Cornelia Bailey, champion of African-rooted culture, dies at 72
Cornelia Bailey, a vivid storyteller who fought to protect a vanishing slice of AfricanAmerican culture on Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia, died on Sunday in Brunswick, Georgia. She was 72.
Inez Grovner, president of the Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society, which Bailey helped found and where she was vice president, confirmed the death. The cause was not announced.
Bailey was among a shrinking number of people to have been born and educated on the island, where descendants of slaves have lived for generations, the isolation of island life allowing them to retain elements of West African traditions, language and religion that have become known as Gullah-Geechee culture.
That culture has been threatened over the decades by dispersion and, most recently, development pressures and high taxes. Bailey, as the unofficial historian of Sapelo, was among the leaders of efforts to preserve and pass along the island’s heritage, ends that she furthered through advocacy, entrepreneurialism and activities that included a fall cultural festival.
“She would always present the culture to anyone she could get across to,” said her friend Carletha Sullivan of the McIntosh County Shouters, a performance group that practices the tradition known as ring shouting. “If she knew someone who could do something pertaining to the Gullah-Geechee culture, she would always try to open a doorway for them.”
Bailey’s main preservation achievement may have simply been telling the stories of her ancestors and her own life, something she did eloquently in the memoir “God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island, Georgia” (2001, with Christena Bledsoe).
“Back in my youth in the 1940s and 1950s,” she wrote in the book, “we had five Geechee communities on Sapelo and more than 450 people. Today, we have one community left and fewer than 70 people; and I fear for the survival of my people on this island.”
Cornelia Walker Bailey was born on June 12, 1945. Her father, Hicks Walker, often worked for R.J. Reynolds Jr., the tobacco heir, at the mansion he owned on the island. The house had been the centerpiece of a plantation where, in the early 1800s, Thomas Spalding used slave labor to grow cotton, rice and sugar cane.
Bailey’s mother, Hettie Bryant, was, like many in the community, a believer in spirits. When the eyeglasses that she was sure she had left on a particular table would disappear, she would suspect a long-dead uncle of having moved them.
“Mama would call on the spirit of Uncle Shed to put her glasses back,” Bailey wrote, “and then she’d go and do her work and come back, and those glasses would be on the table right where she left them.”
Sapelo, which is about 11 miles long and part of a chain of barrier islands, is accessible only by boat or air. Today, almost all of it is owned by the state but, in the decades after the Civil War, former slaves and their descendants bought land there and established several settlements. Bailey grew up in one of these, Belle Marsh, and wrote of a childhood that was both idyllic and rugged.
The family cooked with a wood stove, the dishes a genuine version of the Gullah cuisine trend now evident along the coast. They had, she wrote, “what most people would call an ‘outhouse’ but we called a ‘toilet,’ because we still used a few words from the French era of Sapelo and that was one of them.”
She would tell the story of how, when she was 3, she died — or so it appeared. She had become sick after eating unripe pears and seemed to expire. Her parents, who had already seen two infant sons die of fever, were preparing to bury her — they had a coffin made — when her mother’s sister, Mary, operating on some sixth sense, got some crushed garlic, “packed it in my nose, my mouth and God only knows where else, and I came around.”
After that, she said, everyone thought she had a some sort of special gift, an expectation that she could find burdensome.
“I just wanted to be a normal kid,” she wrote. “I didn’t want to be able to see the future or predict whether someone was gonna have a baby boy or girl. The only signs I wanted to read were the signs Papa could read from nature, like when the tide is right for fishing.”
Bailey’s preservation battle was difficult, as young people left the island in search of higher education and jobs. In 1910 the island had a black population of 539; by 1970 it was estimated at 175, and when a reporter for The New York Times wrote about the island in 2012, it was around 50.
The island’s school closed in the 1970s. More recently, Sapelo’s limited amount of private land caught the eye of well-off people looking for vacation properties. Bailey did not want to see it go the way of nearby islands like Hilton Head, S.C., with its yachts and golf courses, and was blunt about her preferences.
“On the verge of sounding racist,” she told The Times in 2008, “which I have been accused of, which I don’t give a hoot — I would rather my community be all black. I would rather have my community what it was in the ’50s.”
In 2012, Hog Hammock residents were hit with a substantial property tax increase that some felt was an effort to drive out the remaining Geechee residents.
“I call it cultural genocide,” Bailey said in a video interview in 2013. Some tax relief was negotiated, though the issue remains a concern.
In 2004, Bailey received a Governor’s Award in the Humanities for her preservation work.
Survivors include her husband as well as several children and grandchildren.
Although Gullah and Geechee — terms whose origins have been much debated and may trace to specific African tribes or words — are often used interchangeably these days, Bailey always stressed that she was Geechee. And, specifically, Saltwater Geechee (as opposed to the Freshwater Geechee, who lived 30 miles inland).
“We thought our speech was a bit more musical than theirs,” she wrote in her book, “because we talked a little faster, with fewer rest stops between our words, so that everything ran together. We’d listen to them and say, ‘Can’t they talk any faster than that? People don’t have all day.’”
Grovner said Bailey had been instrumental in a continuing effort by the Sapelo Island cultural society to establish a Geechee historical village on 25 acres on the island, where visitors could see how people cooked, planted and lived in times past.
“Hopefully, we can get it up and going on her behalf,” Grovner said.