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Charles
Joyner got his calling early. His parents, who taught
him to read before he started school, gave him a book
on the Presidents of the United States when he was around
five. In short order he had all their names memorized
chronologically – up through Franklin Roosevelt,
who held the office at the time.
“I
couldn’t wait to take history classes in school,”
says Joyner, his rich baritone glowing, excited even
by the memory of the prospect. School didn’t disappoint,
and high school brought a revelation.
“Mary
Long was my American history teacher at Myrtle Beach
High School. She didn’t focus on wars or dates
or presidents, but on larger movements of history,”
he recalls. “She also staged debates. In one of
them I was assigned to defend the English side in the
American Revolution. Well, I didn’t know that England
had a side. That’s when I learned that it’s
not a good guy-bad guy world. For the most part it’s
real people with honest differences of opinion. That
was the first time I saw history as an intellectual
exercise, as a way to understand human experience. I
haven’toutgrown that yet.”
Not
surprisingly, Joyner majored in history in college,
earning a bachelor’s degree at Presbyterian College
in Clinton, S.C., and went on to get a Ph.D. in history
from the University of South Carolina. In the late 1960s,
while he was on the faculty at St. Andrews Presbyterian
College in Laurinburg, N.C., he started work on what
was intended to be a routine scholarly article. He wound
up writing a book that changed his life.
Gullah
In the summer of 1969, Joyner received a National Endowment
for the Humanities grant to research the oral histories
of African-American ex-slaves which had been collected
in the 1930s as part of the New Deal’s Federal
Writers’ Project. Scrolling through the microfilm,
he was intrigued to find that several of the interviews
were from Murrells Inlet and had been conducted by Genevieve
Willcox Chandler.
Although
Chandler was something of an institution at the Inlet
– she was hostess at Brookgreen Gardens for many
years – Joyner didn’t know her personally.
Beginning that summer, he and Chandler formed a close
friendship as she began introducing him to the children
and grandchildren of Welcome Beese, Hagar Brown and
other African-American men and women she had interviewed
back in 1937. He was fascinated by their stories, their
songs, their language.
Joyner
began making regular trips to the Inlet, to Sandy Island
and other areas along the Waccamaw Neck – that
area of land situated roughly between Murrells Inlet
and Georgetown where the great antebellum rice plantations
flourished – to conduct his own interviews. He
became friends with African-American preachers like
the Rev. George Besselieu, who led him to other descendants.
Joyner took notes on their speech, their customs, their
crafts, all of which he was delighted to find still
vigorously alive after generations of change and assimilation.
He also looked into written sources filed away in various
libraries – censuses, inventories, wills and estate
papers of area plantation owners. Gradually he began
to build a multilayered portrait of the unique African-American
culture that existed on the Waccamaw Neck prior to the
Civil War.
That
culture is called Gullah. The term refers both to the
language – a rich creole mixing English and African
vocabulary and grammatical elements – and to the
general culture and folklife which developed among the
slaves who lived along the coast and the sea islands
of South Carolina and Georgia.
A cross-stitch depiction of the slave street at
Brookgreen Plantation, designed by Joyner |
“Just
the research process itself was stimulating beyond anything
I could have imagined,” says Joyner. “In researching
most historical subjects, you might get a pinch of information
from Texas, a whiff from Tennessee and maybe a nugget
from North Carolina. But here I was able to collect
more information than I could readily absorb, all about
one spot right in my own backyard. I could talk to close
relatives of the people I was writing about. I could
stand in the graveyards where they were all buried,
the slaves and the masters. No other project I had ever
worked on seemed so real to me.”
In
order to do justice to the material he was gathering,
Joyner realized he was going to need more specialized
education in the fields of folklore and anthropology.
“The project called on everything I knew as a historian
and made it clear to me that I had a lot more to learn.”
So he undertook another Ph.D., this time in folklore
and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, all
the while continuing to probe deeper into the Gullah
story.
Although
his beard turned from black to gray in the process,
Joyner’s painstaking approach paid off. The book
that eventually emerged, Down by the Riverside: A South
Carolina Slave Community, was immediately recognized
as a landmark study of American slavery when it was
published in 1984. In it, Joyner recreates the experience
of the Waccamaw slaves in careful detail, illuminating
the intricate structure of the rice plantation in all
its physical and its human complexity. Praised for its
comprehensiveness, Down by the Riverside traces the
story of the Gullah people from their African homeland,
where they first learned the secrets of rice cultivation,
and combs through the evidence of their considerable
legacy in America from several perspectives: historical,
folkloristic, technological, linguistic, ethnic, religious
and musical. Joyner also explains how change and adaptation,
which are inevitable in any society, have helped Gullah
culture survive and develop.
The
book helped establish Joyner’s reputation as a
chief authority on Southern history and culture. He
has since been in regular demand for lectures and conferences
around the world, including two stints as a Fulbright
lecturer in New Zealand. He has been called on to edit
new editions of classic Southern books such as A Woman
Rice Planter by Elizabeth Allston Pringle and Green
Thursday by Julia Peterkin, as well as to write countless
introductions to other works related to various aspects
of Southern culture.
William
Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities,
sized up Joyner’s erudition in a remark he made
while delivering Coastal’s May commencement address
three years ago. Speaking of the mammoth, highly acclaimed
reference work, The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,
which Ferris spearheaded and edited, he said, “Charles
Joyner wrote nearly half of it. I can never thank him
enough – and we certainly never paid him enough.”
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