YOUNG, GIFTED, AND GEECHEE:

KRAKIN’ TEET ‘CROSS GENERATIONS

by Trelani Michelle

Photos by Joshua Lindsey

Back in April, I brought two local elders — Ike Carter and Freddie Gilyard — and two teenagers — Hollyn Anderson and Justice Clark — together for a panel discussion called “Krakin Teet ‘Cross Geechee Generations” at the Bull Street Library.

Hopefully, this interview will inspire you to create similar intergenerational exchanges. This ain’t the whole conversation, by the way, just montaged highlights, along with some context from me, that focus on what it’s like being young, gifted, and Geechee in Savannah.

Theron “Ike” Carter is a Savannah native and Beach High School graduate. He has a vast background in radio management and programming, served as Director of WHCJ radio station for over twenty years, and is a local expert on the history of African-American music. Freddie Gilyard, also a Savannah native, is a forty two year retiree of public education. She taught at Beach High School and was later a principal at Gould Elementary, Herschel V. Jenkins High, and Sol C. Johnson High School. She’s the author of three books, including Just People.

Hollyn Anthony moved to Savannah from Daytona Beach when she was twelve. At the time of the panel, she attended STEM Academy, enjoys music and dancing, and wants to be an oceanographer. Justice Clark, born and raised in Savannah, also attends STEM Academy, enjoys reading and playing video games on a computer he built himself, and, true to his name, wants to be an attorney when he grows up.

ON BEING YOUNG

We’ve either been young or still are. Even when we ain’t young no more, however, our lives are still impacted by young people in one way or another. Almost every time I interview an elder, they say, in one way or another, that young people today are out of control and way worse than they were. I’m almost sure, though, that when they were young, their elders felt the same way about their generation. So I wanted to know if the panelists thought there was a such thing as “bad kids.”

Justice: I mean, for little kids, there’s no such thing. But if you're 12 and up and still doing bad things, I think you're considered a bad kid.

Hollyn: There's no bad kids, but kids do bad things. Sometimes they could just be doing these bad things for attention. That can be a cry for help. If a child is constantly being bad, stealing money, breaking stuff, and they know right from wrong, that can actually be them trying to speak out or grab your attention because something's wrong, but they just don't know how to tell you that, so they act out. They can be struggling kids, but they're not bad kids.

Freddie: We all learn differently. And what this culture has taught us for development is that at one year old, you do X things, and then at five, you do X plus Y things. And it goes on through developmental stages. What was not taken into account is that we all learn differently. We're all wired differently. There are physiological components to how we learn and adjust and acculturate, which makes us just different.

We can't always make ourselves conform to what is accepted in this society, but we can always accept the person as he or she is and help them to meander through this thing we call age and time and space, so that the gifts that they have and the gifts that we have can be accepted.

Ike: I think that sometimes when you see kids misbehaving or doing something wrong, it’s not because they're just innately bad kids, but they have not had the benefit of having someone teach them the proper way of doing things, you know? I guess I could've been categorized as a bad kid, in some instances. A lot came from peer pressure. I'll share a secret and don't tell the police. My friends and I used to hot wire cars. Beach High School, they used to have adult education at night. Most of the guys who were in school were veterans from the Korean War. They all had cars and they would park in front of Beach. And we'd hot wire their cars to go for a joy ride. One day we were joy riding down Mills B. Lane, and I'll never forget because the car ran out of gas. We stopped by a service station that was pretty close. We didn't have any money either. But as it turned out, one of our friends was working at the service station and he loaned us the money to get the gas. So we were able to get the car back, but I'm sure the car couldn't get too far before it ran out again.

There’s a West African proverb warning that “the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.” I asked if they agreed with the proverb. Here are Hollyn and Freddie’s responses.

Hollyn: The child not feeling the warmth of the village is basically neglected and them burning down the village is them doing the crazy stuff, trying to get the attention and trying to feel the warmth. Like, you see I'm here, so acknowledge me.

Freddie: I wasn't the smartest teacher, but I was a great teacher, because I knew that if I did not embrace every child in my classroom for who she or he was and brought to the class, that I could not succeed. Best thing you can do with that person who has the potential to burn the village is to take away the match, and the way to do that is by understanding that they deserve respect too.

Since understanding is a vital part of connecting, I asked if it was even possible for people over 40 years old to understand what young people are going through.

Justice: If we’re struggling, no, not really. Well, it depends. I also don’t agree that there’s nothing new under the sun. There could be, like, a different issue. Y'all didn't have cell phones, and there could be an issue with your cell phone or something like that, or a personal issue going on through text messages or social media. You guys wouldn't understand that.

