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The Gullah: A disappearing way of life

Harris Neck, Ga. -- Mary Moran sits on her side porch, softly singing a funeral song she learned here in north McIntosh County more than half a century ago.

"A wohkoh, mu mohne; kambei ya le; li leei tohmbe," she sings in Mende, the language of an ethnic group in Sierra Leone. "Ha sa wuli nggo, sihan; kpangga li lee."

Joe Opala, an American anthropologist who teaches in Sierra Leone, has translated the words as "Come quickly, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; his heart is not yet perfectly cool (at peace). Sudden death has sharp ears."

Moran, now 75, learned the song from her late mother, Amelia Dawley, who learned it from her mother, and so on back through family and time, probably to the 18th century, when people were kidnapped from countries bordering Africa's westward bulge and brought to the Americas as slaves.

Now, researchers from all over the world are coming to rural Harris Neck to meet this shy, dignified woman whom they credit with preserving the longest known text in an African language still surviving in an African-American family.

Moran's memory of the song helps identify her as a member of the unique Gullah culture, which survives in scattered communities in coastal Georgia and South Carolina. The Gullah people are descended from slaves imported by the thousands almost three centuries ago from West Africa. Basket-weaving (photo above) and other cultural traditions, such as music, food and dance, are still practiced by the Gullah people.

Now, the culture is in danger of disappearing.

Moran said she never expected to make history with her mother's song.

"I didn't know the song was important; I never knew what the words meant," she said. "I didn't even know it was a funeral song. We used to dance to it when we were children."

In 1989, the government of Sierra Leone invited a group of 13 Gullah/Geechee people from Georgia, South Carolina and Oklahoma to a "homecoming" in Africa. The group included four Georgians: Lauretta Sams of Darien, Cornelia Bailey of Sapelo Island and Frankie and Doug Quimby of Brunswick.

The weathered hands of a Gullah man take the first steps in the weaving of a basket.(Photos by David Tulis)

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When ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt learned Sams worked in the records department at the McIntosh County courthouse, she asked her to search for relatives of Amelia Dawley, the last Georgian known to have sung the song.

"It was by the grace of God I was on that delegation or we never would have f ound the linkage," said Sams, who immediately recognized Moran's name as that of a lifelong family friend.

After learning Dawley's daughter lived at Harris Neck, Schmidt and Opala visited Moran in 1990 and played a recording of Dawley made in the 1930s by another researcher.

Moran immediately recognized her mother's voice and began singing along "perfectly," according to Schmidt, who said she isn't surprised that the song retained by the Dawley-Moran clan was a funeral song. Such songs ranked among the most important tribal music because ancestors are revered in Africa, she said.

Cultural mementos were especially important to enslaved Africans, who treasured them as their only links to lost families and homelands, she said.

Since being identified as the song's preserver, Moran's life hasn't changed much. She does get more requests for research interviews. Opala and Schmidt want to feature her in a film they plan to make on the Gullah / Geechee-Sierra Leone connection.

Ann Wright, the deputy ambassador to Sierra Leone, recently visited, bringing Moran a book, a hand-woven basket and photographs of people who may be distant relatives.

With Moran's children grown, and her husband, Roosevelt, often gone crabbing "to help stretch the Social Security," Moran spends her days in a neat brick home not far from the gates to the sprawling Harris Neck National Wildlife Refuge, where her people lived until World War II, making a living farming and fishing the nearby tidal creeks and rivers.

Moran said none of her own 13 children ever learned the Mende song. "They just wasn't interested in it," Moran said. "But when Joe Opala and Cynthia came by, they said, 'Teach it to your granddaughter,' and I did."

Now, Moran's 13-year-old granddaughter, Marquita Moran, has become the latest link in the as-yet unbroken chain of women who, for centuries, have honored their African and Gullah/Geechee ancestors by keeping a fragile fragment of their culture alive.

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