Robert Smalls and the Gullah Tradition

On St. Simon's Island's western shore, Dunbar Creek winds to a place on the charts called Ebo Landing. Dunbar Creek is four- to six-feet deep and fifty-yards wide. It twists and turns for two and a half miles before it gets to Ebo Landing. Dunbar Creek is so narrow, and so long, and so twisty, I don't see how you could sail a small boat up it. I doubt sailing ships would ever have navigated it- even small coastal schooners. There are six or seven other spots on St. Simon's Island where deep, wide water runs right up to shore. Surely any sailing ship calling on St. Simon's- taking off cotton, delivering manufactured goods and slaves- would have gone to one of those other landings. I can't really see why a coastal schooner would find its way all the way up Dunbar Creek to Ebo Landing. But I'm thinking about it in a way that doesn't fit the stories. Maybe that doesn't make sense.

Gullah folklore has many stories. One of them tells of Sea Island slaves recently arrived from Africa. In this story the Africans could speak no English. They were sent to the fields, and when they refused to work, an overseer beat them. So the Africans turned themselves into birds and flew away to Africa.

The story has variations. Interviews with Gullah speakers compiled by a Federal Writers' Project during the Great Depression tell the story in some twenty different forms. In more recent times, the story found its way into print in numerous books, notably Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon. In the various tellings, the Africans include or don't include a pregnant woman with a nursing baby. The white overseer who beat the Africans is generally portrayed, somewhat sympathetically, as simply doing his job. The Africans are generally described as being unsuited to the work expected of them. The African language they speak is depicted sometimes as the quacking of marsh birds, sometimes as magical words that enable the slaves to take flight.

The events are often, but not always, said to have taken place within living memory. In these cases, the teller insists he heard the tale first-hand from so-and-so on a nearby plantation, who in his youth witnessed the metamorphosis and flight of the Africans with his own eyes. (These versions were recorded in a time when elderly storytellers would have known people who had been slaves.)

The location of the miracle is reported up and down the coast of Georgia and South Carolina, along the entire geographical range of Gullah culture. The settings may be inconsistent, but they are usually quite specific. Sometimes the story takes place at Ebo Landing on St. Simon's. Sometimes it is set on John's Island near Charleston, a hundred miles to the north. Other times the actual plantation name is given (Walburg's, for example, on St. Catherine's Island in Georgia.)

These stories are enchanting, entertaining, even inspiring, but entirely unsatisfactory to the modern mind. We want an objective, historical source. Fortunately, modern minds have found such a source in an 1802 slave rebellion at Ebo Landing on St. Simon's. That version of the story relies on a single account written by a plantation overseer. The overseer's letter tells of a small group of Igbo warriors who came on a slave ship from Africa to Savannah. There a St. Simon's plantation owner bought them and loaded them on a coasting schooner for delivery to their final destination.

En route, the slaves revolted, took control of the schooner, killed its crew, and dumped the bodies into the water. The slaves then landed along Dunbar Creek and fought some skirmishes on St. Simon's Island. According to the sole written source, after the local militia overwhelmed them, the Africans ran back into the marsh where they had come ashore- at Ebo Landing- and committed suicide by drowning themselves. (“Ebo” is a common variation of “Igbo.”)

Gullah tradition also includes very different tales of African slaves who tried to walk back to their homeland on the water and drowned. This vein of storytelling provides a convenient link between the written record of the Ebo Landing rebellion and the flying bird stories. The whole genre is now generally lumped together as a variation on one event, reported at least once from a European perspective by the St. Simon's overseer. That makes the entire story cluster more approachable for Americans, who are are so terrified of the African roots of our culture.

In another branch of Gullah tradition, the ghosts of the Igbo who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek are still there haunting the place. Local tradition forbids fishing in that spot, for fear of disturbing the Igbo. In the Gullah universe, the African ghosts still range over that creek and marsh in the nighttime.

Dunbar Creek empties into the Frederica River, which parallels the Intracoastal Waterway for much of St. Simon's Island's length. In fact, if your boat has a modest draft, you can take the entire Frederica River as a scenic detour off the Waterway, coasting by the ruins of the 18th-Century British fort, and then past Ebo Landing itself, only a a couple of miles to the south. The Frederica River provides convenient, protected anchorage for boaters transiting the Waterway.

About four years ago, I found myself spending the night anchored in the marsh within sight of Ebo Landing. My daughter Mary and I had left Charleston two nights before, sailing south toward the Bahamas. The boat was an old Pearson Vanguard, a 1960's vintage, thirty-two-foot sloop. I had found it for sale at a boatyard near Morehead City the previous fall, a couple of weeks after Grace died. A couple of years after the Great Recession had broken my business and bankrupted me. Nine months after a near-suicide had earned me a stay in a mental hospital.

