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Q&A: Identity-Making on Georgia’s Geechee Coast [1]

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Date: 2024-11-01

Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire is a writer from Brunswick, Georgia, currently living in Atlanta. Their memoir, Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast, was released last month from Hub City Press.

Enjoy our conversation about the ocean, environmental racism, and coming into Gullah Geechee culture, below.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Olivia Weeks, The Daily Yonder: Can you just start with your bio?

Neesha Powell-Ingabire: I’m Neesha. My pronouns are she and they, and I currently live in traditional Muscogee Territory or so-called Atlanta. I’m a movement journalist, essayist, and organizer, born and raised in coastal Georgia, which is relevant to my book because it’s focused on growing up there and returning as an adult. And finally, having an appreciation for the Black history and Gullah Geechee history and culture upon coming back.

I’m the Director of Popular Education at Press On, which is a Southern movement media collective. I’ve reported on a lot of different issues that are meaningful to me and relevant to me, such as environmental racism, reproductive justice, racial justice, queer and trans rights, and queer and trans justice. Those are the main things.

Neesha Powell-Ingabire, left, and their grandmother. Their memoir, Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast, was released last month. (Photo courtesy of Neesha Powell-Ingabire)



DY: I really loved the opening essay of your memoir, which is a series of vignettes about your hometown. I was wondering if you could describe your town in a little more detail for readers.

NPI: So, Brunswick, Georgia, is a small coastal town. You know, when I initially went away for college at the University of Georgia, which is about five hours away from Brunswick, I would tell people that I was from Brunswick and they’re like, where is that? What is that? Or they would kind of be disgusted a little bit, you know, because I wasn’t from the metro Atlanta area. Folks just acted like I was from somewhere that didn’t matter. And also growing up there, feeling like Brunswick didn’t matter, feeling kind of like we were this disenfranchised town. You know, it was small and what they call “country,” you know, not very urban, not much access to a lot of things generally.

We knew that racism existed. It was kind of concealed, but you knew that it was a racist town. And I’ve also thought a lot about growing up and not learning the Black history in the region, even though it was so present.

Come By Here released September 24, 2024, from Hub City Press. (Photo via Hub City Press) I grew up feeling like this is a place that I don’t want to be forever. I don’t want to grow up here. I don’t want to be an adult in this town because this is not a place where a Black girl can thrive. And then when I was getting into high school I knew I was at least bisexual or something. So it was also a town where I felt like I could never be out and queer. But it is a beautiful place. And it’s kind of like when you live there, you take it for granted. Right across the bridge, you can get to Jekyll Island and across another bridge, you can get to St. Simon’s Island where there are beaches. The whole region is just like covered with marshes and lots of greenery. And so it is a really, really beautiful place. It’s right by the ocean. And now living in Atlanta I realize I really did take that beach for granted because I would love to be by the beach right now.

Brunswick is a place that is pretty poor and in the actual city of Brunswick, it is a majority Black town. And it’s very clear to see who the haves and the have nots are in that region. I mentioned St. Simon’s before, which is right across the river. So there’s St. Simon’s and Brunswick and they’re both in the same county, both in Glynn County. But St. Simon’s is really wealthy people, like people in million dollar homes. And in Brunswick, you have poverty and you also have a lot of environmental racism happening that does not happen on St. Simon’s Island.

In Brunswick, there’s like four of the most toxic chemical sites in the country, which are called Superfund sites, designated by the Environmental Protection Agency for cleanup because they are so toxic. And there are factories that are spouting toxins in the air and in the water. I’ve done reporting where folks are talking about how the air quality is literally making them sick. But you go just across the bridge to St. Simon’s and they don’t have to worry about any of that. So the income inequalities are very stark. The racial inequities are very stark.

DY: I thought the duality of it being a really hard place to grow up for you and also you having a lot of fun there as a kid and as an adolescent, was really interesting and present in the book. I think it’s a classic story that when you’re living in your hometown, you hate it. And then when you go away, you start to sort of recollect the fond memories.

NPI: Definitely. I went away to college and then after that I was just sort of a nomad living in a lot of different places, living in Durham, North Carolina for a while, living in Atlanta, moving to Seattle and being there for almost five years. So getting pretty far away from home. And honestly, I just didn’t ever even think to visit because I just felt like, “Oh, that’s somewhere I don’t really belong anymore.”

So I feel like I got as far away as one can in the United States, you know, all the way in Seattle, all the way on the other side. I went to journalism school, but I graduated at the height of the Great Recession so I could not get a journalism job. And so I kind of fell into social justice work. I did AmeriCorps and then after that I worked at a lot of nonprofits and I kind of gave up on having a journalism career. But around 2016, 2017, I was always writing, blogging, writing for free, things like that. But I started following some different websites like Black Girl Dangerous blog, Everyday Feminism.

A lot of them are gone now, sadly. But I was reading those and being like, “Oh, wow, these outlets really align with my interests.” So I started writing for them and actually getting paid.

And as a freelancer I was having to come up with different stories I wanted to write about. And I started thinking about Brunswick. I started thinking about home and all the pollution there in particular. There’s a big factory there, spouting out all these billowing clouds. And, you know, it’s horrible for the environment, but that’s just the way it is. This is a plant where a lot of, you know, working class people can go and get good jobs without having a degree.

So I never thought too much about it, but I was freelancing for Autostraddle, which is an LGBTQ women’s online magazine. And I pitched the story about Brunswick. And that’s when I found out about the four Superfund sites. I also started talking to people about how flooding in that area is getting worse over the years and is really like a nuisance in majority Black neighborhoods. And I feel like that started my kind of, my becoming more interested in what’s going on back home. I ended up moving back to Georgia with my partner, to Atlanta. And then I visited Brunswick for like the first time in about a decade in 2020, right before the Covid pandemic. It was so exciting to show my partner where I grew up. A lot of those hard feelings that I had about it, I think they just started to melt away.

