- [Narrator] A production of the South Carolina Educational Television Network.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music ending) - Hello from Conway, I'm Patti Just.

We're on the banks of the Waccamaw River to talk with author, Dr.

Charles Joyner.

As you look at some of the titles of the books, we're going to be talking about, I'll tell you a little of his background.

Dr.

Joyner is Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at the University of South Carolina, Coastal Carolina College, also the Director of the Waccamaw Center for Cultural and Historical Research.

He received a PhD in History from the University of South Carolina, and a PhD in Folklore and Folk Life from the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr.

Joyner, it is a delight to have you on our program tonight.

- It's a pleasure for me.

- Let's talk about your very many books on slavery, folk life, and folklore.

How did you become interested in all that area?

- Accidentally, I guess.

I got interested in folklore when I was working on Master's thesis in history, working on labor history in the Rocky Mountains, and found in those old labor newspapers songs that miners had made up, and sent in, and I got very excited about 'em, that this was what I'd been looking for in history.

I'd been doing public opinion studies, but I wasn't really getting public opinion, I was getting what people had been told by the press, and the pulpit, and things that people made up gave me clues to the motivation, what led people to do what they had done, and that always fascinated me, the things about ordinary people, rather than the people that were already known a lot about, I wanted to find out about the ones that weren't.

I got interested in the South a bit later, I mean I'm a native Southerner, I grew up in Myrtle Beach and ultimately became very fascinated with my own region, so much so that the rest of history seems a little bit tame by comparison.

- Your book, "Down by the Riverside" was a source of much critical acclaim.

People say maybe it's possibly the best book ever written on slavery.

What do you think about that?

- Well, I was awfully flattered right now.

Delighted to hear that, and I'm not about to disagree with it.

(Participants laughing) - The book, as I said, has gotten a lot of acclaim about it.

What do you think the differences in your book are than other books?

Why was yours so popular?

- It may have been a thing that could have made it disappear quickly, that it was about one small area, an area smaller than a county.

The good part of that is that you can get to know the people there pretty well.

And so there's a core, a fairly small core of the same characters that keep appearing and reappearing throughout the book, almost like characters in a novel, and it's possible to learn enough about them in this small area to characterize them, so that they can appear to readers, like characters in a novel.

At one point, very late in the process, after all the research and all the analysis, I began to think about, you know, how to present this to an audience.

I'd used anthropological methods of analysis, and linguistic methods of analysis, and historical and folkloristic, and their social science is jargon-heavy in some cases, and I knew that they were mutually exclusive audiences.

I began to think that people read books one at a time, so you don't write for an audience, but write for one person.

In this case, my daughter, Hannah, was 16-years-old at that point, and I thought very bright, and I thought, can I explain to her everything I've learned in the process of trying to research and analyze this?

Can I make this clear to her?

I didn't wanna vulgarize it, 'cause I really cared about her, I didn't wanna oversimplify it, but I had to make it clear, I couldn't use the jargon.

And I suppose what merit it has in literature might probably derives from that.

- You talk about in the beginning of your book about being on a tourist trip on a boat called "The Island Queen" going down the Waccamah River, and you described the river as being "The color of Pepsi", that's an apt description, I think.

And you wondered too about what life was like back in slavery days, your imaginings, do you think that's what created this book?

- I suppose, certainly it's a way of, a literary way of moving from present to past, it's also a literary way of letting readers know that all the things we read in history are the result of the work of historians, and our efforts to recapture what's something that really happened.

In some ways, our work is like that of other writers, novelists, and in some ways, it's not, we don't have the freedom to be as creative as novelists, we can't create a whole world if our evidence only reveals part of a whole world, we can only do a little bit of speculation, and clearly label that as speculation.

And yet you see how novelists create a whole world, it can provide us with some awfully creative questions to pose to the evidence that we have, and that's what I was trying to do.

The influence of literature on my approach to "Down by the Riverside" was pretty strong.

- Could you describe the South Carolina slave community, and what was going on at that time?

- Well, I'm not sure that I can describe the whole South Carolina slave community, 'cause it was different in the up country, but in the low country, in the rice growing regions, slaves were chosen from particular parts of Africa, because they had skill in growing rice, they knew how to grow rice, and nobody else did.

The Englishman who came here, the French Huguenots who came here, the Scotch Irish who came here, none of them had any experience growing rice at all.

If they're gonna grow rice, they had to get people who knew how.

