice varied as the project unfolded. A memorandum issued by Alsberg on July 30, 1937, stressed the importance of narrowing the interviewing process down to one or two of the more interesting and intelligent people, revisiting them, establishing friendly relations, and drawing them out over a period of time.¹² Furthermore the memorandum urged interviewers not to lead their informants or influence their responses. An extensive list of questions was offered in hopes of eliciting a consistent level of pertinent information. Along with these questions, Alsberg’s memorandum included notes by an editor on dialect usage and an extensive list of words which should not be used. These directives urged interviewers to privilege truth to idiom over exact phonetic transcription, citing the assumption that present day readers are less ready for the overstress of phonetic spelling than in the days of local color.¹³ Thus the FWP’s method was not utterly self-consistent. Insofar as the project’s ultimate goal was a coherent guidebook or set of guidebooks, the government’s instructions emphasized accessibility to readers over more-scientific inquiry and reportage. Nonetheless the tendency toward standardization in FWP documents was part of a larger and more complex impulse toward sustainable, communicable diversity: FWP officials were trying to define a national culture in which individuals and groups could participate as Americans, while retaining their regional, ethnic, and racial identities.¹⁴

In Weevils in the Wheat, Charles Perdue notes that the national interviewing project coalesced as something of an afterthought to the work already being done by regional offices.¹⁵ This can be said to be true more generally of the long progress from the first, privately funded interviewing projects to the federal mandate under which the interviews in the present volume were originally compiled. The quasi-organic, bottom-up organizational development of the enterprise helps to explain many of its methodological inconsistencies, but it also underscores the importance of individual initiative in the project’s accomplishments. Finally the most valuable accounts of African American history produced during this era exist thanks to the coordinated labors of real people: African American informants and an eclectic mix of writers committed to presenting lives in all their complexity. Thus the finest interviews of ex-slaves and their children live up to the principle that history is the record, not of heroic deeds performed on a global stage, but rather of men and women acting according to their own needs in a manner shaped by their own cultural norms. In this way the ideological efforts of the FWP and the labors of its field-workers did produce a significant contribution (however problematic) to the historical record.

The Interviewer and the Interviewing Method

Folk-lore is not as easy to collect as it sounds. The best source is where there are the least outside influences and these people, being usually under-privileged, are the shyest. They are most reluctant at times to reveal that which the soul lives by. And the Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people and we do not say to our questioner, Get out of here! We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed resistance.¹⁶

This observation by Zora Neale Hurston pinpoints an inevitable difficulty in folklore collection and one of the crucial weaknesses of the method by which the Federal Writers’ Project obtained ex-slave narratives. Most of the writers employed by the project were from the middle to upper-middle classes and white. The informants were black and either former slaves or their descendants. As several scholars have pointed out, this disparity most likely led many informants to water down their experiences or to tell interviewers what they wanted to hear, good or bad, with respect to race relations.¹⁷ Genevieve Willcox Chandler was a white woman from a well-established family. To some degree the historical integrity of her work must be contingent upon social pressures beyond her control. In Them Dark Days, William Dusinberre rightly identifies a paternalistic attitude in some of Chandler’s excursuses, noting for example Chandler’s observation in one interview that most old ex-slaves in the South Carolina lowcountry … love and revere the names and memories of their old masters.¹⁸ Chandler managed to do exceptional work within the constraints of the situation however, and Dusinberre’s reading of her work depends on numerous flawed assumptions and inattentive readings. The example above, for example, appears somewhat out of context, notably excluding Chandler’s puzzlement that the old couple [Ben and Stella Horry] still live with many old and odd beliefs one being that the white man only is entitled to the good things—the better things.¹⁹ Speaking more generally, it would be a mistake to flatten the complex emotional experiences of these informants to fit current attitudes and beliefs. We must not overlook the distortions of paternalism, but we would also do well to avoid relying too adamantly on assumptions that conflict with what the ex-slaves claimed they felt. Although we may assume that ex-slaves’ feelings toward their former owners were complicated, we cannot utterly dismiss the possibility that they included something like love.

Though many writers were conducting interviews and collecting folklore in South Carolina in the mid to late thirties, Chandler managed to set herself apart from her Federal Writers’ Project peers who similarly lacked formal linguistic training or degrees in anthropology or folklore. Long after the completion of her work, she has been called a great folklorist²⁰ and pioneer.²¹ Her transcription of Gullah speech has been lauded as astute, offering tantalizing glimpses of [Gullah] vocabulary and its pronunciation and an opportunity to discover its grammatical rules.²² William A. Stewart praised Chandler at great length, citing her impressive background knowledge (including a near-native fluency in the Gullah dialect)²³ as cogent enough explanation for her success. In fact, Stewart opined, much of Chandler’s strength as a scholar came from her lack of academic preconceptions and prejudices.

