Family Across the Sea Transcript
- [Man 1] There's the man, Emory! How are you?
- [Man 2] I'm not even going to welcome you.
- [Man 1] Nice to see you again.
- I would not imagine having that kind of reception of the number of people that were there to greet us. People were really interested in seeing their brothers and sister, who were long lost across the water, coming back home. That was probably the most amazing thing that I probably ever have happened to me.
- Welcome, welcome,
- Thank you
- Welcome.
- [Woman] Thank you so much.
- Welcome
- [Woman] God bless you.
- You feel like there's a place that we're not single. There are a thousand people waiting to greet you and you get off the plane, and all of a sudden there, there are these people who the first thing they do when you get off the plane, is they say, "Thank God you've come home."
- [Narrator] At a dark airport in Africa, a reunion takes place between family that has never met. The people of Sierra Leone welcome brothers and sisters from America. They have journeyed from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Oklahoma. They're called Gullah, or maybe 'Geechee' or 'Freedmen'. They are from a people who have recently discovered their separate lives are bound by history to this one small country in West Africa. The story of this connection begins with the land. Land which is strangely similar on the coasts of both the Southeastern United States and that of Sierra Leone. The vast salt marshes and Sea Islands of the Carolinas and Georgia are mirrors of the mangrove swamps and wide rivers of West Africa. It's clear the lives of Gullah and Africa are bound to the land, to the sea, and to each other. When a Gullah man in a South Carolina tidal Creek tosses his net, another man in a river in Sierra Leone draws his in. Here in Africa, were born the legacies that are passed down to their American cousins. And the channels of history plied by the Gullah and the Sierra Leonean lead back their winding courses to a common source.
Over four centuries have passed since the earliest Portuguese navigators sailed past this part of West Africa. The green mountains prowling the coast reminded them of the King of the Beasts, and they named the land, 'Sierra Leone', 'The Mountains of the Lion'. The people of Rogbonko village in Sierra Leone make coil baskets in a style Sierra Leoneans call Shukublay. Her name is Kadiatu, a woman of the Temne people of Northern Sierra Leone. She and her neighbors know nothing of the long years of hardship for African-Americans. Of slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights. In fact only now is Kadiatu learning that many Americans are black. This is the beginning of an understanding about the connection with family they never knew existed. For Kadiatu and her neighbors see for the first time, a basket made by the Gullah people in America. A basket the Gullah call a 'Fannuh', Marveling at its workmanship, they point out its similarities and differences. In their language, this particular style of basket, low-brimmed and wide, is called Fanner. To them its purpose like its name, is instantly recognizable. Fannuhs were once essential to Gullah life. Fanner still are in Sierra Leone. Since ancient times, rice has been a staple food. For a thousand or more years, songs of the rice harvest have echoed in the fields. Sierra Leone is in the midst of what was called the Rice Coast. An area stretching from the Senegambia, south to Sierra Leone and Liberia.
- My grandmother, Mosseh, she used to teach us different thing. I guess she learned it from whole world appearing.
- In Eugenia Deez garden, some sense of Africa remains. Her grandmother taught her the ways of the roots, old secrets of the plant. Still important in West African culture and among the Gullahs. But in the knowledge of growing rice the Gullah reveal even more important connections to Sierra Leone.
- Yeah, grandmother, she always talk about how they had to work hard, but she didn't come after, but her peers came after. And when they first came over, they used to work on this rice plantation. Plant rice, and, when they plant the rice, they had to harvest it. When they harvest it, they had to cut it with a hook. They hook it in. And many time, they have to take some with a... I don't know what you call, there's two pieces, they're rubbing and went there and beat it all. They have to beat up, they put in a long... They cut a hole in the block, called a maller. And they had to pass it, beat that rice up. I've seen them done that. Beat that rice up and get it clean. And they had a wide thing they call a Fannuh made out of straw, like a basket, it was wide and the Fannuh, caught it in the wind, Fannuh let the husks go away. And that's how they got their rice.
