Ntozake Shange was Geechee AF and Hoodoo AF
“The people that I come from on my mother’s side of the family are called Geechees, from the area that goes from North Carolina to South Georgia. Geechees are very proud and very separate. They have a language, a culture, food, caste and class. You never stop being a Geechee; you never stop being a Carolinian.” —Ntozake Shange in a 1991 interview
She was born in Trenton, New Jersey, grew up in St. Louis, Missouri for a handful of years, then moved back to Jersey ’til college. Yet, like she said, “You never stop being a Geechee.” She named her daughter Savannah and, among beaucoup other titles, she wrote Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, the story of three sisters and their mother who spin, weave, and dye cloth for money in Charleston, South Carolina.
She was Geechee af.
Daddy was a surgeon, mama an educator and a psychiatric social worker, she did not grow up poor. Her parents, she said, used to be called race people, meaning “their life was dedicated to the betterment of the race.” Having done well for themselves financially, their children didn’t have to get it out the mud. They dreamed of their children working smarter, not harder, becoming artists and intellectuals like the ones they entertained in their home (W.E.B. Du Bois, Miles Davis, Paul Robeson, Cesar Chavez, etc.).
In Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo, the mother would shake her head at her youngest daughter, Indigo, and say “Something’s got hold to my child, I swear. She’s got too much South in her.” Indigo is a young Ntozake. I know without knowing. And Indigo was Hoodoo af. She made doll babies outta red beans, rice, saw dust, and palm leaves, and they talked to her. Indigo told her dolls that when you get your first period, you should sleep with a Laural leaf under your head, take baths in wild hyssop and white water lilies, and listen for the voices of your visions. The book also explained that “There wasn’t enough for Indigo in the world she’d been born to, so she made up what she needed. What she thought the Black people needed: Access to the moon. The power to heal. Daily visits with the spirits.”
She was Hoodoo af.
And Indigo’s mama claiming she had too much South in her is what I imagine Ntozake’s mama must’ve thought of her. “Race people,” as Ntozake said her parents were, often adhere to respectability politics. That basically means they believe survival and success is achieved by thinking and acting as similar to upper middle-class white folks as possible. Her parents, for instance, wanted her to “go to a seven sister college, graduate cum laude, marry a nice doctor and have five children and a wonderful house; and belong to a wonderful black Civic Group, go to church…” She did a lot of it, but, ultimately, chose her own path. I’d guess that decision to do her own thing happened around age 22 when she changed her name from Paulette Linda Williams to Ntozake Shange.
Ntozake means “She who comes with her own things” and Shange means “She who walks like a lion.”
When there’s not enough of whatever you need in the world for you, you had better come with your own. Geechee culture does a wonderful job of showing us that. There wasn’t enough Black in the white world that our African ancestors were taken to, so they came with it. When asked to explain the Gullah language that her grandmother spoke, Ntozake said “Gullah is slave-trade language, like Papiamento. There is Portuguese, French, Spanish, English and African. It is the language of the slave traders and Africans, all mixed up together…”
Note: The terms Gullah and Geechee are interchangeable, and are most commonly these days merged as Gullah Geechee to demonstrate oneness.
In addition to language, the Gullah Geechee also created a cuisine using foods from back home in Africa like okra, peanuts, benne seeds, and rice to mix with the foods in the land that was new to them. Out of this blending came dishes like shrimp and grits, purloo, gumbo, okra soup, stewed fish made with hot peppers, red rice, and more.
Haint blue is Geechee. Hoodoo too. Painted on walls and porches especially, the light hued blue keeps evil spirits away. They can’t cross water and they’ll assume the blue is water. Baskets, flowers, earrings, dolls, and place mats made of sweetgrass are also Geechee. Bahamians hear Geechees talk and hear themselves. My Jamaican friend saw the Gullah bible and read it as naturally as she would’ve had it been written in Jamaican patois.
What makes someone Geechee is where their enslaved African ancestors were taken. If it was along the corridor extending from Jacksonville, North Carolina down to Jacksonville, Florida, and they stuck around for a generation or more, then you’re Geechee. And you never stop being Geechee.
The Gullah Geechee migrated, so its people and culture are everywhere.
During slavery, of course, there was the selling and reselling that scattered us. There was also us emancipating ourselves and leaving the corridor, like when the Gullahs joined the Native Americans to beat the U.S. Following those wars, many ended up in Mexico, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. In 1978, for instance, historians interviewed Seminole Negro Indian Scouts in Brackettville, Texas and discovered that many still spoke Gullah and ate Gullah dishes. Then there was the Great Migration, which accounted for millions of Black folk leaving the South and heading up North and out West.
Everywhere our enslaved African ancestors were taken is where you’ll find Geechee culture. Like Ntozake said best, “For a child of the diaspora—which for us is the slave trade—there are no national boundaries. I can decide to discuss Chile or to write about Cuba, and I do not feel that I am a ‘tourist.’ When there are black people, I know how to dance, I know the rhythms, I know the food, I know how to have comradery, and I can talk, and sing.”
Basically, she was saying #WeAllCousins.
Ntozake and me at her book reading in DC, 4 days before she passed
October is the month to celebrate Hoodoo Heritage, Gullah Geechee Heritage, and our beloved, self-emancipated black-woman-warrior-writer, Ntozake Shange who was born on October 18, 1948. In true Hoodoo fashion though, we know she ain’t gone; she just switched forms. She told us before she left where we can find her: “I am gonna write poems til i die and when i have gotten outta this body i am gonna hang round in the wind and knock over everybody who got their feet on the ground.”
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