This program is made possible by a grant from the South Carolina Humanities Council.

[airplane engine idling, drumming] (male) There's the man!

Emory!

Welcome... nice to see you.

Thank you.

If you save people's culture and their history and their way of life, you save people.

♪ [drumming, chanting] (John Matthews) I would not imagine having that kind of reception of the number of people that were there to greet us.

People were interested in seeing their brothers and sister who were long lost across the water coming back home.

That was probably the most amazing thing that I probably'll ever have happen to me.

(male) Welcome...welcome!

(female) Thank you so much.

We're glad to be here.

(Myrtle Glascoe) You feel there's a place that wants you.

You get off the plane, and all of a sudden there are these people.

The first thing they do when you get off the plane is say, "Thank God, you've come home!"

♪ [drumming, singing] (Augusta Baker) At a dark airport in Africa, a reunion takes place between family that has never met.

The people of Sierra Leone welcome brothers and sisters from America.

They have journeyed from South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Oklahoma.

They are called Gullah, or maybe Geechee, or Freedmen.

They are from a people who have recently discovered their separate lives are bound by history to this one small country in West Africa.

[distant drumming, singing] [crickets chirping, birds calling] [crickets chirping, birds calling] (Baker) The story of this connection begins with the land, land which is strangely similar on the coasts of both the southeastern United States and that of Sierra Leone.

The vast salt marshes and Sea Islands of the Carolinas and Georgia are mirrors of the mangrove swamps and wide rivers of West Africa.

It's clear the lives of Gullah and African are bound to the land, to the sea, and to each other.

When a Gullah man in a South Carolina tidal creek tosses his net... [water splashing] ...another man in a river in Sierra Leone draws his in.

Here in Africa were born the legacies that have passed down to their American cousins, and the channels of history plied by the Gullah and the Sierra Leonean lead back through winding courses to a common source.

♪ Over four centuries have passed since the earliest Portuguese navigators sailed past this part of West Africa.

The green mountains prowling the coast reminded them of the king of the beasts, and they named the land Sierra Leone, "the mountains of the lion."

♪ [people speaking in African language] (Baker) The people of Rogbonko village in Sierra Leone make coil baskets in the style Sierra Leoneans call "shukublai."

(Baker) Her name is Kadiatu, a woman of the Temne people of northern Sierra Leone.

She and her neighbors know nothing of the long years of hardship for African Americans, of slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights.

In fact only now is Kadiatu learning that many Americans are black.

(Baker) This is the beginning of an understanding about the connection with family they never knew existed.

Kadiatu and her neighbors see for the first time a basket made by the Gullah people in America, a basket the Gullah call a fanna .

[people speaking in African language] (Baker) Marveling at its workmanship, they point out its similarities and differences.

In their language this particular style of basket, low brimmed and wide, is called fanna .

To them its purpose, like its name, is instantly recognizable.

Fannas were once essential to Gullah life.

Fannas in Sierra Leone.

[rice swishing in fanna] Since ancient times, rice has been a staple food.

[pestle pounding, people talking and singing] [people singing] (Baker) For a thousand or more years, songs of the rice harvest have echoed in the fields.

[people singing] Sierra Leone is in the midst of what was called the Rice Coast, an area stretching from the Senegambia, south to Sierra Leone and Liberia.

[no audio] [crickets chirping, birds calling] [crickets chirping, birds calling] (Eugenia Deas) My grandmother, Mosey, she used to teach us different thing.

She learn it from her older parent.

(Baker) In Eugenia Deas' garden, some sense of Africa remains.

Her grandmother taught her the ways of the roots, old secrets of the plants, still important in West African culture and among the Gullahs.

But in the knowledge of growing rice, the Gullah reveal even more important connections to Sierra Leone.

My grandmother she always talk about how they had to work hard.

She didn't come from Africa... her parents came from Africa.

When they first came over, they used to work on these plantations, plant the rice.

When they plant the rice, they have to harvest it.

