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- [00:01]
Optum Announcer
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- [00:30]
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- [01:07]
Chris Duffy
This is how to be a better human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. It's become a joke in my family that my dad has done all this really intense, painstaking genealogical research tracing our family back generations and no one else cares about it at all. He'll be telling me this discovery he made about how our great, great great grandparents had just moved to Gillespie, Illinois. And I'll say, uh huh.
- [01:29]
Optum Announcer
Yeah.
- [01:29]
Chris Duffy
Wow, Fant. Um, when is dinner again? What are we having? You know, I've never been that interested in the past, especially the past of my own family. But today's guest, Keith Rushing, has convinced me that I have been wrong. I know my dad will be very glad to hear this introduction. Keith has convinced me that there is a lot of value in understanding where we come from, our ancestry, our culture, and our heritage. Maybe I've also just crossed some sort of invisible line of aging where all of a sudden genealogy becomes much, much more alluring. I don't know. What I do know is that I love Keith's perspective. He views family history as a way of understanding our present and our future. How does understanding where we came from in the past make us better humans right now? Well, Keith's book Descended Searching for My Gullah Geechee, Roots is a beautiful exploration of that question and so many more. To get us started, here's Keith reading an excerpt from his book.
- [02:22]
Keith Rushing
Soon after ABC first aired the TV series Roots, my seventh grade teacher asked us to pursue our own mini Roots projects. We had to ask our oldest living relatives about the oldest ancestors they could remember. The story of Alex Haley's family, tracing back to an African ancestor named Kunta Kinte, who came to America from the Gambia, had sparked tremendous interest in origin stories among black people. Although the book later proved fictional for African Americans, it ignited conversations about slavery and particularly the origins of ancestors who were captured and bound for the United States aboard ships carrying the enslaved. Aunt Angie, short for Agnes, seemed like the perfect fit for my assignment at the time. She was 80 years old. Born in 1897, she was the oldest of my grandmother's five siblings, who were all born on the family farm in Hilton Eight Island, South Carolina. My parents invited Aunt Angie, who lived not far away in Jamaica, Queens, over to our house in Springfield Gardens to spend the night. As we sat mostly in silence around the kitchen table, she racked her brain digging up names long buried in her memory. Her mother would add them to the family tree spread out in front of her. As she remembered many cousins and the surnames of people who married into the family, mom remembered names she had heard and people she may have met who lived in the south, not New York City where we lived. Aunt Asy could go back as far as her grandparents, Saint Cole and Margaret Molly Christopher. I later learned they were born into bondage on a cotton plantation in Hilton head in the 1840s. After Sanco served in the Civil War among the U.S. colored Troops, they transitioned to life as freed people. That knowledge would surface decades later, however, after archival documents revealed details of Sanco's life during and after the war.
- [04:06]
Chris Duffy
We are going to talk a lot more about Keith's family and how we can all understand and learn from our ancestors. But first, we are going to take a quick break and we will be right back after this.
- [04:18]
Nick and Jack
Foreign.
- [04:25]
Shopify Announcer
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- [05:18]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
So go make it one start your
- [05:20]
Shopify Announcer
free trial at shopify.com betterhuman that's shopify.com
- [05:26]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
betterhuman
- [05:31]
Optum Announcer
Healthcare can feel complicated. That's why Optum uses technology to connect the people and processes that make healthcare easier, more affordable, and more effective. We're making it clearer for you to know exactly what your benefits cover and to help you better manage your health. We're coordinating care between your doctors and your technology. We believe better, simpler healthcare is always possible. That's healthy optimism. That's Optum. Visit optum.com to learn more.
- [06:02]
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- [06:36]
Chris Duffy
On today's episode, we're talking about what we inherit from our ancestors and how the past can inform our future with Keith Rushing.
- [06:44]
Keith Rushing
Hi, my name is Keith Rushing. I'm the author of Descendants Searching for My Gullah Geechee Roots. I began research on this book about 15 years ago. I'm a former journalist, print journalist, that worked at newspapers in Pennsylvania, Connecticut and Virginia. I now work at a nonprofit in
- [07:00]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Washington, D.C. keith, I'm so glad to have you on the show. I really loved your book Descended. I think it's such a fascinating and incredibly well written book. So much of your book descended and the work that you did, the research to write it is about filling in these missing pieces, about learning more about the history that you had never been told or that had been lost. Why does it matter to know our family histories?