- Long before Eugenia Deez was born, this way of life had already died out in the Low Country. Near the turn of the century, the last rice crops were harvested from Hampton plantation, a few miles from McClellanville. It marked the end of an era lasting for 200 years. Literally hundreds of plantations like this grew along the rice fields. But it was African know-how that made the plantation successful. Only they had a tradition of growing rice, not their masters. And it was African technology that led to the creation of the intricate dykes and waterways, which transformed the low country marshes along the entire South East coast in the thousands upon thousands of acres of successful rice fields. It is a feat of land forming perhaps unequaled in human history. ♪ Leaning on the Lord's side ♪ ♪ Lord's side and Savior's side ♪ ♪ Leaning on the Lord's side ♪
- Only now are the Gullah people descendants of rice farmers from Africa learning the truth about their past.
♪ Whose side are you leaning on ♪
♪ Leaning on the Lord's side ♪
♪ I prayed, I prayed, I prayed, I prayed ♪
- I learned Gullah as a kid from my grandparents and I never knew it would come so handy today because we laughed at our grandmother when she spoke Gullah. And that's the only language she knew. And yet it was that language that I now know was the connection to Africa. And I'd like to see how many people in the audience would understand me as my grandmother would get up and talk this morning. She would say, .
- [Narrator] The old-fashioned Gullah words Emory Campbell speaks, are no longer commonly used by younger Gullah speakers in the Sea Islands. But to the honored guests, they are familiar. For President Joseph Momoh of Sierra Leone, the Gullah sounds like his country's daily speech.
- We've heard a lot of Gullah this morning spoken. We in Sierra Leone use English as the official language, but the lingua franca is what we call Krio, K-R-I-O, which is exactly your own version of Gullah. And I will just speak Krio a little bit just to get buttress the point that I'm making. So, and in this respect let me say, I suppose you have followed that
- And the way it's chilling at times just to feel the warmth and the eagerness of the people, because you see, people around here on these islands, as African as they are, have very little concept of what Africa is like or the connection between Africa and themselves. In Penn School, is the institution that began training Africans after slavery to become Americans. And so most of the people who graduated from Penn School have rejected any kind of Gullah or Gullah culture because they really wanted to be polished Americans. And so people who were at the setting of the president's visit, that graduated from Penn School, I could see an immediate change in the attitude toward Gullah. I mean, after the President left I talk to Penn School graduates now and they don't mind speaking Gullah and talking about Gullah and arguing about the words in Gullah that they know. But before then we would never have been able to get them to discuss it.
♪ Amen ♪
- The reason I walked up to the front, is because I know I can handsome.
♪ I want to be ready ♪
♪ I want to be ready ♪
- [Narrator] This day gave a new dignity to a people who had long been disparaged. For their backward ways, and their funny way of talking. President Momoh came to Penn Center because of recently uncovered knowledge about the unusual connection. But this research is a culmination of work began decades ago.
♪ I want to be ready ♪
♪ I am bride all ♪
South Carolina in the 1930s, among the creeks and islands of the Southeast coastal Low country the Gullah were removed from the mainstream of society. This was a culture that a young black scholar named Lorenzo Turner found, when he began researching the Gullah and their language. Folklorists and historians had studied this unusual culture before Turner. They concluded that the Gullah merely borrowed and corrupted English and European language and customs. Some even believe the Gullah were a void in their speech backward baby talkers, whose tongues were incapable of forming proper English. Turner pushed these old prejudices aside. More than anyone before him he was able to penetrate the communities along the coast. Where others heard Gullah only as a primitive pidgin English, Turner found a rich language that owed as much to Africa as it did to Europe. Joko Sengova, a Sierra Leonean linguist is following in Turner's footsteps.
- That work is seminal. It really is the start-off point for most of us who are now investigating Gullah. Well, Turner's argument is that if one doesn't know about the African languages, then obviously one is not in a position to say there has been an influence from them. So I think that's why he set himself the task of trying to understand some of these languages. And he set for himself the task of trying to study a couple of them, about 30.
- Many Gullahs kept private names, basket names, they called them. Names that no outsider ever heard. Names like 'Limbo' and 'Lukkuh' are strange to our ears, but are very African.
- Over a hundred years ago, a friend of Eugenia Deez, Agnes Brown was born into a world where slavery was a recent memory. Her husband's name, Monday, gives a hint of the strong spice of Africa that seasons her life.
