The Water Kept the Words: A Sea Island Morning

People come here and say our talk sounds like the islands. It sounds like where we came from, and it survived because the water made us hard to reach. There was no bridge to this place until I was a young man. That inconvenience is the reason you can still hear my grandmother in my mouth.

My people were brought here for rice. Not for cotton first, for rice — because we already knew it. The tidal fields, the trunk gates, the sluicing, the exact moment to let the salt out and the fresh in: that knowledge crossed the ocean in the heads of the people who were stolen with it. The fortunes built here were built on our expertise, and it was never once called that.

The sweetgrass basket in your hands is the same coil as a fanner basket used to winnow rice. My mother made them to sell, and before that her mother made them to work. When you buy one you are not buying a souvenir; you are buying an hour of someone's eyesight, and the grass itself is getting harder to find because the marsh where it grows keeps becoming somebody's view.

Here is the part visitors find difficult. Most of our land was held without paper — passed down among heirs, everybody owning a share, nobody owning a line on a map. That is called heirs property, and in a courthouse it is a weakness. One cousin sells one share, and a developer can force the sale of the whole. We have lost thousands of acres that way, quietly, legally, in my lifetime.

So when the Circle asked to bring people, we said yes on terms. You come in the number we say. You spend a day working, not watching. You sit with the lawyer and hear how title is actually held, because a guest who understands heirs property is worth more to us afterwards than one who only remembers the food.

And you will hear the praise house singing, but you will not record it. Some things we keep for ourselves. That is not a slight against you. It is the whole reason there is anything left here to show.