These Sacred Sounds: notes toward a new theology of place
And with these sacred sounds, Moving Star Hall and praise houses like it throughout the South Carolina Lowcountry once stood as our churches without walls, our rough-hewn temples, holy, of race, faith, history, and culture. In prayer, in praise, and in song, the Gullah Geechee past pressed black worshipers to remember forward to the ways of the new world, that beloved community where they would ever live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with their God.
But for far too long, historians, politicians, social engineers, and culture workers, born and raised one and all in systems of white supremacy, have looked back in longing; and, they have rendered Gullah Geechee peoples and their cultures as the endangered relics of a romantic plantation past, relics now bumbling, blindly, from decay to decay but for their white caretakers' correction, preservation, and remembering.
These sacred sounds, however, are not a story of a mutually contented and caring plantation family - black and white - and its descendants. No. These sacred sounds are a story of Gullah Geechee peoples’ centuries-long, Bible-rooted struggle to make true those words written by the enslaver, and United States’ founding father, Thomas Jefferson, namely, that “all men are created equal and are endowed by the Father with certain unalienable rights.”
With these sacred sounds then, Gullah Geechee peoples trouble still the waters that divide our nation's democratic principles and ideals from our present-day social realities. Truly, we come seeking a world more befitting freedom.
And so, in those sacred sounds, those ways of knowing, being, and becoming born of Gullah Geechee peoples' history, culture, and faith, ways “adjusted” always “to the needs of the present,” we will give birth to a new people and a new place.
For the South Carolina Lowcountry is Gullah Geechee peoples' territory. What is more, the South Carolina Lowcountry is Gullah Geechee peoples' challenge.
The past is not past. Daily, we live and experience the history of slavery individually, interpersonally, and institutionally. And so, in this region once made rich by rice - and the black bodies who cultivated it - we are confronted by “two basic versions of American history: one which is written and as neatly stylized as ancient myth, and the other unwritten and as chaotic and full of contradictions, changes of pace, and surprises as life itself.”
But these sacred sounds stand in the gap, selah, witnessing, as we reckon here still with slavery's legacy, and endeavoring, ever, for that city on a hill, the new Jerusalem imbued by a “politics of deep solidarity rooted in love.”