It made a particular mix of Africans here, but it was a mix that didn't occur naturally in Africa from very far apart places, with different linguistic traditions, and different cultural traditions, so something very exciting went on here, in which a new culture, a new language that we call Gullah now was created, and a new culture that worked out very much the same way that was mostly African in its origin, but it was not any particular place in Africa, it was what happened when those African cultures bumped against one another, and had to communicate with one another.

It was also influenced by the culture of the English, and Scotch-Irish, and French who were here too, although in the case of Gullah culture, only about all those French, Scotch, Irish and English only constituted about 10% of the population, and the rest were Africans.

So the great bulk of that cultural mix were Africans.

- You call that a "creolization"?

- Yeah, creolization, I was building on a model that linguists have used to explain how the Gullah language came about.

Actually, most of the vocabulary is English.

There's several thousand African words that survived in Gullah, but they're largely nouns.

But the way it's put together to generate meaning is very African, and not very much like English.

So the proper grammar of Gullah is not English grammar at all.

It's not just a mispronunciation of English words, but it's very much a whole linguistic system, and I think something like that happened with the rest of the culture too, that a lot of the same things were done in very different ways.

I could give one quick example out of religion.

The slaves for the most part adopted Christianity.

There's some evidence of survivals of Islam here, a lot more evidence of survivals of Islam in Georgia Gullah culture, and I don't know whether that means, there was really less Islam, or just less evidence surviving, but for the most part the slaves became Christians, which is a universal religion, but one they encountered through whites.

Now, if you look at the theology of it, which I would say is akin to the vocabulary of the language, they're strikingly similar.

There may have been a difference in emphasis that slaves may have put a little more emphasis on salvation and redemption and the whites a little bit more on sin and damnation, but whether that's really true or not, it's just a matter of emphasis, the slaves believed in sin and damnation too, and whites believed in salvation and redemption.

If you look at those, they're really much more alike than they are different.

If you look at what you would call the grammar, or the how you put those beliefs together in a way to generate meaning to worship God, the religious behavior was so different in the two churches, that typically Black Christians and white Christians think that nothing religious is going on in the other one's churches, Blacks think that whites go to church to listen to a lecture.

They're not entirely mistaken sometimes, and whites think that Blacks go to church to have a good time.

It's a very participatory thing in Black churches, as it is in African religious systems.

- Could you read some for us from "Down by the Riverside"?

- Sure, I'd love to take out a passage here from the epilogue.

"As we crossed the gang plank of 'The Island Queen' to the wooden dock of Wacca Wache Marina and step ashore on the Wachesaw Plantation, we're acutely conscious of the persistence of the past and to the present.

The sedans and station wagons of gasman and tourists in the parking lot of the marina are shaded by giant live oaks that stood here, while several generations of slaves grew rice for the blames and the flags.

Scenes out of time, historical and contemporary at once, present themselves to our eyes.

Sitting beneath one of the oaks, a young Black man patiently mends his nets, as such men have done on the Waccamaw for more than two centuries.

Across the river, a small boat performing a timeless ritual returned Sandy Islanders to their homes after a day's work.

It was here on this river that flat boats returned field hands to their homes on plantation streets after a day's work in the rice field.

Some of these same live oaks, their lower limbs brushing the dark waters of the Waccamaw with Spanish moss stood as silent sentinels for their journeys then as per hours now.

Our river cruise has been for us a voyage into history, pecking us past abandoned rice fields once made productive by the labor of thousands of human boons, past rice mills, where slaves once prepared the crops for market, past forest clearings, where once stood the legendary big houses, and whose yards the slaves gathered on Sunday mornings.

We're conscious that history really happened here, to real men and women, whose names we know, over whose graves we have stood in silent homage, and of whose burdens and achievements considerable evidence remains from the letters, diaries, and memoirs of the plantation whites, and their visitors, from census and probate records, and especially from the testimonies of the slaves themselves, and of their descendants.

We have discovered a real world of slave folk life of courage and passion, valor and pity, violation and redemption, faith and fear, love and resentment.

As we gaze beyond the broken trunks of the rice fields, now reclaimed by river and swamp, we can almost see the workers keeping pace with one another as they move across the fields.

We can almost hear their singing as their hose rise and fall on the beat.

Here at the edge of the river, there is an eerie feeling that we can almost reach out and touch these people we've come to know over the years, we can almost see glimmering through the river mist All Saints Parish as it was in the era of slavery, where the talented carpenter, Reddy Tucker builds a chapel for his people, and Jimmy the preacher, leads his flock in prayer and little Sabe Rutledge listens in wide-eyed wonder to the fascinating tales of bur rabbit, and Prince, the bookishcCoachman entertains the slave community with fiddle and banjo, and Ben O'Reed dodges the patrols to visit his first sweetheart, and Mary One threatens to drown herself, rather than submit to a beating.

