South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Georgia’s Sea Islands are home to the unique Gullah Geechee culture, which is both African and Black American in origin and characterized by a distinct dialect and history. The Gullah Geechee people are descended from enslaved Africans, specifically Ibo, who grounded the ship transporting them from Savannah to the island of St. Simons and killed their enslavers before some of them walked into Dunbar Creek to drown. They are known as the “flying Africans.” Those who survived remained on the island, under the control of absentee enslavers, where they grew profitable crops like cotton and indigo. The lack of the enslavers’ presence allowed some of them to escape to places like the Bahamas or Mexico, since they lived on the water. This “African part of the South” preserves Gullah Geechee traditions while it faces gentrification in the form of the tourist industry on the Sea Islands (257).

In 2019, Perry met Dr. Walter Evans during a trip to Savannah, Georgia. Evans is a retired physician who collects contemporary and historical Black art. Perry compares him to W. E. B. Du Bois, “who saw his charge in life as documenting and preserving the artifacts of Black people precisely because their significance had been obscenely discounted and diminished […]” (265).