- [07:26]
Keith Rushing
I think there's a lot that can just fulfill you in that process. Like I, I think I'm still gaining and learning. For me, it's, you know, I think back about, you know, I grew up in New York City. It's my favorite city, probably always will be. But I realized in doing this research and going back to Hilton Head, South Carolina, where my grandmother was born and where my ancestors were as far back as I know. I feel disconnected spiritually. I feel connected to the place. I go to the Gullah Geechee Cemetery, the ancestral cemetery where people are buried. And I walk and visit and I actually feel kind of like just a certain groundedness and a certain feeling that this is home and it's not something that I can say. Like it's like an intellectual Thing. It's kind of an emotional and spiritual thing that's really deep in me. So I think if people do have those questions and they want to know, I would say research as much as you can. If you can go back to graveyards, if you can go back to a place, you may feel things that you didn't know you were going to feel. It may not just be information. It may be kind of an emotional and spiritual connection that you get in that process.
- [08:31]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I also feel like, in my personal experience, a lot of times the people who are most into genealogy or have the longest history records and they have the family tree up on the wall, they're often people who. Their ancestors and their family were always in power, where they're like, I can trace my ancestry back to the president of the United States or to a duke in England or something. And often people who come from a lineage where there was oppression or violence or people fled, where they were from or were taken from where they're from, have a lot less information about their lineage and what people's stories were and what brought them to the places they were brought to or where they fled to.
- [09:20]
Keith Rushing
And that was. That was something that kind of compounds this for black people. I think if you. If you run into people who are, you know, they may know a great grandfather is from, you know, France or England or wherever, or I've met people who said, I'm descended from the Mayflower. And as you said, like folks who come from a very elite background and know that lineage. Part of the process of slavery was being torn from ethnicities in West Africa. The oppression was to disconnect you from that culture. And then I think just the pain of something that's extremely difficult to talk about that, you know, so far, I think for people who live through enslavement, a lot of times those stories didn't get passed down with good reason. Like, you know, that the most traumatic things that people go through, they don't necessarily want to share. But then for generations removed, we just have, like this, what I describe as a void in the book. And just like something's missing there is that. That kind of dichotomy. I think for folks who have been through a kind of a level of oppression and systemic kind of rupture that
- [10:30]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
African Americans have, especially with enslavement. One of the many losses was loss of culture and tradition and language, you know, which was violently torn from people, and they were beaten if they were speaking their language, not allowed to practice their religion.
- [10:48]
Shopify Announcer
But one of the things That I.
- [10:49]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I found so interesting in the book, and I hadn't really known about, is that people in the Gullah Geechee community had some of these really direct ties to African cultural practices, to language, to food, to religious practices, Some of the most direct ties to the places in where they were taken from. So I imagine a lot of people who are listening to this are not familiar with the terms Gullah Geechee. Can you give us a quick overview of what Gullah Geechee means and what it means to be Gullah Geechee?
- [11:23]
Keith Rushing
So Gullah Geechee is just to contextualize it. It's a group of people in the Gullah Geechee corridor is kind of from the very southern part of North Carolina, like Cape Fear, North Carolina, and it goes along the east coast to Jacksonville, Florida. So this is the region in which people who are described as Gullah Geechee come from and is considered to be the most African of African American cultures. And I think what are identifiers for people are, you know, there's a Creole language that people speak that really developed in West Africa. So in West Africa, where you had trade with European nations, in England, even before the slave trade, you had this Creole language develop. But it's intelligible to people who speak Gullah Geechee and people who speak, say, Creole. In Sierra Leone, which is where a lot of. A lot of people who are Gullah Geechee originated, you have this kind of connection and this kind of holding on to African culture. And I think it shows up in foods. And I talk in my book about, like, red rice and jollof rice, which have been described as cousins, like very similar dishes. The way foods are cooked is something you see on the coast of West Africa and you see in Gullah Geechee culture. But you may have, like, meat and fish cooked together in a rice dish, for instance, whether that be jambalaya, you know, gumbo. So you have all these. You see it in the food and then also spirituality. So again, as you mentioned, Chris, if you could not practice African religions and it was you, you could not. You are not to speak African languages or suffer punishment. But folks found ways to kind of imbue and infuse African spirituality in ways of. Of connecting to the divine. In Christianity, part of your process of becoming a full member of the church, you know, confirmation was a process that lasted a few weeks, something called seeking, where young people at about age 12 would go out into. Would fast and go out to the woods at night and had a spiritual guide that would kind of guide them through this Process of, like, meditation and reflection and dreams and. And things are revealed in dreams that are part of their process of becoming a full member of the church. So that's been likened very much to West African rites of passage, you know, so in that sense, it's unique. It's a unique culture among African American cultures.
