The Turn Of The Year

It's the season of reflection and and anticipation as we look back over the past year and look forward to the new one on the horizon. Our fall trips wrapped up earlier this month, and thanks to your support SINHG members enjoyed everything from kayaking, learning about Charleston's pub culture and making indigo dye to walking our woods and wetlands and cruising the Intracoastal waterway. Our spring 2024 trips are waiting in the wings while we pause to welcome in the New Year.

A dish of good fortune

If you've lived in the South and especially in the Lowcountry for any length of time, collard greens, black-eyed peas and Hoppin' John are surely on your New Year menu. These traditional foods are believed to help ensure a prosperous year - collard greens being the color of money, black-eyed peas standing in for coins, and the spicy, field vegetable-and rice-based Hoppin' John predicting a successful growing season. The origin of the dish's name is still much debated. Some think it's from the nickname given to a popular African-American man in Charleston with a faulty leg who first served the dish; or maybe it's because children, in anticipation of eating such a sumptuous meal, would hop around the dinner table in excitement. All that's known for sure is that the first use of the name in print was in landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted's 1861 travelogue, "A Journey In The Seaboard Slave States", in which he claimed he'd been served Hoppin' John by the aristocratic Sarah Rutledge during a visit to Charleston.

Watch Night and freedom

Two years after Olmsted's visit, the Emancipation Proclamation freeing enslaved Blacks took effect on January 1, 1863, giving rise to another New Year tradition observed in the Gullah Geechee community - Watch Night. On "Freedom's Eve", December 31st, Watch Night services take place in the community's churches throughout the Lowcountry, with sacred music, Bible readings, reconciliation of disputes and public resolutions for the coming year. A reading of the Proclamation follows, as church elders serving as Watchmen keep an eye on the clock and sing the last hymn of the outgoing year as midnight approaches and the entire congregation kneels in prayer. On New Year's Day, Charleston's parade is also known as the Emancipation Day parade, the nation's longest continuously held such parade.

"The anticipation of the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation still fills me with a great sense of pride and dignity every year," declared one churchgoer who attended her first Lowcountry Watch Night when she was just eleven years old. "It's a time of putting our best foot forward."

Let There Be Light

It's no accident that the so much of our holiday-making right now concerns light - Christmas tree lights, Yule candles, firelight, starlight - for this is the turning point we know as the winter solstice, when light conquers darkness, days begin to lengthen and nights grow shorter, at least for us in the northern hemisphere. (The solstice was at 10:27pm on December 21st.) Our ancestors may not have known that the earth's north pole had begun tilting back toward the sun, but the prospect of returning light and warmth was a great cause for celebration. Even today, crowds gather at Stonehenge for the arrival of the solstice sun.

For some cultures, the solstice heralded the banishment of sun-averse demons and monsters, and not only in northern populations, whose mythology is full of hairy demons who flee back to underground caves as the days grow longer. Further south, in Greece, the kallikantzaros were angry demons who emerged during winter darkness to wreak havoc if not appeased with food left out for them. Most famously, the agricultural goddess Demeter mourned the loss of her daughter Persephone, captured by the underworld's Hades, causing winter's bleakness before Hades agreed to release Persephone for six months of each year, when light returned and crops could be sown.

La Befana takes to the Italian night skies

Solstice celebrations often involved gift-giving. The ancient Roman Saturnalia, in honor of their god of agriculture, took place over seven days in mid-December, when work was suspended, lavish feasting took place, homes were decorated with evergreens, and gifts were exchanged. And today, Italian children look out for La Befana, a witch-like fairy who takes to the late winter night skies on her broomstick, leaving candies and presents to reward the children for being good. Scandinavian children keep an eye out for the Tomte, a diminutive elfish figure who guards a farm's livestock and might turn ornery if he feels the animals are being mistreated. To stay on his good side, a bowl of porridge is left out for him on winter nights.

Today, we infuse our own holiday with light in both a physical and a spiritual sense and look forward, as our ancestors did, to the return of warmer, brighter times.

Happy holidays from all of us at SINHG!

FIRST ON THE WATER

Today may be "Black Friday" for many of us, the unofficial opening of the Christmas gift shopping season, but a less commercial designation also belongs to this day after Thanksgiving - Native American Heritage Day, proclaimed in 2008 by President George W. Bush to commemorate the role of pre-European peoples in shaping American history.

Here in the Lowcountry, evidence of pre-Colonial and prehistoric peoples are still present in the shell rings and middens scattered among the barrier islands (see our earlier post on shell rings), while more fragile traces of these early peoples are occasionally discovered, including a 4,000-year old dugout canoe found buried in the pluff mud of the Cooper River. As reported last year by the Post & Courier's Adam Parker, the canoe became a rallying point for Lowcountry and Upstate Native Americans from the Wassamasaw, Catawba, Waccamaw and Yemassee Indian Nations.

The canoe was discovered in 1997 by an amateur diver who illegally removed it before it was confiscated under state law and put into storage for nearly two decades before serious restoration efforts began at Clemson University's Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston (where the CSS Hunley is also undergoing preservation).

Members of the Yemassee Indian Nation touch part of their history, Photo courtesy The Post & Courier

Only fragments of the canoe remain, mostly pieces of its bow and stern, but even with these few pieces radiocarbon dating has yielded an age of about 4,200 years, known to archeologists as the Late Archaic period, contemporary with the dating of shell rings like Fig Island. Fashioned from a hollowed-out cypress log, the fragments show clear signs of scraping and firing to create a watercraft that was the common means of transportation for these early peoples, who migrated seasonally between the Upstate and the coast.

The preservation process will be a long one. The canoe has been residing in a trough of fresh water at the conservation center and is now soaking in a solution of glue-like polyethylene glycol to stiffen the wood, a process that can take up to a year to complete. The canoe will then be freeze-dried before consultations with southeastern Indian nations for a permanent and respectful display site. As Chief Lamar Nelson of the Eastern Cherokee, Southern Iroquois and United Tribes of South Carolina told the Post & Courier, "Any Native descendants in South Carolina, or North Carolina, could be related to the people who built that canoe."