Fiction and Literature
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Sapelo Island
Low Country
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
  
 
Most of the story-telling recalls the storyteller's early childhood with great- grandparents in the cotton fields of South Georgia.  

The Storyteller  is a descendant of a Caribbean African American slave who lectures mostly about how  she enjoyed listening to folklore of elder ancestors and her great-grandfather who lectured  about his early childhood growing up on a sugar-cane plantation in St. Croix one of the Caribbean Virgin Islands. During the Era Union General William Tecumseh Sherman and his and his soldiers marched to Savannah. Afterward rending victory and delivering it to President Lincoln as Christmas present in 1865. Briefly, Sapelo Island is mention telling how the slaves escaped from the marshes of Sapelo Island  seeking refugee with the union soldiers by foot and waterways.  

 

 
As I recalls it seems not to long ago when  I was in the cotton fields of South  Georgia with my great grand parents. I loved  listening to my great- grand father tell folk tales. Pa Pa always told folk tales and sang to make  the day  go faster  and to forget the discomfort of the  hot sun every now and then he would say pick the cotton child before you melt. I would say, "will I really melt ?," He responded yes, "if you are lazy you will melt in the sun". Great- grandfather was a Caribbean African American from St. Croix the Virgin Island. 

He enjoyed telling Caribbean  folk tales to his great- great-grand children, and relatives. He liked bragging to my great grand mother about how he came to this country as a free man and  lived near Savannah( Macintosh,County, Ga.) on Sapelo Island until the Union soldiers came to Savannah. My great grand mother was born in slavery . Of all of the folk tales, he would tell there is one I will always remember. Once he would start telling these stories he  would always say you know I came to this country as a free man.  Granny of course would become jealous. She would always response to my pa pa saying " remember to tell your grand children the whole story". Now, You know if you  had not left St. Croix you would have  been a dead man    hum .. hum!! ...so much for a free man " I believe all you west Indian have nine lives anyway, are you sure you didn't die  at least one time before leaving the Island. ha!ha!..

Pa Pa was the son of a sugar-cane planter and the planter's mistress. The slave master's wife ordered the overseer to kill my pa pa and other mulattos running around in the courtyard. Pa Pa was special to the planter being the planter's first born son although he was illegitimate and the child of a slave . Late that night when the slaves and the master finished tallying  bananas. The slave master stored pa pa away on a banana boat to Savannah ,Georgia to be raised by the planters'sister as a Confederate child. Afterward, pa pa found himself alone. Sherman destroyed Savannah killing his aunt and other relatives, Two union soldiers was giving orders  to take pa pa out back of  the barn and kill  him. Pa pa being a manipulator begged and saved his life. The  soldiers believed pa pa story about his exodus from St. Croix and  allowed  him to follow the union soldiers as a  refugee from Savannah down to Central Georgia. V.lyons Folkorist and slave descendant

 
 
Painting of Artist from Sapelo Island 
Ernest Butts
 

 
 
 

                                                                       Cotton pickers
 
Plantation Home
  
  
Sapelo Dancers
 
 
 
 Sapelo Island children
 
 
 
 "Jump de Broom"
 
Confederate Evacuation of Savannah        Sherman's March To Sea Forty Acres And A Mule 
 
 
     Savannah in the winter of 1864-65 was crowded with black refugees seeking shelter and food; temporarily, they more than doubled the little city's population. Simple survival  was their task. In December and early January , General Sherman was also in the city- Savannah had been his Christmas present to President Lincoln He denied reports both of refugees being driven away from his army and of their being murdered by marauding Confederate troops: "A cock and bull story." But he complained that his army of sixty thousand was "overloaded with two- thirds negroes, five sixth of whom are helpless, and a large proportion of them babies and small children. Forty thousand refugees or even close to that number- in a city with 1860 population of 22,292 caused severe problem.  
  Left behind Sherman's march were chimneys bare of their houses wrenched lives. To a large degree, the Confederate  Army, apart from making harassing raids on Sherman's flanks, stayed out of harm's way. The suffering were civilians black and white.  
  In the terrible confusion  of burned cabins and desolated terrain, the people- the freed people, as the better disposed federal soldiers had told them they now were -had to decide for themselves whether to go or stay. 
 
 
 
 
 

Raccoon Bluff
William Tecumseh Sherman, Special Fields Orders No. 15, Jan. 16, 1865, in Sherman, Memoirs, 730. 