- [13:54]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
So I was struck by the incredible ability of families to take care of each other even in some of the most, you know, dire times possible, but also to preserve these things that mattered, that were about dignity and culture and values, even when quite literally, an entire system is built to make that as impossible as. As they could possibly make it. And yet the Gullah Geechee people prove that people find a way to transmit these things if it's at all possible to do.
- [14:32]
Keith Rushing
Yeah, I think. And I think that that's one thing that is, you know, kind of maybe different for folks who are Gullah Geechee. If you go back in time where I think for a lot of African Americans, there was this whole kind of negative, like, Tarzan image, you know, this created fictionalized image of Africa so black people would not want to be called African. It was something to run from. But in the Gullah Geechee culture, you see people embracing African culture and also looking, if you go back far enough, people who are. Who were actually born in Africa, that helped shape the culture. Those people were revered often for their. Their abilities to, like. Their knowledge of, like, plants and abilities to heal. Which is something I talk about is, you know, when my grandmother grew up in Hilton Head, she was born in 1917. There were no doctors, so you went to root doctors. But there was a whole tradition of passing down, like, herbal knowledge and knowledge of healing to future generations. So this kind of reverence for Africa, but I think also seeing it as sustenance, like, this is the way this builds resilience. This is the way we heal. We have this sense of community that we build. And that's something that I think it seems that they were intentional about, you know, through praise houses, through communal living in the sense that, you know, maybe it's more normative here in American culture for people to get married and move away from parents. Often there are folks were living in, like, kinship family homesteads where you would have multiple family members, you know, living in homes on a land where they farm. And that was part of the tradition. It's like, kind of land owned not by individuals or willed to individuals, but to anyone who is a descendant of the family. So that's some of the descriptions of this retention.
- [16:20]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
You also talked in the book about how many people felt like if you told people you were Gullah Geechee, you would be bullied or ostracized because there was this. This view of people with more direct ties to Africa as being not as high status or something to be made fun of rather than to be, like, honored and valued.
- [16:43]
Keith Rushing
If you listen to folks who speak Gullah Geechee and come from the region, you know, there's often there's like a Caribbean sound to the accent, like a Caribbean sounding accent. The words are pronounced differently in Gullah Geechee Creole. So, like, folks that I spoke to in Hilton Head, South Carolina, the island where my ancestry is from, didn't self identify as Gullah or Geechee. So it was more like we were just people living on this island in our own way. And when they would go to Savannah and go to other. Other places, people would say, oh, you. You, a Geechee, listen to how you talk. And then the ridicule would begin. So I think, yeah, part of the. Part of that, that that ridicule was this kind of more African, backward, weird, strange, funny, you know, and. And that, I mean, has existed well through the 20th century. I think it started to turn around maybe the last 30 or 40 years. But I mean, you can still hear people who have stereotypes or ridiculed people who are Geechee, Gullah Geechee.
- [17:41]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Well, we talked a little bit about, like, what being Gullah or Geechee means in. In the general sense, but what about in the personal sense? What does it mean to you? What do you think when you think of, like, my family comes from this tradition, what does it mean to be Gullah Geechee?
- [17:56]
Keith Rushing
The culture just seemed to be. Seems to be a beautiful culture, like, to develop this kind of like a very strong sense of family and value. I think, you know, feeling spiritually connected to my ancestry, which I think if you grow up in a, you know, I grew up Episcopalian in a Christian American culture, it's not something talked about or experienced. So, I mean, I think that that's part of it for me. And I think, and I think also when I go back, there's kind of an embrace of folks who are Gullah Geechee who are from the island or who have ancestry there. There's a. You. You feel kind of a connectedness and an embrace. So I feel like there's a warmth that's still there in the culture and I'm still discovering, like, I'm still kind of like learning more and meeting more people. And I feel like it's kind of an evolving process. Like my process of discovery never ended. It's like I finished the book, but I'm still kind of learning and experiencing more.
- [18:51]
Chris Duffy
We're going to be right back after this quick break.