Whatever training she may have lacked, Genevieve Chandler was a highly educated woman (having begun studies at Flora Macdonald College at age fourteen, she also studied figure drawing at the Art Students’ League in New York and, in 1913, studied portraiture in Liverpool). Furthermore, and in no small part due to artistic sensitivity, Chandler did possess impressive background knowledge of the Waccamaw Neck region, of the people who inhabited the region, and of the Gullah creole they spoke. Chandler’s sympathies and her community involvement were progressive. At age eighteen she began work as a teacher. Chandler taught eight grades in one classroom. Upon detecting that many of the children’s parents were illiterate, Chandler decided to return to the schoolhouse in the evenings to teach them.²⁴ This night work was a forerunner of the statewide adult education system started by Dr. Wil Lou Gray. Chandler did not limit her teaching, though, to white children and white adults in the white school, as the segregation laws of the time required. She taught her adult, illiterate African American neighbors in her own kitchen. By helping the Gullah improve their skills in her private dwelling, Chandler was making a public statement for inclusion, and unwittingly she was also preparing one of many routes to the confidence of those she would later interview.

By the time Chandler began interviewing her neighbors for the Federal Writers’ Project, she had lived the better part of her life in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. In 1908 the Willcox family established itself permanently in the spot where it had formerly vacationed and soon came to be highly regarded in a community where local reputation was still a terribly important commodity. Significantly both the Willcox family and the Chandler family had strong ties to the African American community. Chandler’s brother Allston Moore Dick Willcox, a doctor, was widely known in the Waccamaw Neck region, and he did much to earn trust and admiration, making house calls to members of the African American community, often at no charge. During the Great Depression, Chandler and her husband, Thomas, were ambassadors of goodwill toward their less fortunate neighbors, employing Lillie Knox long after they could truly afford her services, helping in emergencies,²⁵ sharing any available surplus with all comers. In 1936 Thomas Chandler suffered a stroke. He died soon thereafter. Against family advice, Genevieve Chandler insisted on raising her five children alone during the Depression. Her success in this enterprise was due in large part to the income she received while compiling FWP interviews.

In 1936, a year before John Lomax began a nationwide consolidation of exslave narratives, Chandler began collecting interviews with African American and white inhabitants of the Waccamaw Neck for the WPA’s Federal Writers’ Project. Chandler was hired by her lifelong friend Mabel Montgomery, the state director of South Carolina’s Writers’ Project. From the first extant interviews of May 1936 to the last interviews of October 1938, Chandler’s style and method underwent a dramatic transformation. In the earliest dated interviews, Chandler’s writing is heavily stylized—delivered from the fixed, quasi-literary perspective of the short stories Chandler published in various national magazines around the same time. As may be seen, for example, in Chandler’s interview Truss Gawd or Ad’s Plat Eye with Addie Knox,²⁶ the contextualizing, subjective voice tends to reveal more about Chandler herself and the biases and expectations of white culture than it does about Chandler’s informants:

Fourteen. Fourteen human souls she keeps alive with her two hands. Under nourished. Half naked. All in one room. Unmoral. Once a dead baby lay hidden under its sick mother’s bed for a week. In a civilized country. And we are Christian.

Most of Chandler’s interviews, however, dispense with conventional narrative framing. At their most aesthetically austere, Chandler’s texts utterly erase the interviewer’s voice and present only the speech of the informants. This can lead to confusion in reading, especially in cases where informants respond to questions that are not present in the written record. Nonetheless, absenting the field-worker does produce a more documentary effect. In the following example, Hagar Brown has clearly been asked a question about alligators—or foodways more generally—but question and questioner have been removed:

Gator? Eat Gator? My Grandpa have a pond and he shoot one. Eat every part but don’t eat the head and feet. Eat body part and tail. Makes chillun fat. Yes. A hawk kin eat! (Meaning that you can eat hawk.) Crow kin eat, too. Fox? I eat ’em. Fox hard to lay hand on. Them thing can out run a ghost. Possum good! Easy to catch possum. Catch in chicken coop. Coon? Coon better than possum; heap cleaner than possum. Coon won’t eat everything and possum does. Squirl? Good to flour ’em and put black pepper to ’em and put gravy to ’em. Eel? Dress ’em. Strip ’em down the back. Stuff ’em and bake ’em. And eel skin good for rheumatism. Wrap ’em ’round leg. Keep ’em till pain gone. I lick my leg with gasoline and salt.²⁷

It should come as little surprise that the stylistic flavor of Chandler’s interviews is diverse. Based on surviving memorandums from federal and regional offices, it is clear that methodological instructions were often somewhat contradictory. As noted above, Alsberg discouraged interviewers from focusing heavily on dialect recording. By contrast, undated documentation directed specifically at folklore collecting field-workers states that field workers will also record unusual dialect, slang, pronunciations, place names, local expressions.²⁸ In June 1937 Alsberg generally discouraged the sort of literary style Chandler had employed in her earlier interviews:

I should like to recommend that the stories be told in the language of the ex-slave, without excessive editorializing and artistic introductions on the part of the interviewer. The contrast between the directness of the ex-slave speech and the roundabout and at times pompous comments of the interviewer is frequently glaring.²⁹

In October 1937, however, Montgomery suggested that informants be visited several times in order to establish a friendly relation, some material being secured at each visit, and the whole woven into a consecutive story.³⁰ This weaving of various data into a consecutive story implies that the artistic and editorial will of the interviewer should be engaged in rendering the interviews. Chandler, it seems, considered the various instructions she was given and then proceeded with her own synthesis of practical strategies. Accurate dialect recording was important enough to Chandler that she chose to work against official recommendations.

