"I hab a deep suspicious mine dat way muhsef. I know  deah is luck and unluck an some people kin wuk it. It's  a science in mos ebryting dey does. Deh kin swap yuh frum good luck place tuh bad luck place." 

 —Drums and Shadows 

Drums and Shadows at the Pin Point Heritage Museum 

Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, published in 1940, studied the heritage of African-Americans living on the Georgian and Carolinian coast in the 1930s. The people studied had ancestors introduced to the region from across the Atlantic, enslaved to toil the area plantations. The study recorded dozens of interviews with coastal residents and documented the dialects spoken at the time, including the insightful quote above.  

The barrier islands throughout the Low Country of Georgia and South Carolina became inhabited by the descendants of enslaved West Africans. In Georgia, these West African descendants are known as Geechee, while in South Carolina, they are called Gullah. As a result of being isolated for decades from much of the nearby population — whites and other African-Americans — the Gullah and Geechee peoples of the Low Country maintained native cultural practices and folklore for much longer. 

Slavery within the English colonies of North America began in Virginia in 1619. But Georgia, founded in 1733, was the last colony among the original thirteen English colonies. Slavery was further forbidden in Georgia by law for two additional decades before the colonial Trustees gave way, to Oglethorpe's grave disappointment, when the colony copied its Carolinian neighbor and adopted the horrible practice.  

I painted this en Plein air scene of the salt marshes off Shipyard Creek from the grounds of Pin Point Heritage Museum, located a few miles south of Savannah. Pin Point, Georgia, was founded in 1896 by the ancestors of formerly enslaved people living nearby on Ossabaw, Green, and Skidaway Islands. A devastating hurricane in 1896 forced the Geechees to move from the islands to Pin Point. The exhibits at the Heritage Museum focus on the local practices and industries in Pin Point during the early Twentieth Century, which included shrimping, crabbing, and oyster harvesting. 

Sweet Field of Eden Baptist Church, founded in 1897, served as the community school until the 1926 opening of a 'Rosenwald School' in Pin Point. Between 1912 and 1932, a farsighted collaboration between businessman Julius Rosenwald and educator Booker T. Washington designed and opened more than 5000 schools to educate African-American children in eleven States of the former Confederacy.  

Julius Rosenwald (1862-1932) was the generous Jewish President of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, while Booker T. Washington (1865-1915) was the founder of the Tuskegee Institute. In Georgia, more than 35,000 students attended 242 Rosenwald schools. Academic studies later revealed a significant impact on literacy levels, cognitive skills, and life expectancy for those attending Rosenwald schools.  

US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is the most famous Geechee descendant from Pin Point. In his 2007 memoir, My Grandfather's Son, Thomas fondly recounts his memories of Pin Point. "Life in Pinpoint," he wrote, "was uncomplicated and unforgiving, but to me it was idyllic…We wandered through the nearby woods, sometimes tussling with the white kids from Bethesda Home for Boys, the oldest orphanage in America…" (see PFS-146). 

Soon enough, circumstances would bring the young Clarence Thomas to Savannah to live with his mother and then later to be raised (along with his younger brother Myers) by his Grandparents. In contrast with living in Pin Point and until he moved to live with his grandparents, Thomas' memories of Savannah were simple to express: "When I was a boy, Savannah was hell."