- [19:04]
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- [20:01]
Nick and Jack
Hey Yetis, this is Nick and Jack from the Best One yet podcast. Now the last company we worked at, they used Paylocity and everything just worked. It wasn't until launching our own media business this show that we realized how rare that is. Because Paylocity is one delicious burrito of operational needs.
- [20:17]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
They roll up HR finance and it
- [20:20]
Shopify Announcer
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- [20:22]
Nick and Jack
When everything wraps together like that all at once, your workforce, your tech stack back your business. You don't need more tools. You don't even need cilantro.
- [20:28]
Keith Rushing
You need one solution.
- [20:29]
Nick and Jack
And that is why Paylocity built a single platform to connect HR finance and IT with AI driven insights and automated workflows that simplify the complex and power. What's next? Or as we call it, a delicious operational burrito. Yes, we do experience a one place for all your HCM needs besties. So start now at paylocity.com 1paylocity.com O N E.
- [20:57]
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- [21:12]
Keith Rushing
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- [21:13]
Angel Soft Announcer
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- [21:15]
Keith Rushing
Soft and strong.
- [21:16]
Angel Soft Announcer
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- [21:19]
American Eagle Announcer
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- [21:20]
Chris Duffy
Circle. And we're back.
- [21:29]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
You talk in the book a lot, which I think people would expect if you're trying to trace your ancestry as an African American back to Africa to understand where your family came from and what their life was like. You trace it through the history of slavery and that institution, of course. But you also talk a lot about how many years after abolition families were taken advantage of their historical rights to, for example, land that they had lived on and farmed were not respected. This island that your family had lived on for many years has become a very wealthy, very white vacation community. And it previously was a very black, very African farming community. And so there's this change that has happened that is not in any way the institution of slavery, but is another form of erasure of the past.
- [22:33]
Keith Rushing
I would say my grandmother was born. You go up through which I said was 1917. You go up through the 1930s and 40s. Hilton Head and a lot of these islands were seen as kind of remote backwaters by other people. You know, here, for the folks who live there and own land, they were descended from the enslaved people who were enslaved. These were former plantations, but it was also where their ancestors were born, where people, you know, loved one another and lived. So I think there was a strong attachment to land, but in terms of monetary value, it wasn't thought of something that was. That was worthwhile. Right. So. But it was in the 1950s when you started to see two men in particular who came and did a whole logging operation, right, to make money timbering on the land. And then it went from that to this idea of vacation homes, like retirement homes, hotels, gated communities. The idea of, like, the coast as a place for recreation, but also to retire. And if you were to go back, say, like, to the early part of the 20th century, you had kind of, like, wealthy white businessman who owned a lot of land in the South. So most black people lived in the north of Hilton Head, so the upper quarter to a third. And so you had these wealthy white businessmen that own land, but they didn't develop it. They'd go down there with friends and hunt. And so black people used the island, all over the island, however they wanted, so where they live, but they could also go hunt and fish in the South. So as this development happened and you started to have gated communities, people found themselves, like, locked out of areas that they. Where they had always been, you know. So that was, I think, the start of a process where you see more kind of exclusion and, in a sense, segregation, where segregation didn't exist. My Cousin Phoebe, who's 97, never having experienced, like, segregation on the island, like, she didn't, you know, you had almost no contact with white people, families would go to Savannah and sell produce and go to market. And I think when you went to mainland US you would encounter segregation. But on the island they didn't. But through this process of gentrification and locked communities where only residents could be people who were black and Gullah Geechee found themselves locked out. I mean, not to go in the weeds about it, but aggressive ways of taking land away from folks. Like people would buy the rights as an heir. So their land was heirs property. And I think when you look at Gullah Geechee values, again, it wasn't about, I am going as a, as a, you know, maybe the, the matriarch, a patriarch in a family, going to give this land to the one son who, you know, has his stuff together in his sharp. It was the. The idea that the. All the heirs inherited it. Whoever needed to use it to farm, they had ways of allowing that to happen. But when with heirs property, there's vulnerability, right? Because any heir can force a sale. So what you would have happen is that people, developers would buy the rights from an heir maybe for a small amount of money, and say, I want to force a sale and force the land to be sold. And so those are things that happened. And I think within families a lot of times there's still this, this kind of tension between those who may want to sell land and still goes on today, and those who want to hold onto it.
