Seeking

This is a story I wrote for a History final project about a Gullah Geechee descendant who goes on her own Seeking journey!

Dedication:

To Dr. Seitz and Ms. Candy: Thank you for challenging my beliefs and changing how I think about and approach sensitive topics. I learned so much from you guys in just one semester.

Author’s Note:

This story is told from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old Gullah Geechee descendant. The Gullah Geechee people have a vibrant history in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Their story is an incredible story of a multicultural community created in the midst of a dark time in history. I encourage anyone interested in learning more about the Gullah Geechee people to research them and their incredible stories.

This story in particular revolves around the Gullah Geechee religious act of Seeking, but it focuses more on the connection to nature and identity that Seeking often brought. The narrator is searching for identity, and Seeking is the start of that journey. Creative licensure was taken when describing her Seeking journey, as it strays from the typical religious journey.

Seeking: by Kyndra Randolph

My grandmother used to tell me that nature remembers everything. The rushing creek water eternalizes every wish and the gentle ocean breeze passes on every secret. As I made my way into the quiet forest, I wondered if the oak trees remembered me. It had been nearly seven years since I had last trekked through these woods, but I felt the hush that came over the trees as I stepped carefully over their roots. It felt like the trees were trying to decide if I were friend or foe, and they hung at the precipice of recognition.

Perhaps it was only my imagination, but I felt it the moment I was recognized. The woods sprang to life and the birds picked up their tune. It was the second I reached the tree with a name carved into it that I was accepted. I lightly ran my fingers over the harsh lines that spelled the name “Amari.” The tree seemed to sigh in remembrance as I let my fingertips graze over my name. The last seven years seemed to disappear as I considered that the woods did not view time the same. They likely still believed me to be the confident nine-year-old who wore the label of Gullah Geechee with pride rather than a sixteen-year-old tired of trying to explain that I was not just “African American” or “Black.” My heritage went much deeper than that, though it seemed like no one cared to know.

I sighed and lowered myself to the ground in front of the tree. It seemed the best place to sit and think, or Seek, as my grandmother had called it when she pushed me in the general directions of the woods with an old journal.

“Seeking is one of the most important Gullah Geechee traditions. It is more than a religious retreat. It’s also about connecting with nature and yourself. If you have lost yourself, Amari, you need Seeking to find yourself.”

The message was pretty clear: don’t come back until I had meditated on my problems, which is how I ended up sitting on the roots of a tree considering who I even was as a person. I wouldn’t have been struggling so much if it weren’t for some silly ancestry project I was forced to do. The project itself was easy because my grandmother had a pretty extensive catalog of our family. She was even able to trace our lineage to certain African countries. That in itself was something to be proud of because not many people were able to fully trace their lineage due to the slave trade.

I was so assured in my heritage that when I stood up to present to my classmates, I proudly proclaimed that I was a Gullah Geechee descendant with familial ties to the South Carolina Sea Islands, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. I spoke about the connection between the Gullah people and the community they had built amid horrible times, and my classmates stared at me like I was speaking another language. When I finished my presentation, I asked if anyone had any questions and a girl near the front of the class immediately raised her hand.

“So…what are you?” she asked. What, not who.

“Gullah Geechee,” was my simple answer.

She squinted her eyes at me. “So you’re African American?”

“I’m Gullah Geechee,” I said again. “I’m not sure if you heard my presentation, but I provided a history of the Gullah Geechee people.”

“Right, but you said that they were slaves, so that makes you African American, right?”

I didn’t know how to answer her so I just gave her a tight nod and sat down, my cheeks burning. I had declared myself as Gullah Geechee and all my classmates saw was an African American who had come from slaves. I had never felt so diminished in my life. I was used to the Sea Islands, where people knew what it was to be Gullah Geechee. In Boston, however, I was just any other Black teenager.

Who was I if I were not Gullah Geechee? Did I have any way of setting myself apart from my Black friends if my lineage was ignored or forced to assimilate into “Black American” culture?

The questions had driven me mad, so I jumped at the opportunity to return to my childhood home and renew my connection with both my Gullah Geechee community and the land that had belonged to my family since the Civil War. Only, I had made the mistake of telling my grandmother a bit of my struggles, and she immediately sent me off into the woods.

With nothing else to do, I opened the journal and began to thumb through it. The first dozen or so pages were so worn that I couldn’t make out what was written on them, but the pages in the middle were intact and the writing legible. At the top was my grandmother’s name, followed by the word “Seeking.” It read:

My daughter asked me today what Seeking was like. I couldn’t help but smile at her as I remembered what Seeking had been for me. Somewhere in the last three generations, my family had altered Seeking. We didn’t go to the woods just to receive a divine dream and be accepted into the church. We went to remind ourselves where we came from, to return to a place of solitude and connect with our souls.