When they harvest it, they cut it with a hook...hook it in.

They run it in, have to take the-- I don't know what you call it-- two pieces with rubber in the middle, beat it all.

After, they had to put in this long-- they cut a hole in the block, call it a mortar.

And they had a pestle... beat that rice off and get it clean.

They had a wide thing they call a fanna , made out of straw, like a basket but wide.

The fanna it go into the wind.

The fanna let the husks blow away.

That's how they got their rice.

[crickets chirping] (Baker) Long before Eugenia Deas was born, this way of life had already died out in the Lowcountry.

Near the turn of the century, the last rice crops were harvested from Hampton Plantation, a few miles from McClellanville.

It marked the end of an era lasting for 200 years.

Literally hundreds of plantations like this grew along the rice fields, but it was African know-how that made the plantations successful.

Only they had a tradition of growing rice, not their masters.

It was African technology that led to the creation of the intricate dikes and waterways which transformed the Lowcountry marshes along the entire Southeast coast into thousands upon thousands of acres of successful rice fields.

It is a feat of land forming perhaps unequalled in human history.

(choir singing) ♪ Leaning on the Lord's side.

♪ (female singing) ♪ Lord's side, ♪ the safest side.

♪ (choir) ♪ On the Lord's side.

♪ (Baker) Only now are the Gullah people, descendants of rice farmers from Africa, learning the truth about their past.

♪ Whose side ♪ ya' leaning on?

♪ (choir) ♪ Leaning on the Lord's side ♪ ♪ I pray, ♪ I pray ♪ I learned Gullah as a kid from my grandparents.

I never knew it would come so handy today, because we laughed at our grandmother when she spoke Gullah.

That's the only language she knew, and yet it was that language that I now know was the connection to Africa.

I'd like to see how many people in the audience would understand me as my grandmother would get up and talk this morning.

She would say, "How hunna to do today?

"We glad hunna da wit we today fo greet we family from Africa.

"We wan tell dem all bout de island.

We wan make dem feel like dem be home."

(Baker) The old-fashioned Gullah words Emory Campbell speaks are no longer commonly used by younger Gullah speakers in the Sea Islands.

But to the honored guests they are familiar.

For President Joseph Momoh of Sierra Leone, the Gullah sounds like his country's daily speech.

(President Momoh) We find a little Gullah this morning spoken.

We in Sierra Leone use English as the official language, but the lingua franca is what you call Krio, K-R-I-O, which I think, which is exactly a fashion of the Gullah.

I will just speak Krio a little bit, just to bolster the point that I am making.

In this respect let me say... [President Momoh speaking Krio] [President Momoh speaking Krio] I suppose you all follow that!

[people clapping] (Campbell) It was chilling at times just to feel the warmth and eagerness of the people, because, you see, people around here in these islands, as African as they are, have very little... concept of what Africa is like or the connection between Africa and themselves.

Penn School is the institution that began training Africans after slavery to become Americans.

So most of the people who graduated from Penn School have rejected any kind of Gullah or Gullah culture because they really wanted to be polished Americans.

People who were at the setting of the president's visit that graduated from Penn School, I could see an immediate change in their attitude toward Gullah.

After the president left-- I talk to Penn graduates now.

They don't mind talking about Gullah and arguing about words in Gullah they know.

Before then, we would never have been able to get them to discuss it.

[congregation singing] The reason I walked up front is because I am handsome!

[congregation clapping, laughing] ♪ I want to be ready, ♪ I want... ♪ (Baker) This day gave a new dignity to a people who had long been disparaged for their backward ways and their funny way of talking.

President Momoh came to Penn Center because of recently uncovered knowledge about the unusual connection.

But this research is the culmination of work begun decades ago.

(men singing) ♪ By and by, oh... ♪ (Baker) South Carolina in the 1930s, among the creeks and islands of the southeast coastal Lowcountry, the Gullah really moved from the mainstream of society.