- [25:56]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
The personal and the political journey that you went through and that you are describing, it's much more broadly applicable than just the story of one community on one island in South Carolina. I think that this is a story that happens all over the world in slightly different ways, but a lot of similarities of people who are struggling to understand their own history and struggling to maintain control of the property and the land and the place that they have historical ties to when maybe they don't. And I'm going to put this in big quotes like have the right paperwork or the right, you know, legal distinctions, even though those legal distinctions may be created just to take it away from them, right. You see this with indigenous communities. You see this with black families in the United States. You see this all over the world, though. And so I think for a lot of these people, really knowing the history, understanding what was happening and how long it's been happening for can be really empowering. Even when you see how things have been taken advantage of, it's empowering to know what was owed and what would have been the right way to handle things.
- [27:13]
Keith Rushing
That speaks to their culture. And the culture of Gullah Geechee people and land being owned by lineages. And I talk about that. And that is true of. It's in West Africa. It's been. It's true of places in the Caribbean where there's a different kind of culture in relationship to land and land ownership than there is in America. Under typical law, people were very intentional about paying their taxes, you know, and if they sold land, they would sell land. You see that all the way into the 19th century. And I know speaking of folks that live there, I mean, it was until very recently, like, you, you know, if you didn't pay your taxes for one year, your land could be auctioned for sale, right? So it's like. But so people were very intentional about that. And so the idea of, like, heirs property, it's not illegal, but that. It's like the system doesn't recognize that as a. I guess it's not kind of validated in the way property is. When you confer it into a child or something and then in the deed is going to, like, one or two individuals, it created this vulnerability. But I think the other thing is you're speaking to is. I mean, and I see that here in. In D.C. you know, is you see how gentrification and I would say aggressive gentrification, where people are having to move maybe because, you know, taxes are going up, property becomes too expensive. So the racial demographics of a community changes, but also people who have lived there for four generations are having to go. But then the culture changes when people come and say, we know, I don't like the fact that these people are playing this music out on the street, or people are congregating. And I want to have the police come. A Jamaican restaurant, for instance, right in D.C. in a black community, and they would play reggae music and cook jerk chicken outside. But it was seen as offensive to people in the community. Like, the music's too loud. Then there's questions like, is this sanitary? And a lot of harassment and inspectors coming until the owners just decide to sell and move. So you see that. That it's not only sometimes with gentrification that the race and class may change, but then also people trying to control that space in ways that alienate the people who've been there for generations. And so, I mean, and that's. That's what we see in Hilton Head, where people had free reign as to hunt and fish and do it sustainably. But then you have, like, rules and laws and lock gates coming, you know, in that control people's movement. In the space that had always been there. So, yeah, I think that that kind of parallel between gentrification in cities now today and what happened displacement in Hilton Head and other islands in the corridor is very similar.
- [30:02]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Can we talk about process just for a second, Someone who is interested in doing a similar project themselves.
- [30:11]
Chris Duffy
How.
- [30:12]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
How does one get started in researching your family history and understanding the stories of where. Where your family came from and what they were going through?
- [30:22]
Keith Rushing
Yeah, I would say, I mean, if you can do a similar process that I went on is just to. To go and try to find out how far back can, you know, just in oral history, if you were to talk to, like, the oldest folks in the family or someone has kind of kept the family history to go and talk to them and to start, go back as far as you can. Where were they located? What's the place? You know, there are census records. Once you identify those names and are there names that correspond to the names in your family, where do they live? I mean, I went to the. The Heritage Library of Hilton Head was like, immensely helpful with this book. Were kind of conducting research around U.S. colored troops. They have said, like, they will help anyone, you know, who's trying to do that research. And there are a lot of libraries around that will help you kind of navigate or figure out, okay, I have this ancestor. How can I go further? And what you'll see, like, if you go through census records and you go and let's say you see a great grandparent, you may see an older person living there. And so who is that person? Most likely they were a parent or grandparent. There are someone who's a relative. You may see other. Other siblings that you didn't know about. So I think it's. It's just like there's this process of discovery that kind of unfolds, like one thing leads to another. But I think there are just a lot of resources there, I think, starting with, for me, I think the oral history and then, like, census data is a great place to start.
- [31:46]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
What's the similarity in the difference between doing this research into your own family versus, you know, a story that you're reporting on?
