• Country Club: American paradise without tips ... or racial minorities

On February 29, 2016, something happened that did not happen in the United States Supreme Court for 10 years and 7 days: Judge Clarence Thomas spoke.

He didn't talk much, it's true. He just asked a lawyer who was arguing a case. But that is not important. In fact, nobody remembers neither the case nor the question. The news was that the judge had spoken. "Clarence Thomas surprises the Supreme by ending 10 years of silence," The Guardian titled. Not only the press realized. When Thomas's voice was heard, the president of the Court, John Roberts, was startled and shook his head in surprise, as when someone hears a strange noise.

Afterwards, Thomas was silent for three years and three weeks , until March 20. When he spoke again - this time in a famous case, in which his was one of the votes that sentenced a man to death -, the New York Times repeated the head of the Guardian : «Clarence Thomas breaks three years of silence in the Supreme Court ».

The Gullah-Geeche nation is a territory of 30,000 km2 and is the size of Biscay, Cantabria and Asturias together

The question is this: why doesn't Thomas speak? For his place of birth. This was explained on December 14, 2000, when, on a visit to an institute, the magistrate unexpectedly asked the students: "How old are you?" "Sixteen," they replied. And then, Thomas confessed in public: “ When I was 16, I was the only black in the class , and I had grown up speaking a type of dialect they called geeche. Now some people call it gullah, and it is well seen, but at that time they laughed at those of us who spoke it. And then he added: "I thought in normal English but spoke in another language, so I developed the habit of listening."

Thomas spoke Gullah, the language of the descendants of Africans and indigenous people, who mixed to create a culture in a marsh that was originally as large as Castilla-La Mancha , and which, under a Congressional Law, is known as Gullah-Geeche Nation. It is a territory of 30,000 square kilometers that occupies a strip of 600 kilometers of coastline - more or less, such as Asturias, Cantabria and Biscay together - from the center of North Carolina to northern Florida, through South Carolina and Georgia. The land of the gullah [pronounced "gul-lah", with a guttural] or geeche [which is called "guíichi"] was a no man's land between the Spanish empires (which here reached its northern end), British and French, a region so isolated that, for centuries, only a few whites lived in it to supervise slaves who grew rice and indigo - a key agricultural product in the textile industry - and that, after the abolition of slavery, it was completely in the hands of the old captives.

This is how the African culture remained, mixed with that of the survivors of the aboriginal genocide . And this is how in 2019, just three and a half hours drive from Atlanta, the city of What the wind took , CNN and Coca-Cola, some old people still speak Gullah, which, for speakers of what Thomas describes as "normal English," is nothing more than an incomprehensible jargon, with own grammatical constructions and even with words like goober [gúubaer], which means peanut as well as a fool, and that comes from the kimbundu spoken in the Luanda region, in Angola, or juke [yuk], which can be translated as a bar of bad death or brothel, and that comes from the bambara of Mali and Senegal.

Bill and Sara Green on the porch of their restaurant in Saint HelenaCONTACTOPHOTO NYT

With the arrival of the recorded music, juke became the jukebox - literally, a box of bar of bad death - with which the music devices of the bars were baptized in which, for a coin, one could hear a song. And so, the word brought by those children and teenagers - the blacksmiths didn't want anyone over 20 years old - who came to the port of Charleston, in North Carolina, marked with a red iron so that no one would steal them from their owners - It became one of the central elements of what is perhaps the defining sign of the United States: pop culture .

The jukebox was born, like Thomas, in the 40s. Since then, things have changed a lot. No one knows better than Thomas himself who, until his mother sent him, at the age of seven, from his hometown of Pin-Point - one of many villages founded by former slaves once the whites left - To live with his grandparents in the city of Savannah, he didn't know what it was like to have running water at home or eat three times a day. But, as the Gullah territory has opened up to the rest of the world, there has been a clash of cultures . Today, some Gullah leaders claim that their land is being colonized by tourism.