This was a culture that a young black scholar named Lorenzo Turner found when he began researching the Gullah and their language.

Folklorists and historians had studied this unusual culture before Turner.

They concluded that the Gullah merely borrowed and corrupted English and European language and customs.

Some even believed the Gullah were addled in their speech, backward baby-talkers whose tongues were incapable of forming proper English.

Turner pushed these old prejudices aside.

More than anyone before him, he was able to penetrate the communities along the coast.

Where others heard Gullah only as a primitive pidgin English, Turner found a rich language that owed as much to Africa as it did to Europe.

Joko Sengova, a Sierra Leonean linguist is following in Turner's footsteps.

(Joko Sengova) That work is seminal.

It is the start-off point for most of us who are now investigating Gullah.

Turner's argument is that if one doesn't know about African languages, then obviously one is not in a position to say there has been an influence from them.

I think that's why he set himself the task of trying to understand these languages.

He set the task of trying to study a couple, about 30.

(man singing) ♪ Oh, I am... ♪ (Baker) Many Gullahs kept private names, "basket names" they call them, names that no outsider ever heard.

Names like Limba and Loco are strange to our ears, but are very African.

[speaking Gullah] [Eugenia Deas offscreen speaking Gullah] [both women laughing] (Baker) Over a hundred years ago, a friend of Eugenia Deas, Agnes Brand, was born into a world where slavery was a recent memory.

Her husband's name, Monday, is a hint of the strong spice of Africa that seasons her life.

(Deas) Monday Brown.

He was a working man, too.

Yes.

(male) You were saying why they-- (Deas) I say that came from Africa.

They used to name their children after the day which they born on.

If they didn't give them the whole name, they give them part of that name.

(male) Oh, really?

It's to say that that was Monday.

He was lucky he got the whole name--big shot--Monday.

What we are looking at is American English and parlance of American English, dialects, so on and so forth, especially Gullah, which have been influenced by African languages.

We're trying to pinpoint these survivors.

For instance, I think Sea Islands people, Gullah speakers, still refer to the expression "day-clean," which means "when it dawns."

(Sengova) We have a similar expression in Krio, in Sierra Leone Krio, which would come out as "doe-clean."

The clouds open up, the clouds break.

♪ [female singing, gravelly LP recording] ♪ [female singing, gravelly LP recording] (Baker) Specific connection to Sierra Leone required more exacting proof.

The woman Turner found singing this song didn't know what the words meant, but to Turner the meaning was clear.

It was a funeral song of the Mendes, the largest ethnic group of Sierra Leone.

It was the most extensive example of African language he or anyone had found among the Gullah.

♪ [female singing] ♪ [female singing] (Baker) Words Turner found represented African languages from the entire Atlantic coast.

Of the 3,000 African words and names used in Gullah speech, a quarter of them came from Sierra Leone.

Of the lengthier texts, songs, and story fragments, virtually all come from this one country... from the Temnes in the north, the nomadic Fulas, Vais, and Mende to the south.

Even the words "Gullah" and "Geechee" were close to the names of the ethnic groups found in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia... the Gola and the Kissi.

♪ [drumming] [street sounds, people talking] (Baker) King Jimmy Market, along the harbor of Freetown, draws Sierra Leoneans from all over the country.

Although Sierra Leone is a nation only a little larger than South Carolina, it has over a dozen ethnic groups, each with its own language and sometimes several dialects.

Communication would be impossible without a common ground, one language everyone knows.

[street sounds, people talking] (Baker) That common ground is Krio, which is also the mother tongue of the Krio people.

The Krios, like the Gullah, are descendants of freed slaves.

Krio speech evolved from the various tongues of these slaves.

[street sounds, people talking] In the mountains above Freetown lies the small Krio village of Regent.

Clapboard houses dating from over a hundred years ago reveal the strong Lowcountry and West Indian influence on the Krio people.

The same influence marks the speech of Krios like Arthur John.

(Baker) In Gullah, for example, the phrase "I'm happy to meet you," becomes "I glad fuh meet ya."