- [31:53]
Keith Rushing
I think just there was this idea of kind of like, you know, this the same journalists would say of like, pulling string. Like, when you find one fact, you keep pulling and going further and further back. And so if you're doing an investigative piece, like, you find out one fact and it leads to something else. There's another question that sparks. So I mean, that's kind of the Process that I had here was. I mean, the first thing was Xenko Christopher was the US Color troops, and he was one of the black troops that enlisted to fight for the Union in the Civil War to fight for his liberation. And the National Archives has a. If you. For troops that applied for disability pensions, which many of them did, there's all this information that comes available because they had to document who they were. There are no birth certificates. So that was the first kind of where I actually was like, okay, he's naming the person who was his enslaver. It is a plantation. And that was something that I didn't have, like, a personal knowledge of slavery in my family until doing this research. It was like, I'm getting this general history. You know, there's roots. There's, you know, but that disability pension file, which is like 2 inches thick and hundreds of documents, it kind of started me on this path of like, okay, he was enslaved. This is where it happened. And I learned that they're all cotton plantations. Then I was able to kind of see through other documents, like land ownership and how people started to buy land and form community.
- [33:20]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I'll be okay. So here's. This is me just being personally honest, is that I already know that when this episode comes out, there's going to be a funny moment in my own personal family, because my dad is very, very into genealogy, has tried really hard to understand our family's history, and I have always so totally uninterested in everything that he has ever found. I'm like, I can't imagine something more boring than talking to you about our great, great, great, great grandfather. And when I read your book about your family's history, I was like, this is so interesting. So I know that my dad is gonna be like, why are you interested in someone else's history and not in our own? Can you convince me to be interested in my own family history, too?
- [34:09]
Shopify Announcer
Or does it not matter?
- [34:10]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Do you think that I. It doesn't matter if I am or I'm not.
- [34:12]
Keith Rushing
Are you curious about anything about your family? What's your relationship to that past that your father has uncovered? Or. And maybe not what he's uncovered, but maybe did it spark any questions?
- [34:24]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah, well, you know, my honest opinion normally is that, like, if you look into your past, you're likely to find
- [34:32]
Shopify Announcer
either that horrible things happened to your
- [34:35]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
family or your family did horrible things. And either way, I'm like, why not focus on, like, the future and things being good? And my dad's family is. Is Irish, so there's this history of, like, leaving because of the potato famine. There's, you know, trying to. To make it in a place where there were not many opportunities, but still, like, the possibility of survival. So I am kind of interested in
- [34:59]
Shopify Announcer
it, but it does seem to me
- [35:00]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
like uncovering a lot of darkness. And there's so much darkness already in the world that that's part of why I'm resistant to it for myself.
- [35:07]
Keith Rushing
You know, the Irish potato famine, so they went through this. This trauma that may have brought them here. You know, I mean, and that's. That's in my book, right? Like, the trauma of enslavement and the horrors. Like, there's a lot that I don't know about. Right. But I do know, you know, that there was, you know, torture and there was sexual violence and horrors, but there was all this beauty and resilience of family and culture and community. I mean, to me, it was, like, amazing for me to go back. I was there once at age like 4 or 5, you know, and saw this cousin who's 97. So when I did this research, she remembered me and she remembered my mom, and there was still enough communication that, you know, we were known to her and her siblings. So to me, that's kind of amazing is that, you know, here I'm tracing someone who was born 180 years ago, and my family left Hilton, hadn't left the south in around 1940, and that I can go back, you know, 70 years after that and be embraced, you know, with love. And it's kind of amazing, for me, it wasn't about the trauma. It was about all this richness that I found.
- [36:20]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
It also makes me think, so my dad's family has these ties to Ireland. My mom is Eastern European Jew, so fled pogroms and violence of their own. But something that made me think on both sides is I can't speak the Irish language. I can't speak Yiddish or the other languages that my mother's family used to speak. And now, as a parent, it makes me think about if there are ways in which I can reunite links to the past that have been broken, if there's ways that I can redraw that. Right. I don't know if that's possible, but there's something interesting to me about that idea of, like, how do I reconnect for my kids with this vibrant cultural heritage that was lost along the way somehow.
- [37:12]
Keith Rushing
Yeah. I mean, and I don't know if you've done. If you've gone back to those that. Those places in Ireland that your ancestors are from?
- [37:19]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I haven't, no.
