A Selection from Gullah Ghosts . . .
Gullah stories and folktales from Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry with notes on Gullah culture and history.
Read a selection from . . .
Cousin Corrie, one of the Hostesses at Brookgreen Gardens in the middle of the Twentieth Century, occasionally recounted stories that old “Dr. Wardie,” beloved physician of Brookgreen Plantation had told her many years previously. This was a story Dr. Wardie had heard from his aunt, “Miss Bessie.” He, Cousin Corrie, and Miss Bessie all enjoyed the story because it revealed that high and mighty rice planters of olden times didn’t always have everything their own way.
Although the rice harvest was bountiful that year in the mid-1800s on Brookgreen Plantation the plantation Overseer was troubled. The yield in rice didn’t seem to be as large as he had expected. The Overseer thought and thought about this and finally became convinced that someone was stealing rice from the barn where they stored it after threshing.
But who could be taking the rice, and how? No one could steal rice during the day with so many people about, yet how could anyone get into the rice barn at night? It was locked carefully each evening and there were no signs of break-in.
Suddenly the Overseer realized who locked the barn each evening! Devine, the head slave on the plantation, held the keys. Old stories began to recall themselves to the Overseer, stories about Devine stealing rice and selling it to buy liquor (and of how Devine had gotten caught but I won’t go into that right now).
“So!” mused the Overseer to himself, “Devine is sneaking into the barn at night and stealing rice again! And he is probably bringing other slaves with him because a lot of rice seemed to be missing. Now how can I catch Devine and his accomplices in their act of thievery?”
The Overseer thought, and thought some more, and finally devised a plan. He would hide in the rice barn at night and surprise Devine when he and the others came in to steal rice. And he would put his plan into effect that very evening!
After the day’s work was completed the workers all went home to the Street, as the community of slave cabins was called. The Overseer also went home to his cottage near the Street but after dark he crept back to the rice barn, which was located where the Dogwood Garden stands today at Brookgreen Gardens, just behind us here in the Museum. The Overseer looked around stealthily but all was still. He unlocked the door, slipped into the barn, and carefully relocked the door from the inside.
The rice barn was not a very inviting place to spend the night but the Overseer made himself a pallet out of rice straw and curled up near the door to wait. He didn’t bother to stay awake because he knew that anyone entering the barn would rouse him.
The next morning the Overseer awoke nicely rested. His sleep had not been disturbed by anyone coming into the barn. Disappointed but undaunted, he slept in the barn again the next night, with the same results.
This puzzled the Overseer greatly. Why wasn’t his plan working? He thought some more and decided that Devine must have known somehow that he was sleeping in the rice barn. Of course Devine and the others would avoid coming in to steal rice with him there. So that evening the Overseer made a big show of moving his pallet out of the barn and giving up his attempt to catch anyone coming into the barn at night. But as soon as it was dark he sneaked out of his cottage and crept back to the rice barn. This time he hid himself in the trees along the edge of the barnyard where he could keep close watch on the barn without being seen.
The Overseer sat for hours watching in the dark, again with no results. No moon or stars shone through the cloudy skies and night noises made him uneasy at times but he was determined to catch his thief.
Suddenly a faint light appeared at the far edge of the barnyard. The Overseer’s initial thrill quickly turned to apprehension. This was a very strange looking light. It was not a torch but a faint, eerie glow. Gradually his apprehension turned to terror. All the stories he had ever heard about haunts and plat eyes came rushing back to him as the faint glow bobbed slowly along the far tree line. What manner of horrifying specter was coming from the miasmic swamps to threaten him? At least it wasn’t coming any closer!
Slowly the glow moved toward one of the outbuildings in the barnyard, the one where workers stored rice straw after they threshed the rice grains out of it. Nothing was wasted on the plantation and even worthless rice straw made good animal bedding or compost for cornfields.
In another moment a light flared inside the outbuilding as if someone had lit a torch. Suddenly the explanation came to the shaken Overseer: the faint glow that he had watched bob along the tree line had come from a glowing ember carried hidden in a pot. Now someone had used that ember to light a torch inside the building.
Fear drained from the Overseer to be replaced by curiosity. What was anyone doing sneaking into the shed where they stored rice straw? The Overseer moved closer until he could see inside the building. A large muscular slave stood with his back to the doorway holding a small “fat light’erd,” a splinter of pine heartwood saturated with pine resin that served as a torch, illuminating the inside of the building. Under his direction three field hands dug down into the piles of straw and pulled out seagrass baskets. From the baskets they poured rice into sacks.