And in Krio... (Baker) To a group in Gullah, "I glad fuh meet oona."

In Krio... "I glad fuh meet oona"... oona, you see?

[street sounds, people talking] (A. K. Turay) You find it a very useful language, most useful language, but educational masters before now deprived ourselves the use of Krio.

They derisively referred to it as broken English, and the [inaudible] accepted it.

(Baker) A. K. Turay holds a doctorate in linguistics and is a cabinet minister in Sierra Leone.

He has studied the development and importance of the Krio language.

(Turay) Language is very strongly tied to a people's identity.

It's the storehouse of all their thinking over the centuries, of all their actions, all their beliefs.

All their hopes and aspirations are woven together in their language.

To deprive a people of their language is depriving them of a part of their existence.

When deprived of speaking Krio we have to speak English, in which we are not experts.

Education also deprived us of using our own local languages, so we ended up not speaking any language.

[man speaking African language] (Baker) Among themselves, however, the Krios spoke Krio.

They held it close to them and, like the Gullah, kept it alive.

[crowd noises] [bat cracking, people cheering] Take your time, boy!...

doing beautiful!

[crowd cheering] (Baker) The Gullah went further, keeping this tongue a secret... an act that allowed the Gullah to remain African in their souls.

[speaking Gullah] (Turay) It's a...willpower, a great strength, a great spiritual... strength in them.

Despite all odds, they carried it out.

They behaved exactly as I'd expect any African to behave under difficult circumstances.

If you do research in other languages here, you'll find that you always have a language of secret communication.

So...the Englishman was here, he made us speak English.

And even within that English, we very quickly developed other forms of communication which they heard what we were saying, but they were not able to understand.

I'm sure the use of the Gullah language in southern Carolina fulfilled part of this need for them to communicate as a means of self-identity without letting our secrets out to their masters.

(man singing) ♪ Oh freedom!

♪ (Baker) Two hundred years ago, when a slave ship arrived in Charleston, rice planters would crowd the streets outside the old slave market.

They would read bills like this to find out where the slaves originated.

Only a premium price at the auction block would buy a slave from the Rice Coast, from Sierra Leone.

The records of the slave traders have helped scholars establish a predominant homeland in Sierra Leone for the Gullah people.

[man speaking] (Baker) Today in the market of Charleston, Africa lives.

The sweet grass basket makers sow their own "shukublai" in the shape of fanna .

Joe Opala is an anthropologist who has studied the Sierra Leone-Gullah connection.

This Oklahoma native joined the Peace Corps in 1974 and wound up in Sierra Leone.

Once there he began looking into the history of slavery from the African side of the ocean.

For nearly 15 years, he has tracked down a remarkable series of connections that end here in Charleston and begin on a far shore in Africa.

[no audio] (Joe Opala) These Gullah people are the descendants of the slaves that were brought to Charleston in the 1700s.

They are the descendants of the rice-growing Africans who were brought to those plantations in the 1700s.

What is remarkable for us here in Sierra Leone is that these Gullah people have preserved so much language and cultural heritage from this country.

Now, how did that happen?

(Baker) Opala is currently a lecturer at Fourah Bay College, the oldest university in sub-Saharan Africa.

He now teaches the history that he and others are uncovering.

(Opala) During this period when slaves were being sent to South Carolina, Bunce Island was a major slave-trading base.

Bunce Island is located here in the Sierra Leone River in the harbor here about 20 miles from Freetown.

That particular slave capsule was virtually specialized in sending slaves from this area to Charleston in South Carolina.

♪ [piano music] (Baker) Bunce Island... a quarter-mile-long speck in the Sierra Leone River.

It has been called a little bit of Africa that was destroyed to build America.

It is the furthest point inland the slave ships could travel without grounding, so it was here they picked up their human cargo.

♪ The ruins of the old fort have stood uncared-for since the English abolished slave trading in the early 1800s.