To know what is happening, it is best to go to the geographic center of the Gullah, the island of Saint Helena, a name that, like everything in the Gullah region, is a hodgepodge. Because thus, in Spanish, it was how Pedro Menéndez de Avilés baptized it in 1565, which built here the Fort of San Felipe . It was the Cold War of the 16th century. Just 10 kilometers away, the Frenchman Jean Ribault had founded the fort of Rochefort, on the island of Parris. It only lasted a year. Today, the island of Parris continues to have a military use: there is the Marines Military Academy.

The next time you see Stanley Kubrick's metal jacket or any other movie in which the brutal instruction of that weapon of the US Armed Forces comes out, remember: that was the northern limit of the Spanish Empire. And, 334 years after the founding of the Fort of San Felipe, while the rejection of the Spanish by colonialist and genocidal extends throughout the United States, Saint Helena is a site whose inhabitants have no problem explaining who arrived there from Europe first, even though the relationship between Menéndez de Avilé s men and indigenous people was marked by violence from the beginning.

History aside, the island, with its "Spanish moss" beard of old - huge plants that fall like waterfalls by the branches of cypresses that grow in the swamps could be the perfect setting for a horror movie. But the road, between the open-air restaurants in the middle of the marsh with signs of Care with the alligators , has the scalloped ditches with signs of For sale and Real estate agent.

Marquetta L. Goodwine, renamed Queen Quet , head of the Gullah / Geeche Nation has lived in Saint Helena all her life. And he still remembers when he saw the first target on the island. 'It was in 1980. I was driving and, when I saw it, I almost crashed the scare car. What are you doing here? 'I wondered.

It was an understandable question. Until the 1930s, Saint Helena could only be accessed by sea. And, in the 70s, the population of Charleston, Savannah, and Atlanta began to enjoy the tourist potential of a region where, if you are lucky, go from the beach to the dolphins, literally get out of the water to catch fish

«First they built shelter for hunters. But, of course, the ladies did not want the men to disappear for two or three days, so they made private country clubs. Then the urbanizations for retirees arrived, because the people of the North want to come here in winter. What is left for us? "Queen Quet asks. What for one person is an infected swamp, for another it is a fishing ground in which to fish or shellfish, and for a third party it is beachfront. "They leave us unable to approach water, and our whole life revolves around water," Goodwine laments.

The Gullah achieved their land when the whites were expelled from the region in a bold military operation carried out by the North with the help of slaves in the Civil War, but many of their property titles are collective. That is to say: families are those who own the land. No one has made the partitions. Builders only have to convince a member of a family that owns a land to sell. That can trigger an epic family quarrel that ends in the courts, which often often opt for what is called "forced partition." When that happens, it is enough that one or two people sell their land so that, suddenly, a whole marsh ceases to be useful for fishing, agriculture or shellfish.

Acidification of the sea, produced by the accumulation of CO2, is killing shellfish

In Saint Helena there are rumors of land killings . Queen Quet is convinced that when in 2017 Dylan Roof murdered nine African Americans in a church in the city of Charleston, 90 kilometers north of the island, she did not do so because of racism, but because one of the victims, the Reverend and state senator Clementa Pickney, defended the collective property rights of families . These fears seem strange in Saint Helena, a place that seems anchored in the sixties, when the leader of the fight for racial equality Martin Luther King used to come here for spiritual retreats and even, they say, wrote his most famous speech here, the that he pronounced in Washington, with some words that still resonate today in the identity of the United States: «I had a dream ...»

The problems of the Gullah-Geeche go beyond tourism. The acidification of the sea, produced by the accumulation of CO2 from the combustion of coal and oil, is killing shellfish. It is the same CO2 that is causing the poles to melt , with which the sea level rises, and the marshlands in which they live, cultivate, and fish are eaten. To see that they advise to go to the end of the island. One drives through cypress forests, crosses vast plains of grass that grows on water, and borders mangroves of trees whose roots leave the sea. But, when it is about to reach the extreme where the Gullah-Geeche nation mixes with the Atlantic Ocean from which they arrived, in the wineries of the ships, their founders, the road is cut. An urbanization does not allow entry to those who are not residents of it.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • U.S

Russia Vladimir Putin says he will not be the first to deploy new missiles

Football: Fear of selling Coutinho

VenezuelaThe Government of Nicolás Maduro describes the US blockade as "economic terrorism"