December Programs: Daufuskie Island & "Combee"

UPDATE 12/03/2018 - Due to a family emergency the BDC Research Room will be very short-staffed this week. The only known anticipated schedule adjustment will be on Wednesday, December 5th. The Research Room will be closed 9 AM to 2 PM for Grace to host the long anticipated "Daufuskie Island" Author Talk with Jenny Hersch and Sallie Ann Robinson at Hilton Head Branch at 11 AM.  Grace will be in the Research Room to assist customers from 2  PM - 5 PM that day.


In December the BDC sponsors two free programs about black history - and you don't even have to register to attend! 

Sallie Ann Robinson and Jenny Hersch will be at Hilton Head Branch Library the morning of December 5th to share their research, images, and stories of life on the Daufuskie Island. At the conclusion of the program, books will be available for purchase and autographing by the authors.

Wed., Dec. 5 | BDC@ Hilton Head Branch, 11 Beach City Road | 11:00 am

From the publisher's press release: Daufuskie, a Muscogee word meaning “sharp feather” or “land with a point,” is an island located between Hilton Head and Savannah, bounded by the Calibogue Sound and the Cooper River. With no bridge to the mainland, the island maintains a distinct allure. Home to Native American tribes, a paradise for pirates, and a strategic military outpost, Daufuskie held enslaved Africans brought by plantation owners as chattel to build their wealth. After the Civil War and occupation by Union soldiers, freed slaves from the Sea Islands and surrounding states settled on Daufuskie as landowners and sharecroppers. Daufuskie's population fluctuated in keeping with local industries, and those who stayed often relied on farming, hunting, and fishing to survive. Electricity was brought to the island in the early 1950s, and the first telephone rang in 1972. Today, historic sites, restaurants, outdoor recreation, and scenic beauty draw visitors and residents to this unique community. Daufuskie Island is part of the National Park Service's Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.


Jenny Hersch first visited Daufuskie in 2000 and has called the island home since 2013. Sallie Ann Robinson is a sixth-generation Daufuskie native, cookbook author, celebrity chef, and certified nursing assistant. She is known as “Ethel” in Pat Conroy's memoir The Water Is Wide. Together, they have done extensive research and gathered stories and photographs from island residents, visitors, libraries, and archives - including some from us here in the Beaufort District Collection.  

As part of St. Helena Branch's annual Gullah Night on the Town celebration on Saturday, December 8, 2018, we are hosting a very important lecture regarding ground-breaking research about the people released from bondage during the Combahee River Raid.

Dr. Edda Fields-Black, Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University, is

a specialist in the trans-national of West African rice farmers, peasant farmers in pre-colonial Upper Guinea Coast and enslaved laborers on rice plantations in the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry during the antebellum period. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001. We have copies of her book based on her dissertation, Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora in the Research Room and through the Gullah Geechee Collection at St. Helena Branch. Copies are also available for checkout through SCLENDS.

Her "Combee" presentation focuses on the Beaufort plantations impacted by the Combahee River Raid of 1863 during which Harriet Tubman guided a Union foray into the heart of Beaufort District's rice production area. She interprets a unique compilation of primary historical sources, which show how localized groups who stole their freedom from Combahee rice plantations viewed themselves and viewed other groups from Sea Island cotton plantations and urban centers like Savannah and Beaufort when they were all resettled in Beaufort during the critical Civil War period. The paper chronicles this important microcosm of creolization using the experiences of Blacks enslaved on Combahee River rice plantations and freed in the 1863 raid to create a model of cultural change among New World African cultures and their complicated and nuanced relationships to pre-colonial Western Africa, their environments, and the plantation economies in which they were enslaved."

Sat., Dec. 8 | BDC@ St. Helena Branch, 6355 Jonathan Francis Senior Road  | 1:00 pm

St. Helena Branch also has other activities on the agenda the afternoon of Saturday, December 8th: 
flyer

There is no charge for attending any BDC@ The Branches local history programs. Anyone over age 12 interested in the program topic are welcomed to attend.