When the sacks were full and tied closed the workers hoisted them over their shoulders. The man with the torch then turned to lead them out and the Overseer could see him clearly. It was not Devine. It was John! One of Captain Ward’s most trusted field hands, and the plantation Class Leader!
As the Overseer watched, John extinguished his torch. He and the others stole back out into the night and headed toward their homes in the Street. The Overseer understood that later they would pound the rice in homemade mortars hidden in the swamps to remove the outer hulls, then boil it up for dinner in their cabins in the Street. Not only would they have extra rice to stretch their weekly rations, but fancy whole grain rice even better than the midlins, which are the broken grains that could not be sold on the international market, that Captain Ward and his family ate, and certainly better than the small broken pieces the slaves usually got in their weekly food ration.
Now the whole situation became clear. No wonder he hadn’t caught his rice thief by sleeping in the barn. Devine was not stealing rice from the barn. Nobody was stealing rice from the barn! And Devine was not involved at all. The thief was John!
Each day as field workers threshed the rice and scooped it into baskets, they hid some of the baskets in bundles of straw instead of taking them to the rice barn. Then when they carried the bundles of rice straw into the outbuilding for storage they were also carrying away hidden baskets of the newly threshed grain. Later they easily returned during the night to collect the hidden rice from under the straw in the unlocked shed. There was no need to steal rice from the carefully locked rice barn!
The Overseer had discovered his thieves at last. And the biggest shock was that John, the plantation Class Leader—the slave religious leader—was now leading them in their thievery!
Captain Ward had grown to admire John, the Class Leader on his Brookgreen Plantation. John was a tall strong man, a good worker, and a leader among his people. As a field hand he became expert in all phases of rice production. Captain Ward came to rely on John more and more because of his intelligence, his expertise, his leadership abilities, and especially because of his honesty.
The plantation Overseer was not quite so trusting of John and sometimes resented Captain Ward’s reliance on John’s judgment in matters related to the rice growing operation. But Captain Ward continued to entrust John with numerous responsibilities and to praise his abilities and loyalty.
The year that this story took place, which must have been shortly before the War, had been a good one for rice production. When the harvest came, Captain Ward placed John in charge of the threshing floor just in front of the rice barn. John worked under the direction of Devine, the Driver or head slave, and under the direction of the white Overseer of course, but Captain Ward trusted John completely and gave him serious responsibilities. After all, John was the Class Leader on Brookgreen Plantation.
The harvest was in full swing. Every day rice flats piled high with bundles of rice stalks laden with plump grains of rice arrived at Brookgreen Landing, just down the rice island steps from us here at the Museum. A steady stream of field hands carried bundles of rice stalks up the steps from flatboats to the barnyard. John directed them as they arranged the bundles on the hard packed dirt of the threshing floor in front of the barn.
Under John’s supervision, workers beat the rice stalks with wooden flails to knock rice grains loose from the stalks. Then, they scooped up the rough rice from the threshing floor into coiled seagrass baskets and carried it into the rice barn to storage bins where it would wait for milling later in the season. Finally, they carried off the bundles of rice stalks, now just the remaining straw, to an outbuilding for storage.
At least, that was what was supposed to happen. But now the Overseer had discovered that John wasn’t sending all the rice into the barn. There in the dark of the midnight barnyard the Overseer had discovered the secret of John’s thievery!
The Overseer was eager to tell Captain Ward what he had discovered, especially since it involved John, whom he had long suspected of being less perfect than Captain Ward believed.
But what surprising development awaited him? Find out in . . .
Meet "ghosts" of the African-American Gullah culture once so alive along the South Carolina coast. These charming Gullah stories and folktales include one actual ghost story—“Crab Boy’s Ghost,” the one you just read—as well as the tale of an ingenious slave matching wits with his plantation owner, a visit to the uniquely independent inhabitants of Sandy Island isolated in the Carolina Lowcountry, and notes on Gullah history and culture.
OR
Read all the stories from the Tales from Brookgreen Series in Lynn Michelsohn’s longer collection:
Folklore, Ghost Stories, and Gullah Folktales in the South Carolina Lowcountry
(The Complete Series)
return to the beginning of Chapter 2.