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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.
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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
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| 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
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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
Coming Home
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| Sapelo's People: A long Walk To Freedom, William S. Mcffely Low Country |
| Home Page | Folk Storyteller |
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 Gullah
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| 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.
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