- [Eugenia] Monday Brown
- Monday Brown. Good old Monday Brown.
- [Eugenia] He was a worker man too.
- [Interviewer] If you were saying why they...
- Yeah I'd say that came from Africa. They used to name the children after the day, or year which they are born in.
- [Agnes] Yeah And if they didn't give them the whole name, they give them a part of that name. A part of that name,
- [Agnes] Yeah
- That's right.
- [Interviewer] Oh really?
- Mm-hmm. Just to say that that was Monday. But he was lucky, he got the whole name, Beishas, Monday.
- So what we're looking at is American English and patterns of American English, dialects, and so on and so forth, especially Gullah, which have been influenced by African languages. And we're trying to pinpoint these survivals. For instance, I think Sea islands' people Gullah speakers still refer to the expression: which means 'when it dawns'
- Now, we have a similar expression in Krio, in Sierra Leonean Krio, which would come out as . The clouds open up, the clouds break.
- [Narrator] Specific connection to Sierra Leone required more exacting proof. The woman Turner found singing this song didn't know what the words meant. But to Turner, the meaning was clear. It was a funeral song of the Mendes, the largest ethnic group of Sierra Leone. It was the most extensive example of African language, he or anyone had found among the Gullah.
- [Narrator] Words Turner found represented African languages from the entire Atlantic Coast. Of the 3000 African words and names used in Gullah speech, a quarter of them came from Sierra Leone. And of the lengthy attacks, songs and story fragments, virtually all come from this one country. From the Temnes in the North, the nomadic Fulas, Vais, and Mende, to the south. Even the words Gullah and Geechee, were close to the names of the ethnic groups found in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, the Gola and the Kissi. King Jimmy market along the harbor of Freetown draws Sierra Leoneans from all over the country. Although Sierra Leone is a nation only a little larger than South Carolina, it has over a dozen ethnic groups, each with its own language, and sometimes several dialects. Communication would be impossible without a common ground, one language everyone knows. That common ground is Krio, which is also the mother tongue of the Krio people. The Krios like the Gullah are descendants of freed slaves. Krio speech evolved from the various tongues of these slaves. In the mountains above Freetown, lies a small Krio village of Regent. Clapboard houses dating from over a hundred years ago, reveal the strong low country and West Indian influence on the Krio people. The same influence marks the speech of Krios like author John.
- How you do? How are you? That's, "How you do?", you see. How are you? How you do? But you see it is similar, you see? Come. Go. We talk it in Krio and its an English word, you see? Well we have our own different time of Creoles, you see, with no connection with English words, but most of these Krio words derive from the English words.
- [Narrator] In Gullah, for example, the phrase, "I'm happy to meet you." becomes, . And in Krio, I'm happy, 'Happy' is used in Krio also. But if you want to say, "Happy", you say
- [Narrator] To a group in Gullah, in Krio, you see?
- [Man] No.
- You find it a very useful language most useful language, but educational masters before now, deprived also the use of Krio because they derisively referred to it as broken English and the earlier Sierra Leoneans accepted it.
- [Narrator] A.K. Turey holds a Doctorate in linguistics and is a cabinet minister in Sierra Leone. He has studied the development and importance of the Krio language.
- Language is very, very strongly tied to people's identity. I mean it is the storehouse of all their thinking over the centuries, of all their actions, all their beliefs all their hopes and aspirations are bundled together in their language. And to deprive the people of the use of their language is actually depriving them of a great part of their existence. Because we were deprived of speaking Krio, we have to speak English in which we were not experts. And the education also deprived us of using our own local languages. So we ended up not speaking any language properly.
- [Narrator] Among themselves, however, the Krio spoke Krio. They held it close to them, and like the Gullah kept it alive.
- Any time boy boy, you're doing beautiful. Wuuuh!
- [Narrator] The Gullah went through, keeping this tongue a secret. An act that allowed the Gullah to remain African in their souls.