  In the first  fall of the Civil -War- on November 1861 the United States Navy entered the harbor of Port Royal , South Carolina, to blockade Charleston, On the 24th, ships reached Tybee Island, Georgia, to close the way into Savannah and began patrolling the defenseless, exposed Islands reaching south to Florida. Many of the island planters left, leaving their slaves to fend for themselves. Others planter ordered their slaves onto boat on the mainland, marched them 163 miles into the interior of Georgia, where it was hope they would be out of the way of the Union forces. The hope was not worth much. The people marched from Sapelo found themselves directly in the path of General Sherman's 1864 March to the Sea. 
  Planter's fears were warranted. Although the war that began April 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumter left the region for a time, it came back to Sapelo and the other sea islands sooner than it was to return to any other part of the deep South . To block entrance of supplies to Charleston and Savannah, the Union Navy seized the sea island harbor of Port Royal in South Carolina in November 1861. A confederate colonel was to have led his regiment in what provided to be a futile defense of Port Royal, but to the dismay of some of his fellow  planters, was too drunk to do so- . Ship then ranged un-deterred along the Georgia islands, and white Georgians in the port of Darien talked openly of their fears that Yankees would take their town and turn the slaves loose.

Meridian Dock, Georgia    Department of Natural Resource  and United States   Commerce," Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve Management" (Gregory Pernell Bailey)

  

   When the delegation of black men told the general that they would prefer to be left alone and that they would not be dependent on his army, it was with the knowledge of the success of the Carolina sea islanders. It was they who provided the commander with solution to his problem. If given land that they could farm, the refugees would stop following him. On January 16, 1865, the general issued Special Field Order 15: "The islands  from Charleston south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the county bordering the St. John's Rivers, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of negroes now made free by the acts of War  
Sapelo was safely centered in this large stretched of territory in which the people were to be on their own: "On the islands, and in the settlement hereafter to be established no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside ; and the sole and excessive management of affairs will be left too the freed people themselves . 
In the spring of 1865, with more slavery and war on their backs than anyone should have to endure, the refugees in Savannah had enough of white people folk. And yet white folk were still doing for them. Fortunately ,General Saxton was one of them; as Shernan's armies moved north into Carolinas, Saxton was left behind to serve as, in effect, the military governor ,of Sherman's coastal maroon. 
  He and his staff were soon busy trying  to relocate as many as possible of the thousand of Savannah refugees to the islands. Efficiently putting the reverse side of absconded Farmers and Mechanics Bank blank loans forms to use, they responded to requests from heads of households.

Coming Home 
Ella Barrow Spalding August 1914, Humphries, Journal of Mckinley, 242. 
2. Green, op. cit., "Prince Carter Family," Family #107. Charles Jones family Family, "Family #119

 
Sapelo's People:  A  long Walk To FreedomWilliam S. Mcffely                                                       Low Country
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Sugar-cane field and ox cart
 
 
 
Gullah man from Low Country Sugar and Slavery
 
 
Sam Lord's Castle Down In Jamaica
 
Sherman's March to Sea Belize
 
 
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Storyteller/Internet Research
Africa OnLine
De Grummond Collection Fairy tales
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Most of the story-telling recalls the storytellers' early
childhood with great-grandparent  in the cotton fields of South Georgia.
 The   storyteller is a descendant of a Caribbean African American slave.
 
 
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at Decasa2@Aol.com
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     Programs Includes:
 
 
 
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Biography  Diversified Storyteller Down by The Sea with The old Folklorian
 
 

Legendary Folklore story-telling Escape from St. Croix
 

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       Click  the picture below to read more slave  narratives.
 
 
 
 Slave Narratives
 
 
 
                The Middle Passage  to Georgia
 
 
Sapelo's people know their ocean differently. On one hand, it is simply there-to be ignored; On the other hand, it echoes a remote real past. Africa is on its other side. Sapelo forebears were survivors of the terrible voyages from Africa to America, the Middle Passage, Of the dragging from a home and of the cramming into the holds of slavers to endure the torture of an ocean crossing. Their fellow slaves-to-be who did not endure were, dead or dying, thrown into the sea. The ship took those who lived into the New World ports. Many who eventually were sold to sea island planters were taken first to the Bahamas, sold, and driven to work. Then, to be sold again, were shipped to Charleston. There as well in the Bahamas earlier, the planter's agent bought Sapelo's people, who were walked and ferried onto the island. Slave masters  made them clear their forest, work their fields; they in turn- and not out of choice-made the masters island their home. 

  
Sapelo's People: A Long Walk Into Freedom                   William S. Mcffely 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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