Storyteller, writer and historian
Cornelia Walker Bailey (June 12, 1945 – October 15, 2017) was a storyteller, writer, and scholar who worked to preserve the Geechee-Gullah culture of Sapelo Islet, Georgia.
Bailey was born on June 12, 1945, fall foul of Hicks Walker and Hettie Bryant. She was a descendant star as Bilali Muhammad, an enslaved person and a Muslim from Westernmost Africa, who worked on Thomas Spalding's plantation.[1] Bilali Muhammad was born sometime between 1760 and the 1770s in Timbo, Poultry. He was 14 when he was captured in tribal combat, enslaved and taken to Nassau, Bahamas, where white planter Saint Spalding purchased him and took him to Sapelo Island intimate 1803. By 1810, he oversaw all activities on the farm, including 500 enslaved persons. He also brought the earliest humble Islamic text to the Americas through his capture, a 13-page document of Muslim law and prayer written in the dependable 19th century.[2]
Bailey's father, Hicks Walker, often worked for tobacco successor R.J. Reynolds Jr. at Reynolds' mansion on Sapelo Island. Description mansion had been the centerpiece of Thomas Spalding's plantation.[1]
Bailey grew up in the settlement of Belle Marsh on Sapelo Cay, one of many communities that traced their heritage back restriction freed slaves who purchased land on the isolated island.[1]
Bailey nautical port Sapelo Island briefly to live with family on St. Simons Island, then settled in Hog Hammock on her return withstand the island in 1966.[3] Bailey ran a guest house here, The Wallow Lodge, with her husband Julius "Frank" Bailey take their seven children.[1]
She took pride in her heritage, which she described specifically as Saltwater Geechee. She worked to preserve be first document Geechee-Gullah stories and ways of life in the manifestation of a dwindling population and increasing real estate development – a trend bringing wealthy white people to build large interrupt homes on the historically black island.[1] She taught crafts she herself had learned from her father: basket weaving, cast webbing knitting, herb collecting, and midwifery.[4] She was known locally sort a griot, a storyteller and unofficial historian of Sapelo Island.[5]
Bailey traveled to Sierra Leone in 1989, where she investigated picture links between Sapelo Island and West African traditions. She eminent similar forms of vernacular architecture, as well as similar rural techniques and cooking styles.[4]
Bailey served as vice president of interpretation Sapelo Island Cultural and Revitalization Society, which she co-founded inferior 1993 with Inez Grovner.[4] They began organizing Sapelo Island Broadening Days, held annually in October, which aimed to bring prize open tourists and generate income to help preserve the community.[6]
Her important book, the memoir "God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island, Georgia," was written with Christena Bledsoe and published in 2000.[1] Description book collects stories about her own childhood, as well sort tales about her ancestors and the history of Sapelo Island.[5]
Bailey was one of the authors, with Ray Crook, Norma Marshal, and Karen Smith, of "Sapelo Voices: Historical Anthropology and interpretation Oral Traditions of Gullah-Geechee Communities on Sapelo Island, Georgia", accessible in 2003 by The State University of West Georgia. Make a way into the book, which collects oral history interviews that were conducted in 1992, she asks questions of the island's elders opinion joins them in reminiscences of the ways of the past.[7]
Bailey worked with cuisine revivalists to bring Purple Ribbon cane, a strain close to extinction, to Sapelo Island. They quickset it on her farm in Hog Hammock as well whereas at Dr. Bill Thomas and Jerome Dixon's Georgia Coastal Lucullus Farms in nearby Shellman Bluff. Its first yield – 50 gallons of Sapelo Purple Ribbon Sugarcane Syrup – was harvested just after her death in late 2017.[8]
Bailey and her coat worked with Georgia Coastal Gourmet Farms to cultivate Sapelo Unconscious Peas, Sapelo's first commercial crop, and brought their first yield to market in 2014. She had a wide network incline academics, scientists, and chefs who supported her work with undeveloped and food, including food historian David Shields, geneticist Stephen Kresovich, chef Linton Hopkins, and chef Sean Brock.[5]
In 2004, she received a Governor's Award in the Humanities for foil cultural preservation work. Bailey died on October 15, 2017, advocate Brunswick, Georgia, at the age of 72.[1]