Did you know camels and elephants once roamed Charleston's lowcountry? That sharks as big as school buses (35-ton megalodons) plied the coastal waters? That the Battery was once a Native American oyster bed? That rice-Carolina Gold-the great cash crop of the lowcountry, had an unusual Romeo and Juliet: a pirate and princess from the east African island of Madagascar?
Charleston's history, its surprises and new twists, also celebrates international ties, especially its Gullah heritage. Gullah, the name derived from Angola ( An ·
gola- "gullah"), represents the speech, belief, and customs of the lowcountry's unique Euro-African heritage developed over two centuries by melded communities from West, Central, and Southern Africa.
Faith and work are twin Gullah pillars for individual and community sufficiency and growth. Believing faith to be a deep inner mystic ( beyond sense or reason) , the Gullah make and use symbols, stories, songs, memories, and physical sites to mark and make known their faith. Work expresses faith.
Faith/
For example, towering above the city and the sea since 1761, the Biblical meaning of the 187 ft. octagon steeple of St. Michael's Church is right out of Genesis. God made the world in six days, rested, then called the world to new life on the eighth day (The same day He made sweet tea! The animals were thirsty!) Recall the eight souls saved on the ark. The eight-sided steeple extols the city to begin or renew life in Christ.
Buried at the NE corner of St. Philip's Churchyard,William Harvey was concerned about the snares of temptation in the afterlife. To aid his safe appearance on Judgment Day, carved on his stone are five Persian angels to guard his virtues.
Interred at Circular Congregational Church is Rev. G. Hutson. Cherubs flank his cameo, one resting an elbow on an hourglass (life has expired); the other's elbow propped on a human skull without a jaw, its teeth sitting on a ledge (a symbol of the silence consigned by the grave . . .).
Praise House, held most Tuesdays at 7 pm at Circular, presents a rare cultural opportunity-witness the Magnolia Singers singing spirituals spanning 200 years, in the call and response tradition of the Africans who created this deeply moving, spirit-filled music. Somehow the rhythms of this live performance touch and enter the body to access an inner mystic.
Born in the rice fields, forest groves and clearings near the slave quarters, in wooden "praise houses" and modern churches, the spirituals passionate outpouring chronicle a history that laughs, cries, and prays, but always moves forward. All the while the voices swing-healing by memory, moving forward in praise, offering thanks for the mercy of the present.
The lantern windows high in its bell tower sealed and dark, Emmanuel AME Church still illuminates the world beyond horizon and sight. A bellwether African-American congregation, Emanuel AME Church is one of the most important houses of worship in the USA.
Founded in 1791 as a prayer band, Emanuel's discipleship (at slavery's peak in 1817, its 5,000 members were drawn from 3 Methodist congregations) shadowed the number Moses led through the parted Red Sea (5,000, protected and guided by God), echoed the number touched on the day of Pentecost (5,000 - filled with grace by His Spirit), and eerily matched the number Jesus fed with the barley loaves and fish on the mountain across from Galilee (5,000 blessed by the gift of faith: sustained, nourished, and strengthened).
In 1865, Daniel A. Payne (the first African-American college president, Wilberforce) and R. H. Cain (later a SC Congressman), re-opened the congregation. At Emanuel, faith is deeply personal: Raphael's famous 16 th century cherubs (seen in the recess of the ground level entrance) have the sculpted faces of 19 th century Charleston youth! The prayer circles, Sunday sermons, the private and public witnesses, altar calls, and shout rhythms adorn the church whose plain beauty is enhanced by its magnificent proportions. Ex-slaves and their children built the present church from their craft and financial resources. Opened in 1891, it retains the original gaslights, altar, pews, Victorian embossed ceiling, and heart pine floors.
The Baha ¢ i faith emphasizes the unity of all people and embraces historic, physical, gender, and ethnic diversity and world peace. Charleston's
Louis Gregory, born in 1874, a slave's grandson, became a lawyer and a leader of the US Assembly of the Bahai. (His restored childhood home is 2 Deportes Court).
