Part One: Who You f'uh?
When my grandfather died many years ago, I remember falling into a fitful sleep on the living room floor of my grandparents' house in Savannah. I woke up the next morning with the vague memory of a dream about my Grampa and with an overwhelming need to find out everything I could about my family's history. The grief I felt about his death left me feeling rootless. It was as if someone had taken away vital link to my identity. I'm not exactly sure why that particular feeling informed my grief, but I knew that digging up my family tree would help. My grandfather's own father outlived him by quite a few years, but he never really spoke much about his past and he had been estranged from his children for many years. So when Great Granddaddy passed, all the questions I had were left unanswered once again. Since I didn't have very many links left to track down my Grampa's roots, I began my obsessive search with my Gramma's side of the family.
I spent pretty much all of my childhood summers in Savannah with my grandparents. There, I heard about people in my family who spoke Geechee and heard that same word applied to my inhuman consumption of rice. I could eat it by the bag full. (I still can though age and an expanding behind have considerably curbed my consumption) It was this word, Geechee, that became the central point to my understanding of Gramma's family and my own heritage. One summer, after my Grampa's passing, I took a trip to Harris Neck where my grandmother was born (the country as she called it), armed with a notebook and her ancient tape recorder ready to capture family history straight from the mouths of my relations.
Over a plates of freshly caught whiting covered in hot sauce with a slice of white bread, Wilson Moran and his mother Mary told me the story of Harris Neck. Mr. Moran is a self motivated researcher with an encyclopedic knowledge of Harris Neck's history. He told me that Harris Neck had been a thriving, self sufficient community of fisherman who lived close to the land which had been allotted to their ancestors during Reconstruction. The town was isolated with no bridges or real significant roads connecting it to the wider world. It had its own sheriff (one of my relatives as it happened) and post office.The only things people had to leave the community for were cloth and flour. Wilson said that if you came to Harris Neck, part of the customary greeting would be the question "Who you f'uh?" which translates roughly to who are your people?/who are you related too? With a single reply of your kinship ties to the community, one could be instantly recognized as family. It strikes me now as I recall this, how that custom trumps all of the superficial racialized methods of marking kinship.
Toward the end of our visit, Mary shared with us a song, "in African" that her mother taught her as a little girl. It was this song that was the subject of a documentary called "The Language You Cry In." Because of the song in African Mary's mother Amelia taught her as as child, scholars were able to trace its back to the specific people in Sierra Leone with whom it began. It turned out to be a burial song of the Mende people. That song tied Harris Neck and its descendants directly to a specific pre-slavery homeland. Harris Neck was a living, breathing tie to America's complex and bloody history.
That's why what ultimately happened to the town is devastating.
(Part two will be posted this Friday)
Source: http://www.isthatyourchild.com/2012/09/though-ive-been-out-of-genealogy.html
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