Hollyn: I'm not gonna say every older person, but most older people, they don't understand, nor do they, like, try to understand. At one point in time, it was low in my life, I told my grandma that I just wasn't feeling it. And she was like, you just need a nap and a snack. You'll be alright. I'm thinking no, I don' had several naps and several snacks. I've seen where somebody tried to come out to their parents or grandparents and they’re just like, you’re just lost or confused or it’s just a phase. What do you mean? They’re telling you that this is who they are. Or being seen and not heard. That hurts because I’m a very loud person. Growing up, I thought that meant that my voice must not matter much.

ON BEING GIFTED

Being gifted ain’t limited to high test scores, formal education, or intellectual achievements. Those who learn fast and/or have an innate ability and talent that everybody ain’t born with are gifted. It’s even a gift to be able to set a goal and achieve it. Often, young people graduate high school, move away, and never benefit their hometown with their genius. So I wanted to know if they thought folk have to leave Savannah if they wanna be successful.

Hollyn: For what I specifically want to do, I would need to be near more water, so I would want to move somewhere closer to the ocean.

Freddie: You can travel all over, but Savannah, Georgia is a wealth of exposure. People are here from all over the world, and the best place to start is the education that you get here at home. Take yourself out into the community and share who you are and what you are, because you make other people better. At this point in my life, I wouldn't be any other place.

Ike: I had been told all my life that I was brilliant, and I started believing it until I got to Howard University. I made friends with people from all over the country and abroad, West Indian students and African students, but I learned that I wasn't as smart as I thought I was, that you just don't get born smart. It comes from an accumulation of hard work and consistency and perseverance. But I learned to appreciate Savannah.

Justice: I think Savannah has enough resources for you to become successful here.

When the gift is art, there’s a lot of opinions about what is and ain’t art and what artists should or should not be creating. I considered Nina Simone, one of the most extraordinary musicians of the twentieth century, saying artists have a duty to reflect the times. I took it a step further and asked the panelists if they believed that artists have a responsibility to discuss injustices, what ain’t right in the world, in their art. There were several prominent artists in the audience. “Jerome [Meadows] is a sculptor, Suzanne [Jackson] is a world-renowned painter, Tommy D is a photographer, and Aberjhani writes,” Mr. Ike pointed out, and some of ‘em chimed in.

Hollyn: I say it's a responsibility. If you're an artist, especially if you're a popular one, that means your voice has a little bit more power than everybody else's does. If something's going deeply wrong within your community or in the world, period, I say you got to touch on the topic. I'm not saying you gotta make a whole album about it, but, like, just touch on the topic.

Justice: I don't think they have a responsibility. I mean, they can choose if they want it to be on the issue that's going on, but I don't think they have a responsibility to talk about it.

Ike: You have artists and you have entertainers. Entertainers are there to make money, so they don't feel a responsibility to the people and so they are often detrimental to the general welfare of the people. Spiritual and mental welfare. If you are an artist, you have a responsibility to share your art with your people, first of all, but to also shine a light. Marvin Gaye wrote the most significant album, I believe, of the twentieth century, What’s Going On. And Bob Marley was a prophet. A lot of hip hop music is doing the same kind of profound things that our artists did in the ‘60s and ‘70s. They have a message. One of the biggest mistakes older generations made was turning their backs on the hip hop generation. If you don't listen to young people, if you don’t establish a line of communication with them, there can be no exchange.

Suzanne Jackson: Sometimes the work that you make, just the fact that you are an artist, you are expressing something that other people sometimes are afraid to do, but quite often in the work that you're making, you may be just putting down paint or making sculptures. But then it turns out, that work, in itself, when people come to it, you've given it to people. So all artists are making work and they're sharing it. And that's the responsibility — without using the word "responsibility." Responsibility tells you you have to do something, but if you're just doing it and it happens… that's usually what happens.

Jerome Meadows: Coming of age during the Civil Rights Movement, the statement was, “If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.” As a young artist trying to figure out what to do with my voice, it became important to always be thinking about that statement.

Being gifted doesn't necessarily translate to making a lot of money or even making enough money to meet your basic needs. There’s many factors (and injustices) involved in that. There’s a lot of talk about “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps,” and it ain’t new talk. In his 1968 speech, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: “It’s alright to tell a man to lift himself by his bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his bootstraps.” I asked if they agreed or disagreed with MLK’s statement. Audience members joined in on this one too.

Hollyn: I'm not gonna say it's cruel to tell somebody to pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they don’t got no boots, because not everybody start off with money. Some people start off dirt broke, right? But you still gotta find a way at the end of the day to make your money. It might be a little harsh, but sometimes that's what people need to hear. They need to know that, like, you need to get up, get yourself together, and go make your money, whether you got boots or don't got no boots. Go get your own boots, then you can pull yourself up.

Suzanne: Our expression was “making a way out of no way.”