When I went Seeking, I was seventeen and eager to understand myself. I told the whole Gullah Geechee community that I was going to find myself. I spent two days in the woods thinking that God would come down and say, “Mariama, this is exactly who you are” and spell my identity out for me.

That never happened, and I returned home feeling dejected. My mother nearly lost her mind when she saw how sad I was. “You missed the point of Seeking completely. You cannot just sit there and expect to know things. Seeking is an action. Go back out there and do it right!”

I returned to the woods the next day with renewed zeal, determined to seek the correct way. I wandered through the woods, reflecting on my family and my heritage. I was Gullah Geechee, but I felt like the enormity of that title was lost on me. What did it even mean to be Gullah Geechee? Had any other Gullah Geechee descendant wondered the same?

I smiled to myself a little at that part. Just knowing that my grandmother struggled a bit in the same way that I did consoled me. I skimmed the next few parts until I saw a section that caught my eye.

There was an old rice field in my backyard and I had never even known about it. I mean it wasn’t quite my backyard because you had to trek a good ways through the forest to get there, but it was there nonetheless. I happened upon it by accident, but the second I saw it I knew what it was. The dikes my direct ancestors had likely created stood tall against the marshy water. I felt overwhelmed in that moment. Perhaps this was where my mother had wanted me to go. I was seeking something, and the rice field is where I ended up. To me, this felt more like where I was supposed to be. This was where I connected with my ancestors, not the woods. This is where they poured every ounce of themselves into creating something that changed the world. This is where my story began: with my ancestors who worked to create a beautiful community as they altered the economy of the nation.

I felt satisfied then because I had been Seeking and I found the beginning. I found where my story started. It doesn’t matter that I know anything else because I know where it all began.

In all honesty, that was a bit of a letdown. I was expecting actual answers. Maybe that was too much to hope for, but how does finding the beginning remotely help someone understand their identity? Sure, it’s important to know where you come from, but you also have to know who you are outside of that. At least, I wanted to know my separate identity.

Maybe I needed to start in the same place my grandmother ended. I needed to see the old rice field. I quickly got to my feet and shoved the journal into my pocket before taking off deeper into the woods. I had no idea exactly how long I walked, but the sun had definitely gotten lower in the sky by the time I reached the field. The second I saw the open area I knew I was in the right place.

The sheer size of the field caught me off guard. I stopped to imagine what the area might have looked like before. Enslaved people would have been forced to clear away trees and bushes before they could build the dikes and create the rice fields. It would have been an enormous undertaking and not the slightest bit easy. Suddenly, I understood why my grandmother reacted to the fields in the way she did. Just looking at the land in front of me made me undeniably proud of what my people had done. They had transformed the landscape of the Sea Islands, likely with improper tools, but they had done it all the same. And while they changed the land, they changed their ideas of community and language.

There was power in that realization. I did not come from people who assimilated into the mainstream culture. I came from people who fought to keep their culture and create their own communities.

Feeling a bit more satisfied, I sat down at the edge of the woods and opened the journal again. There was one more page with my grandmother’s writing on it.

My mother was so happy when I got back. “Mariama, you look as if you have learned something,” she said.

“I did learn something, but I still don’t have answers,” I replied.

She laughed at that. “My dear girl, you will never find those answers. Seeking is not something you do once. You will spend the rest of your life Seeking, and you may never fully understand yourself because you are not set on permanence. You might think you know yourself and then you will change and grow and rediscover who you are all over again.”

I thought about what she said for a long time, and it wasn’t until years later that I actually understood. The most important thing I have learned since my Seeking experience is that people are complex. I have never been the same person twice because every day brings new experiences that change me.

I may not know the full capacity of my identity, but I know my roots. I know where I started from, and that knowledge has carried me far in my journey.

I closed the journal and let that sink in. As I watched the weeds swaying against the wind, I felt comforted knowing that it was okay if I didn’t know myself outside of being Gullah Geechee. After all, I was still learning how to be Gullah Geechee. and I needed to learn the history of my people to better understand that part of myself.

That journey started in the forest, and I believed what my grandmother had told me about nature remembering everything. Every bit of the natural island I was on told the story of my people, and I was finally in a position to learn it. From there, I could teach it because if no one outside of the Sea Islands knew who the Gullah Geechee people were, then I determined to be the one to teach them.

The End <3