- Well it shows great willpower, a great strength, a great spiritual strength in them, that despite all odds, they carried on. They behaved exactly as I would expect any Africans to behave under difficult circumstances. If you do research in other languages here, you'll find that we always have a language of secret communication. So the English man was here. He made us speak English. And even within that English, we very quickly developed other forms of communication with... They heard what we were saying but they were not able to understand. And I'm sure the use of the Gullah language in Southern Carolina fulfilled part of this need for them to communicate as a means of self identity without letting their secrets out to their masters.
- [Narrator] 200 years ago, when a slave ship arrived in Charleston, rice planters would crowd the streets outside the old slave market. They would read bills like this to find out where the slaves originated. Only a premium class at the auction block would buy a slave from the Rice Coast, from Sierra Leone. The records of the slave traders have helped scholars establish a predominant homeland in Sierra Leone for the Gullah people. Today in the market of Charleston, Africa lives. The Sweetgrass basket makers sow their own Shukublay in the shape of Fanner. Joe Opala is an anthropologist who has studied the Sierra Leone-Gullah connection. This Oklahoma native joined the Peace Corps in 1974 and wound up in Sierra Leone. Once there, he began looking into the history of slavery from the African side of the ocean. For nearly 15 years he has tracked down a remarkable series of connections that end here in Charleston and begin on a far shore in Africa.
- These Gullah people are the descendants of the slaves that were brought to Charleston in the 1700s. They are the descendants of the rice-growing Africans who were brought to those plantations in the 1700s. What is remarkable for us here in Sierra Leone is that these Gullah people have preserved so much language and cultural heritage from this country. Now, how did that happen?
- [Narrator] Opala is currently a lecturer at Fourah Bay College, the oldest university in sub-Saharan Africa. He now teaches the history that he and others are uncovering.
- During this period when slaves were being sent to South Carolina, Bunce Island was a major slave-trading base. And Bunce Island is located here in the Sierra Leone river, in the Harbor here, about 20 miles from Freetown. And that particular slave castle was virtually specializing in sending slaves from this area to Charleston in South Carolina.
- [Narrator] Bunce Island. A quarter-mile long speck in the Sierra Leone river. It has been called a little bit of Africa that was destroyed to build America. It is the furthest point inland the slave ships could travel without grounding. So it was here they picked up their human cargo. The ruins of the old Fort have stood uncared for since the English abolished slave trading in the early 1800s. Today, the cannon that guarded against marauding French Navy and pirate ships lay scattered in a row along the remains of the Ramp port. For the people who fish the waters here or travel past on boats, Bunce represented a great mystery. They knew Europeans captured their people, but why? Only a mile downriver from Bunce, the village leaders of Tasso Island gather. In 1978, at a similar gathering, the chief, Pabeso Raka, asked Opala to tell his people what happened to the slaves. To fill in a 200-year gap in history.
- In many ways, this was the beginning of Opala's quest. These people of Tasso had always known Bunce Island to be a slave port. But of the slaves fate, they knew nothing. Some thought they were taken North to Europe, where they died of the cold. Or that they were fattened up like cattle to be eaten. Opala told them what he knew and promised to find out more. He would spend days at a time on Bunce, combing the surface for artifacts. Carefully, he mapped out the locations of buildings, deduced the methods of the slavers and pored over their records, until a picture of the slave trade emerged.
- [Interviewer] Okay.
- Of course at first I had no idea there was a Gullah connection to Sierra Leone. But in 1977, I began to do research on the ruins of the English slave-trading Fort at Bunce Island, which is 15 miles up the river here. We're dealing with a very, very large slave-trading operation, which was essentially specialized in sending slaves from the rice-growing area with rice-growing know-how to the rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. The slave trade corrupted the whole fabric of African life.