Today the cannon that guarded against marauding French navy and pirate ships lay scattered in a row along the remains of the rampart.

For the people who fished the waters here or traveled past on boats, Bunce represented a great mystery.

They knew Europeans captured their people... but why?

[drumming, people speaking] [drumming, people speaking] [drumming, people speaking] (Baker) Only a mile downriver from Bunce, the village leaders of Tasso Island gather.

In 1978 at a similar gathering, the chief, Pabessah Raka, asked Opala to tell his people what happened to the slaves to fill in a 200-year gap in history.

[no audio] [Opala speaking Krio] [man translating] [Opala speaking Krio] [man translating] [Opala speaking Krio] [man translating] [Opala speaking Krio] [man translating] [Pabessah Raka speaking] [man translating] (Baker) In many ways this was the beginning of Opala's quest.

These people of Tasso had always known Bunce Island to be a slave fort, but of the slaves' fate they knew nothing.

Some thought they were taken north to Europe where they died of the cold, or that they were fattened up like cattle to be eaten.

Opala told them what he knew and promised to find out more.

He would spend days at a time on Bunce combing the surface for artifacts.

Carefully he mapped out the locations of buildings, deduced the methods of the slavers, and pored over their records, until a picture of the slave trade emerged.

(Opala) I had no idea there was a Gullah connection to Sierra Leone.

In 1977, I began research on the ruins of the English slave-trading fort at Bunce Island, which is 15 miles upriver.

We're dealing with a very large slave-trading operation, which was essentially specialized in sending slaves from the rice-growing area with rice-growing know-how to the rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia.

The slave trade corrupted the whole fabric of African life.

(Baker) In England, the owners of Bunce Island grew wealthy exploiting the African tribal conflicts.

Their agents on Bunce lived in a kind of pseudo-luxury paid for with human souls.

Besides Bunce Island House, the large Georgian manor of the chief agent, this imitation gentry built formal gardens, even a golf course.

But the vile business of Bunce, the trafficking in human beings, could not be totally hidden.

A young and adventurous woman named Anna Maria Falconbridge recorded in her diary the following... (Sylvia Holmes reading) "Bunce Island House, at a distance, "has a respectable and formidable appearance, "nor is it much less so upon a nearer investigation.

"Behind the great house is the slave yard "and houses for accommodating the slaves.

"Delicacy, perhaps, prevented the gentlemen "from taking me to see them, "but the room where we dined looks directly into the yard.

"Involuntarily, I strolled to one of the windows "a little before dinner "without the smallest suspicion of what I was to see.

"Judge what my astonishment and feelings were "at the sight of between two and 300 wretched victims "chained and parceled out in circles, "just satisfying the cravings of nature "from a trough of rice placed in the center of each circle.

"Offended modesty rebuked me with a blush "from not hurrying my eyes from such disgusting scenes.

"Whether fascinated by female curiosity or whatever else, "I could not withdraw myself for several minutes.

"Be assured, I avoided the prospects from this side of the house ever after."

(Baker) The suffering in the slave yard was only a prelude to what the African slave had in store.

When a slave ship was ready to depart for the New World, the slaves, naked and chained together, would shuffle out of the slave yard through this gate, down to the jetty.

This was the last of Africa they would ever touch.

Ironically, among the slave ship captains employed in the Bunce Island- Charleston trade was one John Newton.

In later years he denounced slavery, became a clergyman in England, and wrote a song that would give strength to many he had helped enslave... "Amazing Grace."

♪ [piano music] (Baker) Slavery made the otherwise marginal colonies wildly successful.

Businessmen, coolly plotting out the net and the gross, grew rich on its existence.

Their records showed Joe Opala that the Gullah- Sierra Leone connection is an historical fact.

The eureka moment for me was when I found the connection between Richard Oswald, the owner of Bunce Island in the mid-18th century, and Henry Laurens, his agent for slaves from Sierra Leone in South Carolina.

When I finally discovered these indications in Laurens' papers, I virtually shouted "eureka" in the library.