Tanesha Watts: We all know how it feels when someone says, “Well, I had a house at twenty five, why don't you have a house?” or “I had a wife or husband and children, and you're at this stage, why didn't you have that?” Just because you had that in your bag doesn't mean the person you meet had it. So it's a lack of compassion to say, well, you need to pull yourself up by the bootstraps you don't have, without telling them how to or just giving advice on how to get the boots.

LaRente Austin: I understand the sentiment behind the quote, don't get me wrong, but at the end of the day, the day gon' end. You still have to get yourself where you're trying to go and dwelling on what you don't have, I don't think it's conducive to where you're trying to go. I do understand we do not all have the same background. We are not from the same circumstances. People who do say pull yourself by your bootstraps are usually people who have not done so or who don't really know what a bootstrap is. Not to get political, but an example is Trump saying he started his business with a small loan of a million dollars from his father. That’s just not an example of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. But we can’t afford to dwell on the fact that we did not have the boot that others have. Tell me how or help me get my boot, because I have to turn myself into what I want to become.

Ashley Mayes Clark: I used to work at a bank, and the things that people would say about finances and financial literacy, just banking terms, it would blow my mind and I would be angry because the customers didn't know. I used to work in a different socioeconomic area than when I started working in town. My best friend told me, "If you know what you know, tell those people. You have to let them know." And I mean, again, people need resources to start. Where can I find some boots? What do I need to get my boots on? If you're telling somebody that, you should at least provide them with resources on how they can better themselves to get their boots.

Freddie: That's so profound, because our roots could be homelessness or coming up in a system where we had to wait ‘til the first of the month to get the bootstraps, or a one-parent household, or no-parent households. Your boots aren't necessarily on your feet, you know, and we have to recognize that and appreciate people for wherever their boots are coming from.

Ike: We would not have succeeded in this country if we didn't pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, by what we had within us, because the deck was stacked against us. We used to be a community of Black people all over the country, all over the world. In Savannah, if there was ever a movie that Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge had a small part in or just a cameo appearance, we would line up to get in the movie. Because when they succeeded, we succeeded. There was a feeling of pride that we had for anybody who succeeded, you know. And that used to happen a lot. When Joe Louis knocked out Braddock, he was the greatest. They called Muhammad Ali the greatest, and he was. I shook his hand. But Joe Louis held the heavyweight championship for twelve years, and when he fought, Black America stopped and turned on the radio; we didn't have no televisions. We all had a sense of pride when Jackie Robinson made it in the Big Leagues. And when Ralph Bunche mediated the crisis in the Middle East in 1948, again, we all felt a sense of pride. I think we lost that to a certain extent, some of it anyhow.

ON BEING GEECHEE

Culture is influenced by many factors, which contribute to its formation and evolution, including but not limited to the physical environment, historical events, political systems, economic conditions, spiritual beliefs, family structure, language, etc. For Gullah Geechee folk, our ancestors came from West and Central African countries like Senegal, Ghana, and Cameroon. Living in Savannah or the Sea Islands, for instance, mixed with our African heritage, resulted in spirituals like the ring shout, functional art like the bottle tree and sweetgrass basket, living in compounds (called kundas) with kin, fishing with hand sewn cast nets, preparing meals like red rice (a descendant of jollof rice) and gumbo, and even the language. Geechee folk speak an English-based creole that was created when our ancestors from different African tongues were forced to live and work together and made to speak English. Instead of doing away with their African languages altogether, they maintained certain words and phrases like “krak teet” for speaking, “dayclean” for a new day, “coodah” for turtle, “buckra” for a white person, and “kumbaya” for come here.

Gullah Geechee may seem like a new phenomenon, but it ain’t. A primary reason for that illusion is shame. From 1865 – 1975, thousands of Gullah Geechee people left rural areas for Southeastern cities like Savannah and Charleston, or they joined the Great Migration of Black folk who, in this area, relocated from the Southeastern Gullah Corridor to Northeastern cities like Philadelphia, Trenton, and New York City. When they relocated, they were oftentimes met with shame, particularly for how they spoke. Being called “Geechee” became synonymous with “backward” or “country.” So they distanced themselves from the label, and were so successful at doing so that we now have generations who don’t know they’re Geechee or even know what Gullah Geechee is. This panel was a great opportunity to see where we currently stand with that divide since Mr. Ike is of the Silent Generation, Mrs. Freddie is a Baby Boomer, and Hollyn and Justice are Generation Z.

Justice: I knew some of the things about it, like I would hear about it, and do some of the [traditions], but I didn't know that it was Gullah Geechee, but now I know.

Freddie: I knew about Gullah Geechee, but we were not taught to respect those who spoke in that lingo nor the culture. My mother was from LaGrange, Georgia, and she came to Savannah and attended what was then Georgia State. Anything that suggested to her that it was different from the education that she was trying to achieve and the culture that she wanted to raise her children in was not appreciated in the home. And as a result, Gullah Geechee was not appreciated. However, we ate the red rice and certainly enjoyed all that came with the culinary aspects, but actually identifying with and being a part of the culture and appreciating the difference was not something that happened.

