Speakin' Power: Notions of Work, Power, Speech, and Transformation in Africa and Coastal Georgia

Abstract

Speakin’ Power: Notions of Work, Power, Speech, and Transformation in Africa and Coastal Georgia Frederick Knight During the 1930s, artists and intellectuals employed by the New Deal’s Federal Writer’s Project (FWP) combed the Southern United States to interview former slaves and their offspring about their experiences during “slavery times.”1 In particular, a group of interviewers from the Savannah Unit of the FWP searched coastal Georgia and the Sea Islands for “African survivals” or cultural forms that could be traced back to Africa. Black coastal Georgians had become known for their distinctive Gullah language and their cultural practices, and the FWP sought to add to the extant record. As the interviewers moved from town to town and spoke to former slaves and descendants of slaves, they unearthed a number of African survivals including religious practices, words, and material objects. For example, an interviewer recorded the testimony of Ben Washington, who lived five miles from the community of Eulonia, Georgia, in McIntosh County, and gave evidence of African cultural practices among Afro-Georgians. Washington wore a “long frock coat and high felt hat” and, like an African elder, was “carrying a walking stick.” He spoke of a world inhabited by spirits, of root doctors who had the power to heal, of the magic power of crosses, of funeral ceremonies, and of religious services marked with drum music and sacred dance. He also mentioned magic tools and recalled, “I heah lots uh tings bout duh hoe. I heah tell bout how it jis stan right up in duh fiel by itself an wuk fu yuh widout nobody techin it —das ef yuh kin wuk it right.”2 Washington was one of several Afro-Georgians who recounted stories about magic tools, accounts which contained a deeper set of African ideas about work, knowledge, speech, power, and transformation that contested the ultimate authority of the planter class. Though recorded in the twentieth century, the interviews of Ben Washington and others in Drums and Shadows provide a glimpse of the world view of Afro-Georgians in the colonial and antebellum eras. For generations, black Georgians passed on stories about people who mastered magic tools. Given their relative isolation from white planters, who generally lived away from their agricultural estates, the Gullah of coastal Georgia possessed a significant amount of cultural autonomy. In front of their hearths and on their front porches, they maintained a vibrant oral tradition, including tales of people who could make tools work by themselves. To understand the deeper significance of their stories about magic tools, it is useful to place the Afro-Georgian community within an historical context of the trans-Atlantic and domestic slave trade, slave labor in the Georgia Lowcountry, and the structure of plantation authority and power. When the tales about magic tools appeared in print in 1940, Africans and their descendants had inhabited Georgia for nearly two centuries and had constituted a majority of the population in some regions since the colonial era. After the colonial government lifted its ban on slavery, prospective Georgia planters bought slaves from South Carolina or followed their neighbors to the north and in other parts of the Anglo-American world into the Atlantic slave trade, establishing slave labor camps for staple crop production.3 The African work force that raised these staple crops came from both West Central Africa and West Africa, though people from particular regions predominated. According to the database compiled by David Eltis, et. al., ships bound to Georgia carried a total of 15,729 Africans to Georgia, of whom 13,782 survived. Of the people disembarking in Georgia, 3,999 (25.4% of the total) came from regions of Africa not specified in the documents. 3,153 came from West-Central Africa (20% of the total; 26.90% of the total when those whose origin was unspecified are excluded). 2,890 people who disembarked in Georgia were from Sierra Leone (18.40%; 24.60%). 2,513 were from the Senegambia Region (16.00% and 21.40%). 1,606 Africans came from Gold Coast ports (10.20%; 13.70%). And 1,568 arrived from the Windward Coast (9.97%; 13.40%).4 While these figures provide...