Esoteric Source

I look up to see a most unusual Star Spangled Banner flying bold African colors of red, black and green from a worn-looking flagpole. It's an expression of indomitable Gullah pride, explains tour guide Alphonso Brown.

Like many living in the east side, Brown himself is Gullah: a descendant of slaves who endured the brutal ``middle passage'' from West Africa and the Caribbean during the 18th century, landing at Charleston's bustling port before being sent to toil on plantations across the South.

Brown's popular Gullah Tour, which marks its 25th anniversary this year, brims with atypical landmarks like this flag, as it excavates vestiges of an uglier time hidden amid the exquisite cobblestone streets and pastel-painted Georgian home fronts.

A multi-million-dollar waterfront estate, for example, looks impressive -- until it is revealed to have been built by a rich slave ship proprietor who added slave quarters and a threatening-looking spiked gate to pen in human chattel. Later, we stop and stretch our legs in a parking lot owned by a Catholic church. It turns out to conceal the paved-over graves of freed slaves, for it was once their cemetery.

And the bus rolls on.

It's potentially uncomfortable subject matter for his mixed-race audience, but Brown manages to keep the atmosphere light, sprinkling his commentary with anecdotes and jokes, and slipping in and out of the sing-songy Creole of his forefathers. ``I-eh hab disshuh dreem,'' he recites in Gullah. ``We hol' dees trut' fuh be sef-ebbuhdent, dat all man duh mek equal.''

Plumped with West-African and Elizabethan English influences, Gullah was initially spoken in secret and spread wherever slaves were taken, along the coast and barrier islands as far as Georgia, and down to around Jacksonville, Fla.

Full Story & Video:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/21/1533071/taking-a-gullah-tour-of-charleston.html

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