- [Narrator] In England, the owners of Bunce Island grew wealthy, exploiting the African tribal conflicts. Their agents on Bunce lived in a kind of pseudo-luxury paid for with human souls. Besides Bunce Island house, the large Georgian manner of the chief agent, this imitation gentry built formal gardens, even a golf course. But the vowed business of Bunce, the trafficking in human beings could not be totally hidden. A young and adventurous woman, named Anna Maria Falconbridge, recorded in her diary, the following:
- [Voiceover] Bunce Island house, at a distance has a respectable and formidable appearance, nor is it much less so upon a nearer investigation. Behind the great house is the slave yard and houses for accommodating the slaves. Delicacy perhaps prevented the gentlemen from taking me to see them, but the room where we dined looks directly into the yard. Involuntarily, I stroll to one of the windows a little before dinner, without the smallest suspicion of what I was to see. Judge then what my astonishment and feelings were at the sight of between 2- and 300 wretched victims, chained and parceled out in circles, just satisfying the cravings of nature from a trough of rice placed in the center of each circle. Offended modesty rebuked me with a blush for not hurrying my eyes from such disgusting scenes, but whether fascinated by female curiosity, or whatever else, I could not withdraw myself for several minutes. Be assured I avoided the prospects from this side of the house ever after.
- [Narrator] The suffering in the slave yard was only a prelude to what the African slave had in store. When a slave ship was ready to depart for the new world, the slaves naked and chained together would shuffle out of the slave yard through this gate, down to the jetty. This was the last of Africa they would ever touch. Ironically, among the slave ship captains employed in the Bunce Island Charleston trade, was one John Newton. In later years, he denounced slavery, became a clergyman in England and wrote a song that would give strength to many he had helped enslave, 'Amazing Grace'. Slavery made the otherwise marginal colonies wildly successful. Businessmen, cooly plotting out the net and the gross, grew rich on its existence. Their records showed Joe Opala that the Gullah-Sierra Leone connection is an historical fact.
- The Eureka moment for me was when I found the connection between Richard Oswald, the owner of Bunce Island, in the mid-18th century and Henry Laurens, his agent for slaves from Sierra Leone in South Carolina. When I finally discovered these indications in Laurens' papers, I virtually shouted "Eureka" in the library. I now had the firm link between Sierra Leone and the Gullahs.
- [Narrator] From Mepkin plantation near Charleston, Henry Laurens captained his rise in South Carolina society. Mepkin was a centerpiece of Laurens' holdings and was earned mainly through his business venture with Oswald.
- Well, the significance of the Oswald-Laurens' connection is that the slave trade connection between Sierra Leone and South Carolina had an impact on the course of American history. Both of these men, Oswald, the Englishman, the slave trader Laurens, the American colonist, the rice planter and slave trader both of these men had risen to positions of international prominence and wealth through the slave trade. And when the American War of Independence came, Laurens became the important figure in the American colonial government, he became president of the Continental Congress at one point. He was the highest ranking American official captured by the British during the Revolutionary War.
- [Narrator] The British imprisoned Laurens in the Tower of London, until Richard Oswald was able to post the bond for Laurens' freedom. Later, he and Oswald helped negotiate the ceasefire which ultimately led to the Treaty of Paris. As a result of the rice trade, and the Laurens-Oswald connection, historians are able to establish the fact that thousands of slaves came from one small part of Africa, to live in one small part of America. But the culture the slaves brought with them couldn't have survived if the Africans hadn't also brought a subtle form of revenge against their masters.
- The Gullahs have been able to preserve more of their African cultural and language heritage than any other group of African-Americans, really because of climate and geography. The same conditions that made South Carolina coastal South Carolina and Georgia, an excellent place for rice cultivation, also made it an excellent place for the spread of tropical diseases brought from Africa. Although the rice cultivation was extremely lucrative from the standpoint of the white masters, it also made the disease environment, made it impossible for the Europeans to live there and prosper in large numbers. This was the only area where black people, African slaves were often the overseers and the farm managers, simply because white people could not live in what was essentially an Africanized environment.
- [Narrator] While the whites abandoned the low country, because of their hell, many blacks refusing to bear the burden of slavery also fled. The most well-known route to freedom was North along the underground railroad. But many Gullah went South to the wilderness of Florida. They joined with another dispossessed people, the Seminole Indians. The former slaves became known as Seminole Negroes. They kept alive their distinct language and culture, even cultivating rice. They also became a nation of black warriors taking arms against their former masters. In the 1830s and '40s, the second Seminole war pitted them against the United States government.
