Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast by Neesha Powell-Ingabire

 

Credit: Hub City Press

Peter Biello: Coming up in this episode:

Neesha Powell-Ingabire: People telling me, you know, while I was writing this book, like, this is what you are. You might not think that you are this, but —

Orlando Montoya: You know there are so many aspects of the Gullah Geechee culture, and it doesn't just specifically focus on one thing. So how does it sort of encompass everything?

Peter Biello: We've, I think, have all had friends who have done or said things that have crossed the line for us that made us want to pull away. This podcast from Georgia Public Broadcasting highlights books with Georgia connections, hosted by two of your favorite public radio book nerds, who also happen to be your hosts of All Things Considered on GPB Radio. I'm Peter Biello.

Orlando Montoya: And I'm Orlando Montoya. Thanks for joining us as we introduce you to authors, their writings and the insights behind their stories, mixed with our own thoughts and ideas on just what gives these works and the Narrative Edge. All right, Peter, I understand you've been reading something related to the Georgia coast lately.

Peter Biello: Yes, I have. And it's a book about the Geechee coast.

Orlando Montoya: Gullah Geechee coast.

Peter Biello: Yeah. And for people who are unaware, if you've never heard those words before, Gullah Geechee people are descendants of Africans who were brought to America through the slave trade. They came from a variety of places in Africa, though many came from West Africa. And the Gullah Geechee Corridor stretches from the Cape Fear region of southeastern North Carolina through Georgia to Florida. Gullah is more of a reference to the Carolinas, and Geechee refers to Georgia and Florida.

Orlando Montoya: Saltwater Geechee, they say. Saltwater Geechees.

Peter Biello: Saltwater Geechee, yes. Sapelo Island, a big part of that, of course. You spent a lot of time in Savannah, not too far from Sapelo.

Orlando Montoya: Many times. A fabulous culture and food. And it's just — it's just wonderful. And it's a history, too. So is this a history book?

Peter Biello: Not strictly, no. It does have some history in it. I should say it's a memoir in essays by journalist Neesha Powell-Ingabire, who lives in Atlanta now. And the title is a phrase translated from the Gullah Geechee language. You know the word "kumbaya."

Orlando Montoya: Of course.

Peter Biello: Yeah, that's that's a word that for me, it it conjured like, you know, a bunch of white hippies, frankly, sitting around a campfire. Right. But it's a Gullah Geechee word, and it means "come by here."

Orlando Montoya: Kumbaya, my Lord. Come by here.

Peter Biello: Come by here. And that's the title of this book, Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia's Coast.

Orlando Montoya: So is it a memoir about how she feels having Geechee heritage or what exactly is she remembering?

Peter Biello: It's partly about that, for sure. It's an exploration of Geechee heritage and learning to embrace it. And the exploration is quite literal here. I mean, she does explore places like Sapelo Island and the Geechee culture that exists there today. She talks to people who are knowledgeable about it. She takes a tour, a guided tour of it, all while thinking about how it was present, but not in the foreground when she was a kid in the '90s, her family's lived on the Geechee coast for hundreds of years.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire: People telling me, you know, while I was writing this book, like, "This is what you are. You might not think that you are this, but this is what you are." And so I think now I think of myself as I would say, I descend from Gullah Geechee folks. I don't want to claim to be an authority. And I'm still very much learning what that means.

Peter Biello: And in this book, that means exploring, for example, Gullah Geechee reliance on fishing, the health of the water, the importance of basket weaving, of song, things like that.

Orlando Montoya: So where is the book centered? Savannah, Sapelo, St Simons, all over?

Peter Biello: It's kind of all over. The thing about this book is that it's a memoir in essays and not necessarily a linear narrative. So there's some time spent in Brunswick, for example, and there's time, you know, like we mentioned, that trip to Sapelo Island that's recounted here. There's a trip to the Okefenokee Swamp. So it's all over.

Orlando Montoya: And is it about the culture fading?

Peter Biello: Yeah. I mean, she writes a bit about the housing situation on Sapelo Island as an example of that, which if you're in Georgia, you've been paying attention to Georgia news, you might have heard about this recent zoning change on Sapelo Island that would essentially allow bigger houses to be built, which would raise property values, hike up taxes and price out long-term residents, which happens to various extents in touristy places throughout the country. But here it's going to in particular push out people with Geechee ancestry who have been on the island for generations.