In Long Journey Home: Folklife in the South, William A. Stewart is cited praising Chandler’s ingenious, intuitive solutions for some of the problems that have led scholars generally to dismiss potential quantitative study of the ex-slave narratives collected by the FWP:

[Chandler] solved highly technical problems in sophisticated and insightful ways. For example, even knowing Gullah, how was a field-interviewer to get a verbatim or even near-verbatim version of rapid, informal speech without recording equipment?

Her solution was to invent a sort of short-hand—actually a form of speed writing—which collapsed individual word spellings (since these have normal Gullah forms which she already knew,) thus allowing her to focus on sentence structure, which was less predictable. And in the case of unusual word pronunciations, she was able to expand the speed writing at that point to include the unusual vowel or consonant.³¹

Rev. Luther Alston recalled the awe inspired by Chandler’s recording method: she would write in shorthand then sing it back. They thought it was so funny weren’t nobody could tell what she scratched but her.³² Whereas most of the ex-slave interviews generated by the FWP were taken down in pencil or pen, most often after the interview, from memory or from scattered field notes supplemented by memory,³³ Chandler had found a way to capture and render language patterns with a level of precision otherwise unavailable to other FWP field-workers.

Gullah and Oral Art

If one pursued the documentary method and looked at facts in their full particularity, as though for the first time, one found no entity to call America. Instead, there were regions, though again if one looked hard enough, the regions gave way and one had communities—which themselves became, on further scrutiny, classes, factions, groups. In short, documenting America turned up such an abundance of what one educator called localized information that no generalization with teeth or vigor held. Each town became so unique that the main thing that joined it with the next was the road.³⁴

Considering the plenitude of materials generated by the Federal Writers’ Project, the work is most exciting as it documents the enclaves of difference and unique cultural identity that have made America the plural entity that it is. The Gullah language is a distinctive dimension of the African American communities that inhabit South Carolina’s Waccamaw Neck, and the language is a tangible nexus for multiple cultural idiosyncrasies. In Down by the Riverside, Charles Joyner offers the process of linguistic creolization—by which two or more languages converge to form a new native tongue—as a model for a larger set of cultural adaptations.³⁵

The Gullah language and culture are unique African American inventions engendered by necessity and ingenuity, emerging from the vicissitudes of slave life. Because men and women were seized from various regions of the West African coast and from various tribes, the early generations of slaves on American soil found themselves in linguistic chaos. Speakers of tongues as various as Ewe, Fante, Efik, Ibebio, Igbo, Yoruba, Kimbundu, Tshiluba, Bambara, Vai, Hausa, Wolof, Kikongo, Temme, Twi, Kongo, and Mandinka were hard pressed to find some means of communicating with each other and with the white slave owners. Gullah evolved in response to this problem, mingling English with the lexicons of many African languages. As Patricia Jones-Jackson describes it, by borrowing words from each other, speakers resolve[d] the communication conflict.³⁶ The adoption of one common language may also have served to undermine the unique cultural traditions of the various African groups, thus accelerating the process of detribalization, or broad assimilation.

Gullah retained primarily West African grammatical structures. The most notable deviations from English include abandonment of many prepositions, conjunctions, adjectives, adverbs, and participles; the absence of the grammatical operations that establish continuity between sentences; the uninflected verb; verb serialization; verb reduplication; and an idiosyncratic pronominal system.³⁷ As subsequent generations were born into slavery and raised with Gullah as their native tongue, the language continued to change. It has changed further in the context of modernization and as the Gullah community has interacted more and more with American mass culture.

According to some analyses, the Gullah of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida currently belong to a linguistic category termed post-creole speech communities. That is to say, Gullah creole and its concomitant cultural characteristics have become more difficult to detect and analyze—their distinguishing characteristics have begun to merge with those of the cultures surrounding them. Even so, the transition has been a gradual one—as Jones-Jackson observes:

Most often we get only a retrospective look at a culture after many of its unique features have been lost. One of the great attractions of the Sea Islands for students of the humanities and social science is that the expected slow pace of change in remote areas will permit a look into the culture as it undergoes transition. As outside forces erode the traditional social structure of the islanders, every attempt should be made to maintain a record of changing language, attitudes, and oral traditions.³⁸

Chandler’s interviews with Gullah friends and neighbors in Murrells Inlet and its surrounding communities are just such a record, offering a glimpse into Gullah culture at something like a middle point in its long migration across a spectrum of social codes and practices.

Chandler had a remarkable appreciation for Gullah culture and did her best to record faithfully what she saw and heard. The product of her labor and her informants’ labors is a curious and rare sort of text: the written transcription of oral art. The effect of such a document is at once revelatory—ethnographically and linguistically—and problematic—because the difference between orality and literacy is more