The Taste of the Sun: Okra Soup in the Geechee Tradition

When most folks think "gumbo," they think "Louisiana." They think dark, rich roux and fiery spice. McIlhenny's or Crystal or Louisiana Hot Sauce on the table. Toothache-sweet tea. Blues on the jukebox. Louisiana.

Well, having lived many years in Louisiana, having, in fact, loved the state and the people and learned to cook a mighty mean gumbo there myself, it nevertheless never ceases to annoy me that there's no similar range of associations for the gumbo I grew up on in Charleston, South Carolina—the gumbo that we called okra soup.

So I want to tell you about okra soup and, in the telling, you'll get just a taste of the heritage of us Geechee folk—sometimes called Gullahs.

We Geechees were planted here in the Low Country like seed nearly 400 years ago. As kidnapped citizens of many African nations, our ancestors traveled with the Spanish in the 1500s, with the English in the 1600s, with Americans from great sailing ports in Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the 1700s and 1800s. Some of us came by way of the Caribbean—some direct from Africa. By whatever route, the massive movement of men and women included rice-eating Golas from Liberia as well as Angolans from the Congo and Angola. Either or, more likely, both could have served as the origin of the word Gullah. And there were also Kissi and Giggi from Sierra Leone—who may have given their names to us Geechees.¹

Like seed in a garden, we naturalized—so efficiently that, in 1970, it was estimated that one-quarter of the native-born black population of the United States was descended from enslaved Africans who landed at the Low Country port of Charleston.² But the knowledge of our roots is limited. The memory of our ways and the knowledge of our elders is fading—will surely fade and vanish forever from the earth unless we share our stories as we share the flavors of delicious but underappreciated dishes like okra soup.

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It's been thirty years since I lived in the Low Country. And I use that name deliberately. The National Park Service, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Congressman James Clyburn have given us the more socially accurate designation "Gullah/Geechee coast," and conscious folks on all sides of the color line bless them for it. But geography matters, too, and time out of mind, "Low Country" has been the people's name for the coastal plain from Cape Fear, North Carolina, to the mouth of the St. John River in Jacksonville, Florida.

It is literally low country: flat, semitropical, studded with live oaks, cypress, and pines, supple jack, smilax, and fragrant vines. It's a land crisscrossed by meandering rivers, by salt marshes teeming with wildlife, and now—since the building boom that followed Hurricane Hugo—crosshatched by mile upon mile of suburban sprawl belching forth the occasional town or multimillion-dollar resort development, all in a headlong march to the sea.

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I'm old enough to remember a very different Low Country and, since I left so long ago, that Low Country exists almost as a separate country that I love to visit in reverie. This Low Country was, in the 1960s, almost entirely rural except for the big cities of Savannah and Charleston. And black folks or Geechees, as we called ourselves (I never heard the word Gullah till I was an adult, though, of course, I heard Gullah spoken every day), were only just beginning to spill out from the borders of the city and from the freedman's settlements purchased just after Emancipation that were scattered all about the rural areas of the county.

In Charleston, those settlements were oriented almost entirely around rivers. East of the Cooper River (known to the Indians as the Etiwan), the settlements had names like Cain Hoy, Remley's Point, Phillips, and Snowden (pronounced as ow as in chow, rather than oh as in snow). West of the Ashley or the "Kiowah" River—in fact, right on its banks—were Maryville...