It was here in All Saints Parish, and in hundreds of unremembered slave communities, like All Saints Parish, that these men and women, and thousands more played important at unsung roles, and a momentous process of culture change, throughout of pride and compassion, as well as anguish and injustice, out of African traditions, as well as American circumstances, that created a new language, a new religion, indeed, a new culture, that not only allowed them to endure the collective tragedy of slavery, but to bequeath the notable and enduring heritage to generations to come."

- How were you left as a writer?

This whole subject seems to me that everything was brought to life.

That the slaves for many people will now be real, rather than just something in history books.

- Well, I hope so.

That was what I was hoping to find out for myself in pursuing the subject, and hoping to communicate to others when I felt that I did understand them.

- Mm-hmm.

I'd like to talk about some of the other books now that you've written, you're in the business of writing introductions too.

Tell me how that is when you write an introduction for a book.

- Well, the task of an introduction is to try to introduce, usually it's an old book that's coming back into print, to try to introduce a book that was written for one kind of audience, to make its significance to a present-day audience clear, to try to put it in time period in which it was written, to try to show why it received the kind of attention it did, or didn't, and to try to make its relevance clear, but basically, it's serving as a translator between one time period and another, and in that sense, not really different from what historians do in any book.

- "Ain't You Gotta a Right to The Tree of Life?"

is one.

Let's take a look at that one.

That was a book originally written in 1966 by Guy in Candie Carawan, brought out again by University of Georgia Press.

In it, you talk about looking back at the heritage of slavery, either as a burden of shame, or a source of strength.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit, on the premise of that?

- Well, for a lot of people, Black and white, slavery is a very shameful period, and something very uncomfortable to talk about.

There was relatively little scholarship on slavery in the United States, until after the Civil Rights Revolution, and the time came when we could look back on this, and see where the sources of strength came from.

It's been slow.

When I first began to do research on Gullah culture, the word Gullah itself was a word that people shied away from.

Black people who spoke Gullah, this language that they created in a preserved so long were ashamed of it, they said they couldn't talk proper, and were embarrassed about it, rather than suing it as a cultural achievement, that particular generation, as several generations had.

Now, I think for a younger generation, it's a source of great pride in what their ancestors achieved.

But for all of us, I think there are elements in our heritage that depend on our compassion and our ability to see things in the context of its own time, and can be elements of shame or pride depending on how we relate to it.

- Mm-hmm.

Can you tell us a little bit about the authors and what they originally tried to do, and looked at the people of John's Island, has a lot of photographs in it.

- Guy and Candie Carawan are old friends of mine, they came to John's Island in the 60s to work in a civic education project, became a voter education project, and became a prototype for voter education projects around the South that were very crucial to the Civil Rights Movement.

They wrote this book about the people of the Sea Island, where they'd lived several years, on John's Island, and after a long, you know, it's published by Commercial Press, and after a fairly short time, as Commercial Press is due, they remaindered it and it was out print for a long time.

And then a few years ago, the University of Georgia Press decided to reprint it, but it's not just a reprint, it's about a third longer now with a lot more information that Guy and Candie put in about the Freedom Schools themselves, and that whole sequence of events, a lot more interviews that they updated, new pictures that add to the story, we see what's happened to some of the people on Johns Island since the 60s, and they asked me if I would write an introduction to it, to try to introduce that to a new audience now in the 1980s and 90s.

- You'll find a lot of music in the book, as well.

Music was at the very heart of the slaves.

- It was the heart of the slavery experience, it's a very distinctive gift, I guess, you would say, a very distinctive part of the heritage of African-Americans.

In our state, it's been particularly the significance of the spirituals has been so strong, and some parts of the South, the blues has been the stronger influence.

I've been studying Mississippi some in recent years too.

But especially on John's Island, the older styles of singing the spirituals, the shouting styles have held on, as they have up here in our area, and the older texts, and there's some marvelous songs.

Guy and Candie are themselves folk singers, and so they were very much drawn to the music, and recorded a great deal of that.

Two of the songs that they recorded very early fed into the Civil Rights Movement, and became the most prominent anthems of the Civil Rights Movement, one called "We Shall Overcome", and one called "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize."

- One of your newest ones, "A Woman Rice Planter", by Elizabeth Allston Pringle, published by University of South Carolina Press.

Tell us about the Allston family, and what they meant to the Waccamaw region.

- Well, the Allston family was really central to the Waccamaw region.