- So in that corner of the U.S., in tropical Florida, there was an African frontier. The blacks were able to escape into that area, set up successful communities based on rice agriculture and resist the whole force of the United States military for several decades. In fact, the commanding general in the second Seminole war wrote back to Congress and said, "Gentlemen, be assured that this is a Negro and not an Indian war."
- [Narrator] It was a drawn-out bloody conflict unequaled in America, until Vietnam. Only when the Seminoles agreed to leave Florida did the hostility end. The black Seminoles remained free and began calling themselves 'Freedmen' and travel with their red brothers along the trail of tears to the Indian territory in Oklahoma where they still live today.
- What is amazing is the black Seminoles in Oklahoma have since that time retained their special identity as 'Seminole Freedmen' which is what they call themselves today. They've retained a separate identity and they've retained much of their Gullah language and culture. Up until the last generation, they were still speaking Gullah in isolated rural farmsteads in Seminole County. People in their forties can still remember their grandparents speaking Gullah and can still remember a lot of Gullah phrases. They've also retained a rice diet, almost identical to that of the Gullahs in South Carolina and Georgia, and for that matter to people here in Sierra Leone.
- [Narrator] While some Gullah, like the black Seminoles, fled white civilization, others, some who were even prospering, and the Antebellum White Society, returned to Africa.
- [Alpha] There was a lingering dissatisfaction. And there was still a desire to go back to the continent and contribute, and maybe feel a little much more at home.
- [Narrator] The study of blacks returning to Africa in the 19th century, drew Sierra Leonean historian Alpha Bah to Charleston. Bah has followed the careers of these people including Charlestonian Edward Jones and his return to Sierra Leone.
- Well, we are at where the Jerry Jones famous hotel used to be. Jerry Jones happened to be the father of Edward Jones. And this is the side of the whole hotel which was one of the most famous hotels in the 19th century Charleston. Edward Jones was one of the first black graduates from maybe a predominantly white institution in the United States, Amherst College in Massachusetts. And of course from there, he quit his degree, which is bachelor's, he found out that he needed to do something more. And by the late 1830s, he found himself in Freetown, primarily as a school teacher and a preacher. And I guess by 1841, he became the first black principal of Fourah Bay Christian College which later on became Fourah Bay College, maybe one of the first, if not the first, institution of higher learning in black Africa.
- Alpha Bah's work, trying to find out why one African-American journeyed back to the land of his ancestors, helped him to observe the Gullah homecoming. He served as liaison and the guide to the delegation. Over a year had passed since President Momoh invited Emory Campbell to bring members of the Gullah community home to Sierra Leone. For President Momoh, this was a chance to show thanks for his visit to South Carolina and to Penn Center. The visit that first brought public attention to the remarkable connection.
- Well, it cannot be anything short of feels and excitement. It is always a very very good feeling for one to be able to discover ones lost parents. And I think this is how Sierra Leoneans see it. So it is great satisfaction, and great pride and great happiness for all of us.
♪ In Jesus name ♪
♪ If my roots call me here ♪
♪ If my roots call me here ♪
♪ Do my roots call me here ♪
♪ In Jesus name ♪
♪ Oh yeah ♪
- [Narrator] The week long visit gripped the thoughts of all Sierra Leoneans. The government honored the Gullahs as state guests and the Sierra Leoneans embraced them as cherished family. Evenings were reserved for state dinners. The Gullahs ate African foods, talked with African people, and listened to African music beneath bright African stars. But away from Freetown under the African sun, they glimpsed the sorrow from which this homecoming joy was born. The Gullahs engaged in a pilgrimage to the grim slave yard of Bunce.
- I knew the purpose of going there, but at the same time, the emotion didn't really start while you're going on the actual trip until you actually got on the island. And that's when it hits you, like, "This was a special Island." not an Island to go visit your cousin at or something. This is a special Island. And it held special memories for some people. And it meant special thing to others. It's kind of hard to describe how you actually feel in a sense, because there were so many things running through your mind at the time. And you look back and you can actually see the people. I actually saw men, women, children, and I can sort of picture them coming on and going off. That sort of stuff. And it made me angry.