I had the firm link between Sierra Leone and the Gullahs.

(Baker) From Mepkin Plantation near Charleston, Henry Laurens captained his rise in South Carolina society.

Mepkin was a centerpiece of Laurens' holdings and was earned mainly through his business venture with Oswald.

(Opala) The significance of the Oswald-Laurens connection is that the slave-trade connection between Sierra Leone and South Carolina had an impact on the course of American history.

Both of these men, Oswald the Englishman, the slave trader, Laurens the American colonist, the planter and slave trader-- both of these men had risen to positions of international prominence and wealth through the slave trade.

When the American War of Independence came, Laurens became an important figure in the American colonial government.

He became president of the Continental Congress at one point.

He was the highest ranking American official captured by the British during the Revolutionary War.

(Baker) The British imprisoned Laurens in the Tower of London until Oswald was able to post the bond for Laurens' freedom.

Later he and Oswald helped negotiate the cease fire, which ultimately led to the Treaty of Paris.

As a result of the rice trade and the Laurens-Oswald connection, historians are able to establish the fact that thousands of slaves came from one small part of Africa to live in one small part of America.

But the culture the slaves brought with them couldn't have survived if the Africans hadn't also brought a subtle form of revenge against their masters.

♪ [piano music] The Gullahs have been able to preserve more of their cultural and language heritage than any group of African Americans really because of climate and geography.

The conditions that made coastal South Carolina and Georgia an excellent place for rice cultivation also made it an excellent place for the spread of tropical diseases brought from Africa.

Although the rice cultivation was extremely lucrative from the standpoint of the white masters, it also made the diseasing better.

It made it impossible for Europeans to live there and prosper in large numbers.

This was the only area where black people, slaves, were often the overseers and the farm managers, simply because white people could not live in what was essentially an Africanized environment.

(Baker) While the whites abandoned the Lowcountry because of their health, many blacks, refusing to bear the burden of slavery, fled.

The most well-known route to freedom was north along the Underground Railroad, but many Gullah went south to the wilderness of Florida.

They joined with another dispossessed people, the Seminole Indians.

The former slaves became known as Seminole Negroes.

They kept alive their distinct language and culture, even cultivating rice.

They also became a nation of black warriors, taking arms against their former masters.

In the 1830s and '40s, the Second Seminole War pitted them against the United States government.

(Opala) In that corner of the U.S., in tropical Florida, there was an African frontier.

The blacks were able to escape into that area, set up successful communities based on rice agriculture, and resist the force of the United States military for several decades.

The commanding general in the Second Seminole War wrote to Congress and said, "Gentlemen, be assured this is a Negro, not an Indian, war."

(Baker) It was a drawn-out, bloody conflict unequaled in America until Vietnam.

Only when the Seminoles agreed to leave Florida did the hostility end.

The black Seminoles remained free and began calling themselves Freedmen, and traveled with their red brothers along the Trail of Tears to the Indian territory in Oklahoma where they still live today.

(Opala) What is amazing is that black Seminoles in Oklahoma have, since that time, retained their special identity as Seminole Freedmen, which is what they call themselves.

They've retained a separate identity.

They've retained much of their Gullah language and culture.

Up until the last generation, they were still speaking Gullah in isolated rural farmsteads in Seminole County.

People in their forties can remember their grandparents speaking Gullah and can remember a lot of Gullah phrases.

They've also retained a rice diet almost identical to that of the Gullahs in South Carolina and Georgia, and for that matter, to people here in Sierra Leone.

(Baker) While some Gullah, like the black Seminoles, fled white civilization, others, some who were even prospering in antebellum white society, returned to Africa.

(Alpha Bah) There was a lingering dissatisfaction, and there was still a desire to go back to the continent and contribute and maybe feel a little much more at home.

(Baker) The study of blacks returning to Africa in the 19th century drew Sierra Leonean historian Alpha Bah to Charleston.