My wife had agreed to let me offer two thousand dollars for the boat, two thousand dollars I had scrimped in my sock drawer in the months after the bankruptcy. She was thinking, she later admitted, that nobody would ever accept two thousand dollars for a sailboat that size. She had sense enough to know this kind of thing just wasn't done in the circumstances. I did not. I was too broken.

It was the Great Recession, and nobody was buying boats. This particular boat was decrepit. No one else wanted it. Three months after the owner rejected my original offer, he called me and gave in. So I emptied the sock drawer envelope, drove to North Carolina, and bought a forty-year-old boat with peeling paint, smelly cushions, and a rusty engine. The Pearson was well-built, though. With many, hard weekends of work, sanding and scraping and painting and filtering old diesel fuel, I had gotten it back in the water. Now we were sailing it to the Bahamas.

By that time, I had also, through what I can only account for as the grace of God, landed a job teaching English at the local community college. I had three months off for the summer. I talked Mary into coming along as crew.

We left Charleston harbor in the dark, motoring past Fort Sumter at sunset and through the jetties as night fell completely. We dodged a large inbound freighter towering black above us in the channel. Mary was terrified. I was terrified and trying not to let it show. I had been terrified and broken for at least two years. Losing Grace had devastated us both.

I took the first watch that night, setting sail in a gentle southeasterly breeze off Morris Island as Mary dozed below. The stars were brilliant in the May sky. The Milky Way rose and glistened from horizon to horizon.

After four hours, when I woke Mary for her first night watch ever, I could tell she was still scared. I pointed out the stars and the Milky Way. “Have you ever seen a night sky like that, ever in your life?” I asked. During my watch, a sentence from Ulysses had been running in my thoughts:

“The heaventree of stars hung with humid, night-blue fruit.”

I said it out loud to Mary before I left her, but she was unimpressed.

Grace would have been transported. Grace found the wonder in art. She often rushed to me after she had read a great book or toured a new art museum, gushing with enthusiasm. After her trip to Europe, she remembered the most delightful details from great paintings, details I had remembered myself since my youth. It was our thing, the thing we liked to talk about, that nobody else in the family paid any attention to.

I left Mary in the cockpit and went below to toss and turn, sleeplessly, for the next four hours. When I came back on deck for my next watch, the stars were gone, and we were sailing in a dense fog.

Mary said she had given up looking out for ships and other boats. She had spent the last hour down below, staring at the radar screen, she said. The fog was too thick, the night too black, to see anything outside.

Well, that was no radar screen. That was an outdated laptop computer I had bought on Craigslist and loaded with free nautical charts. It showed our position off the coast, but it offered no indication whatsoever of other boats or ships passing by. For the past hour or more, we had been sailing at six knots through the fog with no lookout.

My anxiety mounted. It only mounted. It never dissipated on that trip.

By noon the next day, the fog lifted to become a haze with a mile or so of visibility, and we were off Savannah. But the wind had stopped. So we diverted from our offshore course, motored into St. Catherine's Sound on the Georgia coast, and spent the night anchored in Walburg's Creek, alongside what had once been Walburg's plantation.

The next day, we continued down the Georgia coast, coming near nighttime to the mouth of the Frederica River. I remembered the anchorages in the Frederica and decided to spend the night there. The sun was setting. We were running out of time.

In darkness, we made our way to where the river intersected with Dunbar Creek. We dropped anchor.

I cooked supper on the little alcohol stove, and we were safe for the night. I was traveling on my restored sailboat. I was alive. Mary was alive. But we were consumed with our fears. We were grasping for hope. And hope was like the Milky Way we lost in the fog two nights before. We may have known it was there. We may have seen it ourselves, just a short while earlier. But it was gone now.

At that time I did not know the story of Ebo Landing. Now that I know it, I may know the source of the spirits that haunted us that night. Because we truly were tormented and terrified in that lovely and tranquil place. The marsh grass swayed in moonlight. Tree frogs sang in the black, live-oak forest on shore. Dolphins blew in the darkness beside us.

But we were haunted by the ghosts of suicide. By the triumph of despair.

The story of the slaves who killed themselves in that place is so easy to believe. The story of the slaves who tried to walk to freedom across the water, while more poetic, is harder to believe. The story of the slaves who turned into birds and flew away, quacking in their magic language and leaving their hoes sticking up in the field, is beyond belief, is it not?

But which story of the Africans of Ebo Landing is true?