- [37:20]
Keith Rushing
And that's the thing, I think, you know, I didn't know that I would feel differently, you know, in doing this research. I thought I'm just feeling this, I just want to know and this is interesting and I just want to learn more. I didn't know that there would be something kind of spiritual happening that I feel or that feeling of home would be so, so strong. But they could give to you things that you don't anticipate. You know.
- [37:39]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
The ancestor who started all of this for you, Sanko Christopher, as best as you can tell, probably came from somewhere in what is now known as Sierra Leone. Right.
- [37:52]
Keith Rushing
So a lot of, of people who ended up in the Gullah Geechee region, they were brought there for their knowledge of rice agriculture. And so the whole Sierra Leone is part of it. And so when it extends from like Senegal to Sierra Leone, it was called the Rice coast. And it's kind of this rice growing region of West Africa. So it could be anywhere, you know, in that region. And what I found with his name is that there's an African naming tradition that doesn't necessarily correlate to a person holding on to their identity. I think the same way that we grow up and there's names like, you know, Kevin, Paul, John, James, Mary, Martha, you don't necessarily know the origin of that name, but you may like the sound of it or maybe the name of a grandmother that gets passed down. I think that was what happened in the Gullah Geechee cultures. You have this African naming tradition and thousands of names from that were, came from people's ancestors that were, you know, Yoruba and Igbo from say, Nigeria or the Akan people of Ghana. Tree. There's all these different ethnicities that ended up in the naming tradition. So I don't know his specific origins. And part of what I did in the book was to also weave in kind of DNA analysis. Like I found Nigeria being prominent like 29 of my DNA. And then finding through ancestry people popping up as like fifth to eighth cousins that are Yorub and Iborne from Nigeria. And so I'm like, okay, so this is, this is actual real. Like this is likely a cousin that I have some ancestors from this place.
- [39:26]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Did the research make you want to spend time in West Africa traveling and, and seeing life there or, and, and, or have you done that?
- [39:37]
Keith Rushing
Yeah, so I went to Ghana in 2016, I believe 2016, 2017. And yeah, I'd like to travel extensively in West Africa Because I find it, for me, it's intriguing to see, experience the culture, how people talk, how people relate, even, you know, and kind of comparing that to African Americans here, Gullah, Geechee people, Caribbean people. Like, there is kind of this whole diaspora of people who are here and in the Caribbean or South America that happened through the slave trade.
- [40:09]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
What would you say to someone who's listening, who is black or African American, and they feel like the possibility of understanding their past, especially all the way back to Africa to before enslavement, they feel like that's impossible. Like, that is just something that has been lost irretrievably. What would you say to them about the possibility of understanding more about family history and about more than just enslavement?
- [40:40]
Keith Rushing
Okay, I can't point to. Because the thing is, if you are African American, you're probably descended from, like, maybe 30 different ethnic groups. Like, there's hundreds of ethnic groups that were brought here and people are intermarried. So there's no one. I'm going to go find my tribe, you know, I'm going to go find this one group. Like, we're kind of an amalgam of different ethnicities. But I also want to kind of, like, not think of it as, well, you're African American, and they cut off your. Your culture, your religion, your language. So, okay, that's done. It's like. It's a lot more, I think, layered than that. It's not just. It's kind of like binary. It's more like there are aspects of our culture as African Americans. And you see it in the church, you see it in music, you see it in dance. Right. That are African expressions, like the expression, like the. The polyrhythms in music, in black music are a direct link to Africa. And this is because your ancestors, not only because they were Gullah, Geechee, but if they're African American, were holding on to, like, their kind of, like, sensibility, and they're within their way of seeing being the world in whichever way they could. And so it's in our culture. So I think for black people like it, to look at it as, what will I learn when I go to the past and where will it take me? And yes, there's DNA analysis and you can see, you know, where those origins. What shows up for you?
- [42:04]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
What about if you are not African American and you're not living in North America at all, but you are part of an indigenous group, or you're part of a group that has been historically not in power and you're trying to understand more about your history, and it's a history that's not the one that is prominently told in history books. What advice would you have for someone who's trying to start that process?