It was a very early family that settled early, and remained extraordinarily prominent with a lot of branches, some of the branches distinguished by spelling, it was two brothers in the 18th century decided, two William Allstons actually cousins decided distinguish between themselves by one dropping an L from Allston, so there are single L Alstons, and double L Allstons, they're at least distantly related.

They furnished governors of the state, extremely prominent family.

Elizabeth Allston Pringle was the daughter of Governor Robert F.W.

Allston, Governor just on the eve of the Civil War.

And after the war, after her brother, the young Confederate Colonel came home, and had failed as a rice planter, she made an effort to be a rice planter, and succeeded for a long time, although she was constantly short of cash, and began to write as a source of supplementing her income, wrote a series of columns for a New York newspaper, ultimately collected and revised them, and tightened them into a very unified book, and a book that's been out of print since the 1920s that we were awfully glad to get back into print.

- Mm-hmm.

She sort of lived by the motto her father once said to her, "Never say you cannot do a thing", and that spirit carried her through a very difficult time.

- And she lived by that always.

I don't think that she ever thought there was anything she couldn't accomplish after that.

- Mm-hmm.

We have some video tape of her home, the Chicora Wood.

- Chicora Wood.

- Chicora Wood.

Can you tell us about this area, and how she saved it?

- [Charles] Well, it was one of the great rice plantations, it was her father's plantation on the Pee Dee River before the Civil War.

It was of his estate, his insolvent estate, it was the widow's dower that her mother was able to hold onto after the war, and she was able to hold onto it herself as a rice planter, after her brother had failed, and it's still a gorgeous rice plantation, it's been lovingly restored by its present owner, Jamie Constance now, who's writing a book about his restoration of the rice plantation, and it's a beautiful, beautiful plantation.

- Very interesting perspective of Bessie.

- Yeah, it was very challenging to write this introduction, and a long time before, I felt that I understood her, she was, in some ways, a feminist heroine, and in some ways not, and trying to articulate that very clearly, she left a great amount of data, 29 boxes of her correspondence, another book that I hope to see in print too, and I hope to see a biography of her some day.

I think I'm probably not the one to write it, but I found her work fascinating, and ultimately, really, for a while I did not like this task of writing that introduction at all.

Her handwriting was so hard to follow, I was so thankful when a friend donated a typewriter to her, and at least the last two or three years of her life, I was able to read her letters in TypeScript, but ultimately it became a very, very rewarding experience to read and write about her.

- Now, the book you were a contributor on was "Before Freedom Came, African-American Life in the Antebellum South", and that was a book commissioned by the Museum of Confederacy, and the University Press of Virginia.

Can you talk about this book?

This has a lot of photographs, as well, and you wrote about slavery in the South.

- I wrote about slave life on the plantations, the world of the plantation slaves.

There were six of us who were consultants to Kim Rice, who was hired as the Curator for this magnificent exhibit.

It's the first major exhibit of slave life anywhere.

The project originated in fact with the Board of Trustees of the Museum of the Confederacy, which may seem surprising to some people, but they were very serious about doing a very, very good job with it.

And six of us, all of whom had written a good deal about slavery, an archeologist, a folklorist, and four historians, and we were involved in every stage of it as consultants in the planning and implementation stage, as well as writing the catalog for the exhibit, so it's a beautiful picture book, as well as sort of a summary of where the studies of slavery are at this point, or the study of slavery in the American South.

- What have you learned in conclusion from all of this as a writer about slavery, in terms of the material, there's so much material, that many people have questions about, we don't know enough about certain areas, what can you say?

- I think I've learned that I thought everything was known about slavery when I was a graduate student, and now after it, there's been an extraordinary outpouring of scholarship since then, and now I realize we're just at the beginning of beginning to understand something about the experience of slavery, the experience of the meeting of African and European cultures, and Native American cultures to some extent here in the new world, that there's a lot more to do that the more we have done, the more clearly we can perceive how much there is to do.

- Are you, as a writer, going to pursue the topic?

- Probably, I'm interested in everything about the South, and my next projects are going to be in the 20th century South, Tom Johnson and I are collaborating now on a biography of James McBride Dabbs, native of Maysville, who's a very significant writer in South Carolina in the mid-20th century.

Somewhat I've forgotten who it was that said that Edgefield County had produced six or seven governors and the Pee Dee had produced James McBride Dabbs, and that more than matched it.

(Patti laughing) - Dr.

Charles Joyner, thank you so much.

Thank you for your work.

Thank you for this program.

- It's a pleasure to be with you.

- From Conway, I'm Patti Just.

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