Hollyn: I know we had the seafood and we had the blue bottle trees. We had all of that. But I didn't know what it was classified under. That was the norm for me. So I thought that's just how, like, everybody grew up.

Ike: We did not learn about the culture and how significant the culture was. We did not learn that our people were brought over here because of their skills or that we had existing cultures in Africa already. But when I was in school, there wasn't Gullah Geechee. It was just Geechee. The Gullah part came later, even though it's the same thing. Because of the way [Geechee people] talked, we would laugh at them, you know. Just like when we saw the Tarzan movie and Africans came on the screen, people would start laughing like it was a comedy. That's another part of the brainwashing that we were going through. When I went to Ghana, I was riding from Accra to Kumasi, and we passed through this village. And I saw these women in the village sweeping around their huts with these homemade brooms with the tall grass. My grandmother did that in South Carolina, and nobody taught her that. That was cultural memory. It's not taught; it's in you. That says a lot about us as people. There are a lot of things in us culturally that, unless you suppress them, they will come out. But a lot of us, I'm speaking of my generation especially, started to suppress their cultural identities.

The Gullah Geechee language is one of the biggest assets of the culture. In 1929, Lorenzo Dow Turner heard two Gullah students talking during his summer teaching position at South Carolina State University, and their tongue snatched his attention. He visited their families on John’s Island, just outside of Charleston, and concluded that the Gullah language wasn’t broken; it was distinctive. Three years later, he returned to the Gullah Geechee Corridor to record the language and did so mostly in Charleston, Beaufort, Savannah, and Brunswick. Posthumously, he was named the Father of Gullah Studies.

Suzanne Jackson, who sat front row in the audience, pointed out that Zora Neale Hurston studied the Gullah language and culture as well. Also ahead of her time, between 1935 – 1940, Hurston sure enough visited various parts of the Gullah Geechee Corridor to study the culture and its Africanisms. Coincidentally (or not), Hurston was a student of Turner’s and referred to him as her most influential professor at Howard University. “In that whole period,” Suzanne said, “[Hurston] was ostracized by other artists. She didn't think of it as a responsibility. She thought of it as part of her culture and what needed to be recorded.”

Fast forward to today and there are oceans of media that document and/or celebrate Geechee culture and its language. Despite the universal interest in what it means to be Gullah Geechee, some folk still consider the language to be broken or improper and believe that speaking it in public is against your best interest. So I wanted to know where the panelists stood with that — if they thought it was okay to speak Geechee at school or at work, or if it should just be limited to friends and family.

Hollyn: If you're talking in the Geechee language, it's like all shortened words, not everything is said in full form sentences, right? So when you're talking to, like, let's say your higher up at your job, that has been deemed unprofessional. You're not gonna sound like you know how to handle yourself. But at home or when you're talking to your friends, it's okay.

Justice: It depends where you work.

Ike: I have always been bilingual. In the late ‘70s, I sold whiskey. The white salesmen were afraid to go to Black neighborhoods. One day I was in a Black neighborhood with the sales manager, who was white, and he had never heard me speak, other than proper. I said I had to be bilingual. I told him, "Suppose I said, 'let's slide by my crib and cop a grit.'” He had no idea what that meant. We bring color to everything we do and our language was also a mechanism for maintaining secrecy. Being bilingual has served us. It’s only a problem when we try to discard one language for the other. If you went up on the corner in the hood and started talking like you talk at work, it would be a negative. They would say you’re trying to talk white.

Freddie: Twenty years ago, a particular employee of Chatham County wore her natural hair and her hair was braided, and she went to work and was told, “You're not professional.” You can't come here as yourself. You're required to imitate this environment that you're in. And so when you say to a person, “You can't speak to me in the way you talk, because it's not appropriate,” what you're being really told is “I can't communicate with you, not that you can't communicate with me.” I don't understand your speech, your hair, your dress, or why in the world you would paint your nails like that. When a person brings to you their natural self, that's all they've got. I learned this very late, but it's more appropriate for me to accept you as you are and learn as much as I can from you, because I get something from you too.

The “Krakin’ Teet ‘Cross Geechee Generations” panel not only bridged the gap between age groups but also celebrated the rich cultural tapestry of Savannah. By bringing together the seasoned wisdom of Ike Carter and Freddie Gilyard with the vibrant perspectives of Hollyn Anderson and Justice Clark, the discussion illuminated the complexities of growing up Geechee and the diverse paths to success.

Our conversation underscored the importance of understanding and embracing one’s heritage while also addressing contemporary challenges and aspirations. This exchange of ideas and experiences serves as a reminder of the value in nurturing intergenerational connections, ensuring that both past and future contribute to the ongoing story of the community.

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