Orlando Montoya: Now there are so many aspects of the Gullah Geechee culture, and it doesn't just specifically focus on one thing. So how does it sort of encompass everything?

Peter Biello: I mean, I think Powell-Ingabire would say she she's not trying to incorporate everything. She's — I think one of the strengths of the book is, is that it focuses on these elements of the culture that really expand to the universal, like focusing on food, for example, or focusing on the basket weaving that I mentioned. You know, focusing on these one thing on those things and then expanding I think is really a good way into the culture. But by no means is this like a comprehensive view, like you're not going to pick up this book and say, "I'm going to use this to figure out what Gullah Geechee culture is," although that is part of it. Part of it also is just a memoir of her experience growing up in a place that has racist tension, to put it mildly. I mean, one of the things she writes about and one of the things that the blurb of this book pushes is that she was classmates with Travis McMichael, who was one of the three white men to chase down and kill Ahmaud Arbrey In 2020, Travis and two other men were convicted in his murder, and she was there years ago in class with him.

Orlando Montoya: What do we learn about him in this memoir?

Peter Biello: She doesn't write too much about Travis McMichael. They didn't have much interaction. They weren't friends. Here's how she writes about Travis McMichael in the book. And I'm going to quote here, "He was one of the kids who didn't think twice about wearing clothes and driving a pickup truck adorned by the Confederate flag. He was the kind of kid my friends and I steered clear of because we knew he didn't like our kind." So that was from the essay called "The Power of Hate," which was not just about Travis McMichael. It was about, you know, the aftermath of 9/11 and just about racism in general in the United States and on the Georgia coast in particular. And that was my impression when I read the book. And I asked her about that and about how Ahmaud Arbery and writing about Ahmaud Arbery fits into that.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire: Reflecting on what happened to Ahmaud is always painful, always surreal, because you just never imagine that something like that will hit so close to home. I think it's important to speak his name. It's not going to bring him back, but it's important to speak his name. And I, from reading this book, you know, maybe folks will understand kind of like the environment, the climate that we both came up in and how something so horrendous could happen.

Peter Biello: She also has another powerful essay in this book called "The Confederate Son," which is about being friends with the boy she calls Matt. And Matt in the story would say racist things. And his parents had a Confederate flag hanging prominently on his property. And people nowadays still use the "heritage, not hate" line when defending the use of the Confederate flag. But that is not as much tolerated now people call it out for the nonsense that it is. But back then, more than 20 years ago, you can imagine how powerless a young Black girl would feel to say something about how offensive that is to her white friend or her white friend's parents. And so, unsurprisingly, that friendship ends. And it is a sad thing because there were things that these friends liked about each other. But this — this was a bridge too far.

Orlando Montoya: What about her family? Typically, these type of memoirs involve parents, grandparents. What do we learn about her heritage?

Peter Biello: Oh yeah. I mean, she does write about her mother, who was a big presence in her life, and her father, who was not a big presence. He was absent for most of her life. And in writing about both, she says she was trying to be true to the complexity of who they were. And I — I think that she was successful in that attempt. Her mother wasn't always kind, seems kind of judgmental at times, really has strong feelings about what kind of kids she should be friends with. And she was also under a lot of stress, but she can kind of see why she would feel that way. She's a single mom.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire: We had and have a lot of differences, but she has always encouraged my creativity and I have always been, you know, well taken care of. She — but she was a single mom. She had a lot going on. You know, she would be working like two jobs at a time; single mom to four kids. So I salute her.

Peter Biello: And as for her dad, he had some mental health challenges. And as you slowly realize, like, that was a big part of his issue. Like, you get a sense of what he might have been going through and that kind of fills in a lot of blank space about why he was absent for so much of her life. And in a few of these essays, Powell-Ingabire remarks on having her own mental health crises. So there is some level of empathy that she has for her father on that front.

Orlando Montoya: All right. So I'm getting the picture that this is a book of personal essays, a lot of personal stories, but it kind of weaves in a larger cultural narrative. So what gives this book the Narrative Edge? And I assume that's one of them.

