The crooked cobblestone was wet and dark after a heavy rain pounded through the city. Savannah, as eerie as it is majestic, is a hybrid of gothic architecture, art, crime, old money, years of slavery and proper Southern manners. The low-hanging Spanish moss cradled the streets and parks and, after a storm, looked like someone painted it drunk with hazy-hued oils.
Near the Davenport House, a guide welcomed tourists onto a trolley for one of the city’s most popular attractions: a ghost tour. The tour serves as a gateway to Savannah’s many haunted buildings and parks. But beyond the 40-minute attraction is an entire world that is often overlooked – a spirit world rooted in the religion and traditions of surviving ancestors of enslaved and freed Africans.
“We didn’t believe just in the body and the soul. We believed in the body, the soul and the spirit, just like the people in Africa had believed,” writes Cornelia Walker Bailey, a Saltwater Geechee, in God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man. “The way it worked was that when a person died, the body went to the grave, the soul rested in peace, and the spirit remained on earth. So the spirit was always here.”
The Saltwater Geechee are one of the remaining factions of the Gullah Geechee people, who are descended from Central and West Africans who were trafficked into the Low Country regions of the Southern United States. Today, many Gullah Geechee communities live within the 12,000 square miles spanning from South Carolina to Florida. Some remain on the land inherited from their families – distributed by Union General T. Sherman after the Civil War ended in 1865 and enslaved Africans were freed – while others have dispersed into the cities.
The Gullah Geechee’s African cultural traditions and belief systems have often been overlooked. Their livelihoods were encroached upon, and still are, by hungry land developers and those who do not see the beauty in preservation through isolation. Quiet but lively islands like Sapelo, off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, and St Helena, which has a bridge to the mainland not far from Charlotte, South Carolina, were insular.
The presence of the Gullah Geechee is just as integral to the fabric of the American South as its opulent mansions, its cuisine or wars, its flags and bars. Yet, it’s often ignored.
“It’s barely mentioned. You have a deep-rooted culture of African American tradition that is left out,” says Valerie McClelland, a historical interpreter for the Coastal Heritage Society who grew up in Douglas, Georgia.
McClelland’s grandfather was a Geechee man from outside Jacksonville, Florida, though, as a child, she didn’t realize much about what that meant outside of him speaking his native Creole dialect. Gullah is considered, academically, to be the language of the Gullah Geechee, while Geechee refers to the people. Within the community, however, Gullah are those who live north of the Savannah River, while Geechee live south of it.
McClelland continues: “You’re learning about the ghosts that haunted these old houses… But you’re not hearing about how Mrs. Halene saw a ‘haunt’ or a ‘haint’ out on her porch.”
The Gullah Geechee referred to “haints” as the spirits who would, according to McClelland, “share their skin at night.” The haint could be male or female and it could come and sit on your back and hold you down.
“If you were wise, you didn’t underestimate the spirits. They were just as real as any flesh-and-blood person, so they were quite powerful, and there was such a thin veil between this world and the next that they could make themselves known,” Walker Bailey writes. “And, even though you wanted to believe that all of them were good, a spirit could be good or bad, depending on the nature of person they had been.”
According to McClelland, “haint” blue was believed to have protective qualities. The Sea Islands had a large indigo plantation and many of the Gullah Geechee’s ancestors would dip rags in the vats used to process the color and wipe it on the windows and doors and in the cracks and seals of their homes. Today, many plantations and old houses serve as tourist sites, where the slave quarters remain splattered with vibrant blues.
In parts of Africa, people would hang indigo bottles on the tips of tree branches in their front yards and today, Gullah Geechee do the same, some as art and some seeped in belief against the haints.
“They believed spirits would get trapped in the bottles at night and when the sun hits the bottles in the morning light, the spirits would disperse,” McClelland says. “You can see the bottle trees all over. They’re very common in Charleston area. This shows the connection that the Gullah Geechee people have with Africa.”
On the outskirts of Savannah, the Pin Point Heritage Museum, a small space devoted to the Gullah Geechee that’s housed in old oyster cannery beside the Moon River, has a bottle tree in front. Its limbs are not rooted in the earth but were made by a blacksmith named Gilbert Walker. Each branch holds a haint blue bottle.
McClelland says the museum’s tourists sometimes recognize the Gullah Geechee bottle tree. Some have seen it as far as Texas or at craft boutiques in the North. Some even have it in their own yards. Most times, though, they don’t realize it’s a small piece of a salient lineage, quiet as a whisper in the Spanish moss growing right above their heads.