Work/
Planters' letters and archived notes affirm greater trust, higher responsibility, and new work roles for colonial and ante-bellum Charleston's African majority. Slaves brought "across the waters" became captains of ships sailing into oceans and waterways to pick up the rice harvests from plantations spread from Myrtle Beach to Savannah.
Called patroons, these enslaved Gullah captains commanded 20 ton schooners through shoals and creeks, river channels changing with the tides, open seas lashed by storms to stage 600 lb. barrels of rice along Charleston's colonial and ante-bellum wharves for shipment to Asia and Europe.
The builders who erected the city's most recognized landmark and its famed bell ringers have been left out of the city's record until recently. St. Michael's church is a shrine of history - and now a silent monument to the rediscovered names of enslaved craftsmen who laid its brick, stuccoed its exterior, cut and hoisted timber for its belfry and spire. Their English, Spanish, Biblical, African, and Native American names (Simon, Sandy, King, Sancho, Cain, Cuffee, Wando, among others) speak to Africa's global presence.
Silent, too, are St. Michael bell ringer Washington McLean Gadsden's afternoon concerts of hymns ("It is well") and popular tunes such as "Lay Down that Watermelon," "Rib, Rab de Bong, Jing, Jing," "I am not fondly thine Own," and "Charleston Girl." George W. Williams cites the Courier: When the 1885 hurricane "howled through the city, casting destruction on every side," Gadsden coolly sent the "melodies of old hymns over the gale-swept town." An admirer, Edward Nathaniel Harleston wrote a quatrain: I am longing for sweet music. / Play me your most sublime, / But it will not be as soothing / As St. Michael's morning chimes.
The Philip Simmons Garden at Menotti St. (behind Buist School) has an unusual ideogram-a wrought iron map of Charleston and its community life. Mr. Simmons designed the wall grille displaying the harbor, two rivers, Charleston single houses, neighbor-hood streets, and the city's buzzing profusion of business and civic activities in harmonic scrolls. God as a symbol, a fish in rolling waves or an angel with long wings, appears at the grille's top and reoccurs as a diamond, reflecting God's light and deflecting temptation, at the grille's heart.
Get outdoors and go behind the scenes of a lowcountry plantation at Caw Caw Interpretive Center, a county park carved from the 5,500 acre rice (later, tea) plantation of patriot Thomas Rose. Bald Eagles nest in its pine snags, more than 50 bird species fly-by, and alligators sun on the dikes and romp over the markings of ancient quarter mains overgrown by nettles.
A canal bringing water to these fields outlived its purpose: its channel became a manifold memorial of reclaimed hope. Slave hands built the canal, endured their oppressors, pitched dirt to its banks. As they worked, an enduring heart shielded and strengthened the slaves' digging hands. The heart's inner voice commanded the lifting hands to fling away sorrow and rage, doubts and fears-just as they did the dirt on the banks.
The water-filled canal became a work of inner liberty. It witnessed a presence born from within, standing beside the slave, calling from above, to let go-to transcend. Will faith be the servant of power? The slaves' silent answer: no.
Under the enduring heart and digging hands the mile-long canal thrived. (As did the slaves,) for 200 years the canal bore up without collapse. Its seamless waters mark an unbroken love, praise an everflowing, timeless will greater than the human master's. (For those) healed, purified, welcomed and received, the waters are a gateway into blessed faith.
In England, when church stones were used to build cow stables and carved religious figures burned for limestone, the colonial Rose canal dug by slaves remained a sanctuary.
It recalled the canals of the Tigris (by the rivers of Babylon), an embedded triumph of those who "sat and wept"-and a living reminder that Pharaoh's army "got drown." It recalled the "water from the rock" sent to alleviate sufferings.
In these re-shaped rice lands, where dirt was lifted up and burdens laid down-where the lost of external freedom called forth the rushing swoop of a powerful inner freedom, the land and the Africans share a powerful communal memory. The canal's presence observes, in the landscape of time, how the "waters (slavery) chilled my body, but filled my soul (
like burning coals)."
