Wadmalaw Island stretches out around you, part of the Sea Islands that run along the South Carolina and Georgia coast, a world apart from the Charleston peninsula. The Sea Islands were the heartland of South Carolina's plantation economy: Sea Island cotton, long-staple cotton of extraordinary fineness, made planters here among the wealthiest in America. The labor was performed by enslaved Africans and their descendants, who on these isolated islands maintained African cultural practices, languages, and spiritual traditions more completely than anywhere else in North America.
When Union forces took the Sea Islands in November 1861 — some of the first Confederate territory captured — the planters fled and the enslaved population found itself in a sudden and complicated freedom. The federal government ran the Port Royal Experiment here, an early effort to demonstrate that formerly enslaved people could work independently. After the war, the Gullah/Geechee people — as they came to be called — maintained their communities, their language, their sweetgrass basket tradition, their praise house worship, and their distinctive foodways for generations.
Gullah is an English creole with deep West African grammatical and lexical roots. The cuisine, the music, the baskets — all carry Africa across the centuries. The Sea Islands are where that survival is most visible and most alive.