On Black Cultural Heritage Tours trip, a meal that nourishes both body and soul

Iused to think I knew what Southern food was. Then I actually visited the South.

And just like the shrimp often caught by the Gullah Geechee in the tidal marshlands of South Carolina, I didn’t know what hit me when I took that first bite of Lowcountry boil.

I was having lunch at the Gullah Geechee Visitor Center on St. Helena Island in South Carolina’s Beaufort County, and I was surrounded by West African art, sculptures and audiovisual installations that filled every square inch of the building, also an art gallery and museum. I sunk deep into my chair as the flavor washed over me, my senses firing on all cylinders. 

Was it the thick, juicy cuts of pork sausage — that hint of heat — that struck me like lightning? Maybe it was the buttery broth balanced with olive oil that had evenly simmered into every ingredient cooking in that big ol’ pot on the fire outside. There was corn, potatoes, that secret blend of seasoning, herbs and spices swirling around, not to mention the shrimp. Shrimp is the main ingredient in a Lowcountry boil, and just one bite was like a dish unto itself.

The Gullah Geechee people are the descendants of West Africans who were kidnapped and enslaved in America who to this day predominantly live in the Lowcountry region of the American South, specifically along the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Gullah describes the people while Geechee is their language.

“This was the slave era. There wasn’t access to a lot of the fine vegetables, the fine meats,” said Johnny Evans, a St. Helena Island local and our sous-chef, about the origins of this classic Gullah dish he helped prepare for our group. 

“The most common things around here were potatoes, which were easily grown no matter what the climate was. Pork — everybody had farming. Shrimp, it’s local. You can go out to the bridge, throw a cast net out and catch something,” Evans said. “Everything was truly local.” 

I’m glad I didn’t look at the itinerary — or rather, the menu — beforehand for this day of the press trip that I was on, which was an abbreviated version of a new six-day itinerary, Charleston to Savannah: Exploring the Gullah Geechee Culture, created by Black Cultural Heritage Tours and operated by Intrepid Travel. 

Not knowing what was in store that day in Beaufort made the experiences all the more potent and the food that much richer. 

Traveling to Penn Center, the first school in the South for formerly enslaved West Africans, located down the street from the visitor’s center, was moving; it was there, where we stood at the end of a dock overlooking a wide area of marshland, that enslaved Gullah people had once set their shrimp traps for the Lowcountry boils they regularly made for their families and others in their community. Some of this land was the same earth that produced the potatoes, the corn, the herbs and spices that the Gullah people grew. 

The way our head chef, Danny Rivers, prepared the boil — in a big and wide metal pot, somewhat shallow to more evenly distribute the seasonings but deep enough to envelop everything in the broth, much like a stew, felt like it could have been a look back to how Lowcountry boils were prepared in those days.

There was something spiritual, mystical even, about seeing the marshlands of Penn Center where the Gullah once fished, watching how the Lowcountry boil was prepared and finally digging in for lunch at the visitor’s center. I couldn’t help but feel that even back then, in the darkest of times, that there could be solace, some kind of peace found in a good meal that did more than fill your stomach — it touched your soul. Even if only for a moment, if only for a bite.