- [42:29]
Keith Rushing
I mean, I think you go from what speaks to you and what calls to you. And I think as we were talking earlier, there's a lot of other stuff beside pain. There's a lot of resilience, there's beauty. There's, like, what I found. And so I think that's one thing I think. I think, to keep in mind. But I also wanted to say, you know, as we're talking, it's like people are. View these things, like, so differently, just emotionally. So I remember as a reporter covering, there was a replica of the Amistad, which was the ship. You know, the story is. And this. This was a ship that was. That people were enslaved in Sierra Leone, and the enslaved took over the ship, and then they were, like, captured and in New England, in Boston, and were able to free themselves through a court process and go back to Sierra Leone. I remember going in Hampton, Virginia, when I was working at the Daily Press newspaper there to cover this. This. This replica of the ship that was brought down there. And there was a guy standing on the dock, and he said, my wife is on that ship. She's interested. He's like, I can't go any further than this. It's too painful for me. And so it just shows you this, the kind of. Just great amount of variance in two people's, you know, way of grappling with the past who are. Who are married. So I think. I think a lot of this is, like, deeply personal, you know, and some folks, it, like, it calls to you, and you go for it, and then some folks won't. But I do think there's a lot of richness around the pain and a lot of stories of survival, strength. There's culture. There's so much you can find out.
- [44:08]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Your work and your book is not in any way overtly political. And yet I feel like we live in this time where there's such an active process of trying to rewrite history, trying to avoid talking about narratives that in any way make white people uncomfortable, that in any way acknowledge historical wrongs, that in any way open the door for making things right with things like reparations or land back. Like, there's a real process right now that is pushing back on understanding history in an accurate, full way. And so I wonder if this process of just understanding our own family histories, of understanding what actually happened, if it feels somewhat radical or revolutionary or like a political project in a way to just understand the facts of what actually happened, when we're told we're getting some really strong messaging from people in power that we should not be thinking or talking or acknowledging that.
- [45:16]
Keith Rushing
If I had not done this research, I wouldn't know that not only did my great great grandfather enlist in the. In the, in the colored troops, but my two great great uncles, 200 men from Hilton Head. So they, like, took this active role in their own fighting for their own liberation. And I, and I grew up in an era where, you know, I used to hear about, like, welfare dependency and I had this, like, negative narrative around black people that was just in the. The atmosphere, you know. And in this book, I'm like, people did everything themselves, you know, built their homes, built their boats, built their praise houses, didn't have doctors, but heal people through root doctors, you know, had their midwives that brought babies into the world, like they could make a life for themselves in this island. So it was very. It was the opposite of everything that I've been told, you know, so, like, a lot of the erasure around, like, race, our history is about kind of asserting kind of white superiority, trying to assuage, like, white guilt. But we can't sacrifice our history because of these feelings of, like, white guilt or I just want to, like, have power. There's just immense value in, like, going beyond the kind of general, you know, stories that are out there and historical research, which is in a lot of as great and is important, that's under attack. But then also, where do we sit? Where do our families sit within that history and how are you tied to that history? It's an important journey.
- [46:38]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Keith, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you so much for the time, for the work that you do.
- [46:43]
Keith Rushing
Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It was great. It was great having this conversation with you.
- [46:51]
Chris Duffy
That is it for this episode of how to Be a Better Human. Before I read the credits, we are doing a survey right now. It would be so, so, so helpful to us if you would take a few seconds to answer some questions about the show. What you like, what you'd like to see, more of, what you think we could do better. We really, really value your feedback and it makes a tremendous difference in the future of the show. You can find the survey@bit.com ly bhsurvey6 that's bit ly bhsurvey6 or there is a link in the episode description. You should be able to click that link and it'll take you right there. We would love your feedback. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, thank you so much to today's guest, Keith Rushing. His book is called Searching for My Gullah Geechee Roots. I am your host Chris Duffy and my book is called Humor Me. You can find more about my book, my live show dates, and all of my other projects@chrisduffycomedy.com how to be a Better Human is put together by a team whose family lines all converged on the development of the podcast. On the TED side, our family tree includes Daniela Belarazzo, Banban Chang, Michelle Quint, Chloe Shasha Brooks, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tanzaka Sung Minivong, Antonia Le, and Joseph de Bruyne. Ryan Lash is filming and editing the Family Reunion and Matea Seles is fact checking whether we are all cousins removed or not removed. On the PRX side, they come from generations of podcast producers and editors, a line stretching back to the very invention of sound itself. It's Morgan Flannery Norgill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. Thanks to you and your family for listening to this show. Please send this episode to someone who you think would enjoy it. We will be back next week with even more how to be a Better Human. Until then, take care and thanks for listening.
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Oh, no.
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Keith Rushing
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