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EPISODE 1 Transcript THERE IS A RIVER Produced, Directed, and Written by W. Noland Walker Associate Producer: Julia Elliott NARRATOR: The South Carolina coast: The point of entry for one fifth of all the Africans who were enslaved in North America. In large part, the record of their individual lives is lost. But there is much to be learned about who these women and men were and what they believed in through the lives that their descendants lead today. On these shores, the roots of the African American spiritual experience. run deep. ART JONES: These were really deeply spiritual people who had centuries of spirituality behind them, and very long established traditions. And even though some of the specific memories of those religious practices were wiped out as families were traded on the auction block and so on, they still had a very deep spiritual consciousness and spiritual sensibility. NARRATOR: Through the middle passage, sale on the auction block, and endless back breaking labor black people have called upon a spiritual legacy that defiantly proclaims: “I am a child of God, a servant of Allah, a child of Shango, a child of Oshun no matter what anyone does to me.” RACHEL HARDING: It's a way of saying that as a human being I have a right to joy, I have a right to music, I have a right to story and I have a right to the tree of life. NARRATOR: Present in each generation was the faith that a better day would come – that God would send deliverance. But deliverance did not come overnight. Ordinary women and men across three centuries searched their souls - day by day – to rise above the circumstances of their lives. Sometimes faith provided the courage for the extraordinary. In the 19th century, Charleston, South Carolina’s black community would muster all of its spiritual forces in an effort to bring down the house of bondage with guns, knives, and fire. While an enslaved woman in New York would declare her self touched by the breath of God, and use her gifts to help make black people free. What was the source of their strength? How did black people use their beliefs to transform the world around them? It is a story of the past. It is a story of today. MARQUETTA GOODWINE: My name is Marquetta [Larise] Goodwine, and I am a descendent of both Goodwines and Holmes here on St. Helena Island, as we say, St. Helena Island down here in the Sea Islands, which is in Beaufort County, South Carolina. And my family has been here on St. Helena and on Palawana and on Dataw ever since we were enslaved here. MARQUETTA GOODWINE: Religion was our binding force. It kept us centered with the Creator, and it kept us connected to one another. Since there were so many different ethnicities that came together form the motherland that made up our ancestors, they had to then infuse different things and blend different things, different types of rituals, different types of customs, the order of things and all of that, so that we had our own community cohesiveness as a result. So that you could blend all these things together and–and have them evolve. NARRATOR: Over the course of 3 centuries, African religions underwent a transformation in the woods and marshes of the New World. As Ibo worshiped alongside Angolan, and Fulani prayed among Ewe Africans began to build a common spirituality based on shared beliefs and practices. In the Goodwine family graveyard - where some of the plots date back two hundred years - sacred African practices are still in evidence. MARQUETTA GOODWINE: Well, the whole tradition of leaving personal items on graves comes to us from West Africa. It was something that our ancestors brought with them in the belly of the beast, when they came through the Middle Passage. Plates, clocks, jewelry, things that represented the individual who was buried there, things that represent their spirit. ”On my father’s grave, I left conch shells, because he passed his final years fishing all the time. And so I said, well, I’m not going to take fish. Fish will smell up the graveyard. But I can take the conch shells, because also in it you can still hear the tone of the Atlantic Ocean all the time. Also a conch is not going to let you pull it out of the shell so easily. And my father was always that kind of person too. You wasn’t gonna just pull him out of something so easily. RACHEL HARDING: In traditional African religion, there is not a sense in which you, umm, separate your quote unquote spiritual life or your religious life into a compartment, and then the other things that you do the rest of the day or the rest of the week are quote unquote secular. Umm. All of life is sacred. NARRATOR: The majority of the Africans who arrived on American shores believed in a supreme God and a host of lesser gods who oversaw every aspect of life. Africans believed that the very woods that they worshipped in held spiritual powers. They believed in the existence of the soul even before birth. And they believed that when they died their spirits traveled home to Africa. They consulted their ancestors. And they passed what they could on to their children. SYLVIANE DIOUF: The fact that people were in the worst possible conditions, did not consider themselves as being cattle. They thought of themselves as being men and women with a past, with their own history and their own story. And that shows that whatever you're trying to do, and whatever you're trying to destroy in the person or in the community, that doesn't work. People are stronger than that. NARRATOR: Of the nearly half a million Africans who arrived in North America, an estimated 10% were Muslim. These men and woman used Islam to affirm their humanity - in a nation that declared them less than human. SYLVIANE DIOUF: There is a tradition in Islam, which is, to write parts of the Koran on a piece of paper, or on a wooden tablet. And what you do is then that you kind of rinse the tablet or the paper with water, and you drink that water, because then you really absorb the word of the Koran, you reabsorb God's word. And that was a tradition that continued in the Americas. NARRATOR: The Sea Islands provided an isolated setting in which Africans could practice their religion with little interference. On Sapelo Island in Georgia a Muslim named Bilali Mohamed wore a fez, read a copy of the Koran, and wrote in Arabic. Bilali Mohamed also took great pains to pass Islamic practices on to his descendants. The old ways persisted for over a century. But over time, the meaning behind the rituals began to fade away. CORNELIA BAILEY: I didn’t know anything at first about our Muslim ancestry until I read Malcolm X. And I read the book, and one day I was reading, I’m saying to myself, “My God, that sound like us,” you know, [and] because the practices that they were describing in that book, almost identical to some of the things I grew up doing in this church. Like men and women sitting on separate side of the church womens couldn’t come to church with their hair showing. They had to have it covered all the time. And I discussed it with some of the older people, and they said, “Oh, I guess that’s what it was, because of our great-great-grandparents and what they did.” But then they quit using the–the word “Muslim” or “Islamic,” and they just said something that we always did. NARRATOR: Documents from across the South tell of enslaved men and women who continued to fast during Ramadan, to pray five times a day whenever possible, and to wear the veils, skullcaps, and turbans that they had worn in West Africa. SYLVIANE DIOUF: It was a way of showing that they owned their own bodies. Because slaveholders had a dress code for the slaves, to show the difference between slave owners and slaves, and it was meant to accentuate the differences and to show people that they were really nothing. And by maintaining their own dress code, they reclaimed their own body, they would decide what they would wear. NARRATOR: Islam would all but disappear by the end of slavery in the U.S. And over time, Muslims - like enslaved Africans of other faiths - were forced to contend with the religion of the men who enslaved them. MINISTER’S VOICE: Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eye service, as men pleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God: And whatsover ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men. Ephesians, Chapter 6, 5th Verse NARRATOR: White clergy across the nation sought to convert black people to Christianity by using Bible teachings that emphasized meekness and servitude. It was an approach that produced few converts. CORNELIA BAILEY: A lot of time, you were made to go to church with the slaveholders and so forth. So you were made to go to church with them, and you sat and listened at the rhetoric of the white minister that tells you, for instance, that if you behave yourself here on earth, you will be able to serve your masters. When you die, when you go to heaven, you can serve them again.
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