10 Healing Plants and Herbs the Gullah Geechee Used Backintheday
Our people brought all kinda knowledge from Africa with them to the States, including folk remedies to stay well and get well. They added natural medicine from the Native American folk, which only makes sense since they been been here.
These recipes and remedies carried on out of tradition and out of necessity, because formal healthcare wasn’t always available (or wanted). Sometimes that was due to a shortage of physicians, language or cultural barriers, poverty, or general mistrust of physicians (as was and still is the case with many black folk today). So we used what we had to make do.
Here are 10 plants and herbs the Gullah Geechee used backintheday for healing/medicinal purposes. This list is strictly informative, by the way. It is not a prescription. (Don’t sue me. I ain’t got it.)
1. Spanish Moss
From Washington DC all the way to Cartegena, whenever I’d tell people I lived in Savannah, Georgia, they’d go on and on about the oak trees and the gorgeous moss dripping from ’em. As beautiful as the grey hair that swings from the oak trees is, it’s good for you too.
Put it in your shoe and it’ll lower your blood pressure. Boil it for a tea and it’ll help you with your sugar (diabetes) and gallbladder problems. It’s also been used as a bandage for wounds. Just make sure it’s cleaned and dried; otherwise, the chiggers in it will get you.
2. Rabbit Tobacco
When I met Curt Williams (and I talk about this in the book), he was well into his 90s and still working on cars. I asked him his secret to still looking and moving around so good. The first thing he mentioned was life everlasting (another name for rabbit tobacco). And he gave me some.
It can be boiled in a tea or rolled up and smoked for respiratory issues like asthma, colds, cough, flu, pneumonia, and bronchitis. Also for stuff like diarrhea, insect repellant (when burned), sleep aide, sexual stimulant, and headaches. According to Curt, use it and you’ll live forever.
3. Sassafras
In New Orleans, sassafras is ground up and put on dishes like gumbo; we call it file powder. I learned of it as a healing remedy in Susie King Taylor’s memoir. While serving in the Civil War, some of the soldiers got the small-pox. Her response was, “I was not in the least bit afraid of the smallpox. I had been vaccinated, and I drank sassafras tea constantly, which kept my blood purged and prevented me from contracting this dread scourge.” Sassafras is also good for fever, urinary tract health, arthritis, blood circulation, gout, and overall immune health.
Photo from victreeservice.com 
4. Yellow Sulfur
When Curt told me his parents gave him and his siblings a tablespoon of yellow sulfur and honey twice a year, I was confused. I heard sulfur and immediately thought of poison. I went home and looked it up and learned yellow sulfur is anti-fungal and a bacteriostatic, meaning it stops the growth of bacteria. Curt nem used it like a vitamin though, to not get sick.
5. Turpentine
Turpentine, back then, was extracted from pine trees and used for all kinda stuff like kidney health, aches and pains, bee stings, worms, and coughs and colds. Ms. Sadie Green said, “If somebody got cut, you put spiderweb and turpentine on it.” Ms. Carolyn Dowse said growing up, if you got a cold, “You put Camphor on your chest. We even took sugar and turpentine. My sister got all of that from her mother and her mother got it from her mother, and it was passed on.”
Photos from Library of Congress 
Turpentine farm in Savannah, GA in 1904
6. Castor Oil
Get sick backintheday and your people gave you a laxative. My grandma gave me a Fletcher’s brand for kids that tasted like root beer. I loved it. Everybody around me, friends my age and my elders, had a different experience though. Ms. Ruby Jones said, “We took castor oil for everything. Put it in something so it wouldn’t taste so bad….And all day when you belch, you tasted it. Used to grease yo insides. Everything come out.” Ms. Carolyn Dowse said, “Twice a year, you had to be cleaned out. Castor oil and orange juice. And I hated orange juice for the longest.”
7. Cod Liver Oil
This is another one I grew up on but wasn’t so fortunate to have it taste good. It was God awful. Like Ms. Ruby Jones, I pronounced it cah’liv oil. And although it’s disgusting, it’s full of vitamins A and D; good for your eyes and bones; reduces inflammation in the body; helps with arthritis, joint pain, and ulcers; and lowers your risk of heart disease.
8. Elderberry
Like so many other fruit, elderberry used to grow wild in Savannah, most noted on the east side. It’s regaining its popularity. I see a lot of people selling elderberry syrup, especially, these days. It helps with boosting your immune system, calming inflammation in the body, constipation, joint and muscle pain, fever, headache, cough/cold/flu, kidney problems, epilepsy, skin problems, and more.
9. Cotton
I learned this one from the back of Ms. Sabree‘s business card. It lists four healing ways to use cotton. I’d never heard of this before, so it was hella interesting to me:
- Cotton seeds: boil as a tea to heal different ailments, including soothing a cough and increasing a mother’s milk
- Cotton seed oil: contains vitamin E which helps the elasticity of aging skin and helps prevent wrinkles
- Leaves: If used as an extract, it can help with stomach problems. If used externally, it can help with skin problems and headaches.
- Root: Used to stop internal bleeding
Cottonseeds from Feedipedia.com
10. Food
Food is medicine. You are what you eat. Backintheday, everybody kept a garden, so eating veggies with every meal was the norm. Fruit grew in abundance too–almost all my elders talked about fruit trees growing in their yards or neighborhoods (fig, peach, pomegranate, maypop, plums, pecans, etc.). Because they got so much produce in, people rarely got sick.
We’re better off when we feed and surround ourselves with nature in its purest form. Our ancestors and elders knew that.
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My grandmother, Claretha Wilson, raised me, so, I knew, all of the old people. I remember, MS. Kitty, she was the thrash lady, you took the baby, or young child to her house, and she would blow into their mouth, and a couple, of days later, the thrash was gone. I, too, was a child product, of turpentine and sugar, castor oil, Fletcher’s, Life Everlasting, and Sassafrass Tea. Camphor and the leaf, of the pretty purple bush, which, I believe to be Magnolia, that grew near the corner, of great grandma, Arebellar Perrin, (Ms. Gal), house with the, whitest piece of cotton cloth, wrapped, around your head, was used, to draw out the fever. It worked.
Best info ever been saying lets go bac and remember wha we were told and taught
I love these stories and familiar with everyone. One day I am going to vist Gullah Island! Although I was born and raised and have lived in Kentucky all my life, I feel like I have roots there!
I grew up in Hardeeville, SC. My Granny gave us a mixture of apple cider vinegar, garlic cloves and limes. It sits in a mason jar for 2 years at the most. But it never lasts that long, we take a “hit” (about 20mL) whenever we feel sick. If my children have a stomach virus, it pushes it right out. It clears up sore throats if taken early in the illness. It reduces your appetite. If you eat a fatty meal, she makes us take it. She also says it “cleans ya blood”, her exact words. We call it Granny’s Potion. All of us have a jar of it in our homes.