And shortly after that is when Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in Brunswick, Georgia, by a group of white men. The man who pulled the trigger was a former classmate of mine. And it made international news. It was super horrifying. You know, all of a sudden everyone knew what Brunswick was and associated it with something really negative. And I couldn’t ignore that.

I had never been that close to such a major event and such a horrific event. So I started writing about that a bit, and did some reporting on that. And then at that time, I was in grad school as well, thinking about what I wanted my thesis to be about, and I was like, it’s going to be about home. It should be about home because there were all these different things that were pulling me back home, like being so fascinated by and appalled by the environmental racism happening there. And then also the racial violence happening there.

During that time my relationship to it was changing. I started connecting with a lot of folks down there that are doing a lot of culture-keeping and cultural preservation work around Gullah Geechee culture. And so I started really learning what Gullah Geechee culture is and really seeing my own family in it and wondering, “why haven’t I really thought of this lineage before?”

In places like Sapelo Island, Georgia, Gullah Geechee people have developed their own traditions and practices around food, spirituality, language and art. (Photo courtesy of Neesha Powell-Ingabire)

DY: Can you talk about your process of coming to identify with Gullah Geechee culture? Did that process intersect at all with that history getting a lot more media attention?

NPI: Yeah, I think it is getting talked about more nowadays and is really becoming something that can be capitalized on, which is kind of scary. But, yeah, basically I had heard the word growing up, and there was this kid’s show called Gullah Gullah Island on Nickelodeon. I used to watch that growing up, but I didn’t really think about it beyond that.

And I’m really still figuring out what it means to be Gullah Geechee. But I’ve done so much research for this book, whether it be just reading articles or talking to people who identify as Gullah Geechee and are working to preserve Gullah Geechee culture. And a lot of people would essentially tell me “You are like us, like even if you did not grow up thinking of yourself as this, your family is from here.”

So what I’ve come to understand Gullah Geechee as is the folks who were stolen and brought over from West Africa. And from Jacksonville, North Carolina, to St. Augustine, Florida, along the coastline of the southern United States, they developed their own traditions and practices that were a hybrid of what they knew from their former lives and what they had access to here in the new world and in their new lives. And so that extended to their food, that extended to craft and spirituality, language, different types of arts. So essentially they created their own culture. And that’s a really, really big deal because Black Americans generally are told that we don’t have any culture. Like y’all were brought over here as enslaved people and you don’t have any culture. You don’t come from anywhere. And there is this Indigenous culture. A lot of people back in the day did not want to be identified with that because it was seen as backwards. But now it seems like it’s more in vogue in the media.

And also there’s just more and more people who are reclaiming that identity and trying to reclaim ancestral farming practices, like on Gilliard Farms. The modern term for it is something like regenerative organic agriculture. So it’s like all of these different practices that they had, like allowed them to sustain themselves for so many years. And then we abandon them, you know. And I think now people are seeing the beauty in it and just really trying to reclaim those roots because it’s just special. And it’s special to know that you do have a culture and you do have something to reclaim.

DY: Alongside that activism and reclamation work, you were talking about the environmental racism in the area. And I’m just wondering what the landscape of activism around the environment there looks like in Brunswick.

NPI: You know, the work has been going on. I feel like there have been people doing the work, but I think I just know more about it now. As far as environmental racism, you know, having so many chemicals in the air and the water is really harmful to Gullah Geechee culture because of subsistence fishing. Subsistence fishing has been a way of life in the Gullah Geechee culture for so long. And so when you’re like poisoning that food source, that’s a big deal. Gullah Geechee folks are not going to stop fishing and crabbing and things like that, but that means that they’re going to be exposed to really harmful toxins. So there are people doing organizing work around that, you know, trying to organize around letting people know where the safest places to fish in the area are and how you should prepare the seafood, things like that. Organizing around trying to hold the different factories that are spewing chemicals into the air accountable. There’s definitely, there’s a lot of energy around that and that’s exciting.

DY: This is a question that I meant to ask a minute ago. It’s a little bit more related to the first sort of thread in our conversation, but I was really struck, reading the book, by the way it was not just you in your family who left your town and then came back. You described generations of your family leaving and going to New York City and being part of the historical migration of Black people to the north, but then also coming back to Brunswick. So I’m just curious about what you think about that intergenerational tendency to leave and come back.

NPI: I think that’s what oppressed people do to survive. Migration is just a way of life because you go where there are better opportunities. Like when I moved to Seattle, it was because there were better job opportunities. You know, it was really hard for me in Georgia trying to get a living wage job. And I know that is similar to my grandmother who left coastal Georgia for New York City because she was trying to find a better job. A lot of times it’s like, even if we don’t necessarily want to leave, if we want to live more dignified lives, we kind of feel like we have to leave. I think that pulls people away from their culture, like when you move people from the country to the city, like they’re not able to maintain their relationship to land. And we know that Black American folks, that’s where our roots are. We were brought to work on plantations and after that we were sharecroppers.

And so when we’re forced to migrate, that takes us away from our like ancestral practices. And that’s really unfortunate. I think that’s kind of like how the myth of Black American folks not having any culture comes from, because we’re seen as all living in cities and working factory jobs or whatever. Even though our roots are agricultural. And I think a lot of culture gets lost. A lot of stories get lost. And that’s how people get lost.

This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox. Join my email list By clicking submit, you agree to share your email address with the site owner and Mailchimp to receive marketing, updates, and other emails from the site owner. Use the unsubscribe link in those emails to opt out at any time. Processing… Success! You're on the list. Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.

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