In the 1920s and 1930s, researchers descended on Sapelo Island, Georgia, seeking to draw connections between the island’s African-American residents and their African heritage. In her new book, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press), Melissa L. Cooper examines the unique history of Low Country blacks, and explores the motivations of the anthropologists and folklorists who sought to tell particular stories about them.
Four days after Christmas in 1928, dozens of Sapelo Islanders gathered around an oxcart on a dirt road that snaked through live oaks covered in Spanish moss and waited for the white man who was filming them to tell them what to do next. They had already sung “Old Time Religion,” “Steal Away to Jesus,” and performed a rendition of the minstrel tune that was named the Kentucky state song that year?—?“My Old Kentucky Home.” Each time the camera rolled, the filmmaker directed the Islanders to sing while riding in, or walking alongside, the ox cart. The solemn choral group likely included some of the men Howard Coffin hired to build roads, prepare crops, man his sawmill, tend his cattle, work in his greenhouse, or build boats and other structures. Likewise, several of the women in the chorus were either paid by Coffin to work in his shrimp and oyster cannery or in his fields, or were members of the domestic staff who cooked his meals and cleaned his mansion. Even though the filmmaker captured several “takes” designed to look like mundane and typical Sapelo scenes, that day was anything but ordinary. That day, Sapelo Islanders found themselves in front of cameras, recording equipment, and in the presence of a small crowd of newspaper reporters because their boss had recruited them to entertain the most powerful white man in America, President Calvin Coolidge.
Of course President Coolidge’s sojourn to the island made headlines in national newspapers, but articles chronicling the details of his trip also introduced Sapelo Islanders to the nation.