Peter Biello: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think this book is strongest when it's talking about those personal experiences. The essay about her white friend Matt, for example. That one was probably the strongest one for me for a couple of reasons. One, it's relatable. I think we've all had friends who have done or said things that have crossed the line for us that that made us want to pull away — even if there are parts of those friends that we really did like. The second thing was that it was about a human relationship. The focus was narrow. It captured the universal. And whenever she did that in an essay, whenever the frame was there for that, the essay was strong. I think other readers may may like the more lyrical essays that are short and almost — almost like prose poems in a way. Exploring Sapelo through her essay was great. The Okefenokee essay was really cool. It wasn't all just about Okefenokee, but that was a cool essay. And the essays about her parents and her grandmother, about Ahmaud Arbery, her experience with racism, all of that was great. I think one thing that that makes this book difficult to describe is that, you know, it's called a memoir in essay, that's — that's a genre. What bothers me about that moniker, broadly speaking, is that some of these essays kind of repeat things and they're not chronological and — repeating, for example, in various essays, the distinction between Gullah and Geechee. Like, these essays were published in various places. They're expected to have different audiences. But here we are in the same book. I always wish the editor — and this is not Powell-Ingabire's fault — I always wish the editor had sort of looked at the book as a whole book that you would read from beginning to end and not pick through. I don't know, maybe you read essay — collections of essays differently.

Orlando Montoya: I read it differently. I would read one essay, put the book down for a week, come back a month later or days later. So I don't know if that part would particularly bother me — and especially coming from my perspective. I used to write a weekly newspaper column. Sometimes you do repeat things.

Peter Biello: Yeah, I totally could see that. In which case just call it a collection of essays and leave it at that as opposed to a memoir. But you know, that's that. I'm really nit-picking here. Like, that's a minor thing and it really probably isn't even her deal. Like, that's an editor thing. So I did ask Neesha Powell-Ingabire if she had any Gullah Geechee books that she would want to endorse, things that people should read if they want to learn a little more about Gullah Geechee culture. And she wrote a whole chapter about Cornelia Walker Bailey, who was an important figure on Sapelo Island.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire: She was the griot of the island, the storyteller, the one who kept all the stories. And she was just such a huge ambassador and advocate for Sapelo Island. She wrote a book in 2000 called God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island. And that is a very important text because she is talking about her life growing up in Sapelo.

Peter Biello: So you're nodding your head when she's mentioning that.

Orlando Montoya: Yeah,.

Peter Biello: That book, Orlando. So you know it?

Orlando Montoya: Yeah.

Peter Biello: Have you read this book?

Orlando Montoya: I interviewed Cornelia Walker Bailey.

Peter Biello: Oh, no kidding?

Orlando Montoya: I think she died a few years ago.

Peter Biello: Yeah, she passed away. So — so when did you interview her?

Orlando Montoya: This must have been in the late '90s or early 2000s.

Peter Biello: Wow!

Orlando Montoya: I did a series of stories about Georgia's barrier islands, and she was one of the people that I interviewed, and I might have interviewed her later as well, back when I was in Savannah.

Peter Biello: What do you remember about that interview with Cornelia Walke Bailey?

Orlando Montoya: I remember sitting on her porch.

Peter Biello: It was on her porch on Sapelo?

Orlando Montoya: Yeah, it was on Sapelo.

Peter Biello: Man, what an experience.

Orlando Montoya: Yeah, You really have to go to Sapelo to experience it. I think that's one way you learn about Sapelo, really.

Peter Biello: Neesha Powell-Ingabire also recommended Matthew Rayford, who calls himself a chef farmer. That's a combination of chef and farmer. Chef farmer. He wrote a cookbook called Bresson Yam, which has Gullah Geechee recipes in it, as well as his family's story. So worth mentioning that Come By Here is one of many books that people who are of that culture writing about that culture definitely worth checking out.

Orlando Montoya: All right. The book is Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays From Georgia's Geechee Coast by Neesha Powell-Ingabire. Thanks for pointing it out to me.

Peter Biello: Happy to.

Orlando Montoya: Thanks for listening to the Narrative Edge. We'll be back in two weeks with a brand-new episode. This podcast is a production of Georgia Public Broadcasting. Find us online at GPB.org/NarrativeEdge.

Peter Biello: You can also catch us on the daily news podcast Georgia Today for a concise update on the latest news in Georgia. For more on that and all of our podcasts, go to GPB.org/Podcasts.