Waterbearers Against the Dark: Gullah Geechee Women and the Makings of Black Radical Education

• In Event: Black Roots and Reservoirs: Reclaiming Black Education Through Radical Everyday Knowledge Cultivation

Abstract

In this paper, I propose Black radical education to contribute to expanded ideas of Black education as ontoepistemic recovery and cultivation. Turning to Gullah women of the SC Sea Islands, I argue that Gullah women’s spiritual knowledge becomes the makings of Black radical education in what would become known as the United States.

Most commonly, academic researchers have framed Black education as an effort toward equity (Noguera, 2009; Smith & Chunn, 2017; Howard, 2016) or a pursuit for political power (Rickford, 2016; Todd-Breland, 2018) and social advancement (Anderson, 1988). While imperative, these framings are incomplete and rarely acknowledge Black education as a process of knowledge production rooted in the cultivation of Black ways of sensing, knowing, and being in the world.

Situating Black education, however, in the Black Radical Tradition (BRT) (Robinson, 2020) creates space for more full, complex understandings of Black education that account for the various ways Black communities have created their own processes of learning and manipulated existing ones in order to (re)generate knowledge. Robinson’s (2020) articulation of the BRT highlights the ways Black folks have not been fully consumed by logics of racial capitalism, imperialism, and colonization and have instead committed themselves to what he calls ontological totality and wholeness. This unrelenting pursuit for ontological wholeness—even against the most damning processes of antiblackness and racial capitalism—invites serious considerations of intergenerational Black knowledge production as a pursuit for ontoepistemological agency and autonomy.

This paper also positions Black women, specifically Gullah Geechee women as some of the earliest cultivators of Black radical education and attends to the ways these women have inverted their subjugation as captive maternals (James, 2016) to nurture children who can and will nurture and use African-rooted cosmologies to continue to guide Black folks through their living.

To add flesh to this paper, I draw on archival data and oral history about Gullah women between 1861-1895 and ethnographic interviews and observations with contemporary Gullah women. The Battle of Port Royal on November 7, 1861 in the SC Sea Islands effectively freed about 10,000 enslaved Blacks who were Gullah, initiating the Port Royal Experiment (Rose, 1976). Though, through this program, the federal government made it a priority to impart education to these “contrabands” of the Civil War, this education was part of “a most elaborate experiment in Negro rehabilitation” (Pease, 1957). Such an “experiment” placed greater emphasis on the restructuring of society than the restitution due to African folks and their descendents from the institution of enslavement. In other words, federally funded Black education has, since its inception, been about cultural assimilation, not cultural agency.

At the same time, however, Gullah women were still passing on Gullah knowledge to children, even if in less “formalized ways.” Preliminary findings suggest that Gullah women, even as they sent their children to the new schools for negro children, also functioned as community spiritual leaders who modeled and cultivated knowledge with children through storytelling and song; spirit possession and embodied movement; and passive participation.

Author

• Amber Chevaughn Johnson, University of Maryland