- It was anger at first. And then, it really questioned human values. How can some people do certain things to certain people, and still be comfortable with it? Especially with what they call the two-tier setting on Bunce Island. In one instance you had a lavish house with a lavish living style. 20 feet away, you had people in chains or eating rice out of a trough. And it's something to me it seemed inhuman about that.
- I didn't want to feel that. It would have been too painful. If when I think about it now, I try not to really feel it. And I don't wanna do it then, but since I got back, every time I think about it, this is what happens.
- I was imagining the scream in their hearts wanting to go to their families, leaving their families, or families not knowing where they were. Not knowing where they were gonna go. I don't know. Is sad.
- [Interviewer] Any idea?
- Yeah, lots.
- Well, I feel that at that day, when we were in Bunce Island, and thinking of what they went through, and if that didn't, in my mind I can't even imagine some of what they probably went through, but just trying to imagine some of it, it's like, they made it, you can. Don't give up and that's me now.
♪ Oh freedom ♪
♪ Oh freedom ♪
♪ Oh freedom over me ♪
♪ Over me ♪
♪ And before I'd be a slave ♪
- [Narrator] Afterwards on the ferry ride back to Freetown, the tension created by the walk through the slave yard was broken only by song, as Africans and African-Americans shrugged off their pain.
♪ Oh freedom ♪
♪ Oh freedom ♪
- I was very surprised at my reaction. And when we got to the ferry, I knew that there was a way up, and I just said, we escaped, we escaped. And then I started to sing "Oh freedom" and everyone took it up.
♪ Freedom ♪
♪ Freedom ♪
♪ Freedom ♪
- The Gullah people were not there to dwell solely on the past wrongs, but to find the things in their hearts that felt right. In Mende country, in a village called Taiama, Africa held her head high, opened her arms and shouted to the Gullahs, "Welcome home!".
- I tried to tell my wife that, describe that event of crossing the bridge and being... And the school children were there and the villagers were there. And the drums and the guy was blowing the horn, that were calling the tribes together.
- It was almost like being a guest in your own house. You were home when you was like a guest in your house, and you were away for a long time, and everybody was saying, "Welcome back!" And so you're walking down in between all these people on both side of the roads, and it was the most awesome feeling. You can't even describe how it felt. It really felt good, yeah. So this simply put, it really felt good, yes.
- [Translator] I'm very sure all guns were probably--
- And it was funny because I knew I would look like them, but they never thought we would look like them Because they kept saying, "Oh you look just like us." And they would touch our hair. "Your hair is like mine, yeah."
- [Narrator] Taiama treated the Gullahs like royalty and capped it off before hundreds of curious eyes, as Emory Campbell donned the ceremonial robes of Chief. Robes to go with his new name, Chief Kpaa Kori I.
- [Man 1] Don't you try to empty--
- [Man 2] Okay.
- [Narrator] Chief Kpaa Kori, and the Gullahs, feasted on rice and greens. Home cooking to them. They played games, watched dances and began to understand how the fields of rice must have looked to their grandparents. This day was a joyous phase of reunion for the Gullah. For most, the journey would fill in gaps left dark and open for two centuries. There got to be a connection between these people.
- There is no question about it, these are our people. There's no question about it.
- [Laurence] Got to homeland.
- There are things that I can't even put into words. We have this way of saying everything is everything. And truly in Sierra Leone, everything was everything. It was, there are things that are kind of submerged in African-American culture. They're just part and parcel of us. That we're part and parcel of those people. And so when we're there, we're okay.
- Without a doubt, a lot of wounds were healed in my soul. Having gone back and had a chance to see perhaps where my ancestors came from. Having had a chance to meet with my brothers and sisters there, and being greeted, being loved. The main wound that's healed I think is the fact that now I know there is a place that I can go and call home. I know where home is now. And before then, somebody had described the Negro in America as a person without roots. But now I know I have roots so that's been healed.
♪ Amazing Grace ♪
♪ How sweet the sound ♪
♪ That saved a wretch like me ♪
♪ I once was lost ♪
♪ But now am found ♪
♪ Was blind but now I see ♪
♪ Was Grace that taught my heart to fear ♪
♪ And Grace, my fear relieved ♪
♪ How precious did that Grace appear ♪
♪ The hour I first believed ♪