Bah has followed the careers of these people including Charlestonian Edward Jones and his return to Sierra Leone.

(Alpha Bah) We are at where the Jehu Jones famous hotel used to be.

Jehu Jones happened to be the father of Edward Jones, and this is the site of the old hotel which was one of the most famous hotels in the 19th century in Charleston.

Edward Jones was one of the first black graduates from maybe a predominately white institution in the United States, Amherst College in Massachusetts.

Of course from there, he, with his degree, with his bachelors, he found that he needed to do something more.

And by the late 1830s, he found himself in Freetown, primarily as a school teacher and a preacher.

I guess by 1841, he became the first black principal of Fourah Bay Christian College, which later on became Fourah Bay College.

It maybe one of the first, if not the first, institution of higher learning in black Africa.

♪ [singing in African language] (Baker) Alpha Bah's work trying to find out why one African American journeyed back to the land of his ancestors helped him to observe the Gullah homecoming.

He served as liaison and guide to the delegation.

Over a year had passed since President Momoh invited Emory Campbell to bring members of the Gullah community home to Sierra Leone.

For President Momoh, this was a chance to show thanks for his visit to South Carolina and to Penn Center, the visit that first brought public attention to the remarkable connection.

(Joseph Momoh) When you're here, you cannot really feel short of excitement.

It is always a very good feeling for one to be able to discover one's lost parents.

I think this is absolutely the case.

It is good satisfaction and good happiness for all of us.

♪ ...in Jesus' name!

♪ ♪ People, my roots ♪ brought me here!

♪ ♪ My roots ♪ brought me here!

♪ ♪ Children, my roots ♪ brought me here, ♪ ♪ in Jesus' name!

♪ (Baker) The week-long visit gripped the thoughts of all Sierra Leoneans.

The government honored the Gullahs as state guests, and the Sierra Leoneans embraced them as cherished family.

Evenings were reserved for state dinners.

The Gullahs ate African foods, talked with African people, and listened to African music beneath bright African stars.

[drumming] [no audio] (Baker) But away from Freetown under the African sun, they glimpsed the sorrow from which this homecoming joy was born.

The Gullahs engaged in a pilgrimage to the grim slave yard of Bunce.

♪ [piano music] (Cornelia Bailey) I knew the purpose of going there.

The emotion didn't start on the actual trip until you actually got on the island.

That's when it hits you this was special, not an island to go visit your cousin at.

It held special memories for some people, and it meant special thing to others.

♪ [piano music] (Bailey) It's hard to describe how you feel.

There were so many things running through your mind.

You look back, and you can actually see the people.

I actually saw men, women, children.

I could picture them coming on and going off, that sort of stuff... it made me angry.

♪ [piano music] ♪ [piano music] (Matthews) It was anger at first, and it really questioned human values.

How can some people do certain things to certain people?

Especially with what they call the two-tier setting on Bunce Island.

In one instance you had a lavish house with a lavish living style.

Twenty feet away you had people in chains eating rice out of a trough.

Something to me seems inhuman about that.

♪ [piano music] ♪ [piano music] I didn't want to feel that.

It would have been too painful.

Even when I think about it now... [birds chirping] ...but I try not to really feel it.

And I don't want to do it, but since I got back, every time I think about it, this is what happens.

♪ [piano music] (Earnestine Atkins) I was imagining the strain in their hearts, wanting to go to their families... leaving their families... their families not knowing where they were... not knowing where they were going to go.

I don't know...

I felt sad.

(male) Any anger?

Yeah...lots.

♪ [piano music] What I feel that day when we were in Bunce Island and thinking of what they went through, and the fact that, you know, in my mind I can't even imagine what they probably went through, but just trying to imagine some of it, it's like, They made it, you can... don't give up.

That's me now.

♪ [piano music] [no audio] ♪ Oh, freedom!

♪ Oh, freedom!

♪ ♪ Oh, freedom ♪ over me!

♪ ♪ Over me ♪ (Baker) Afterwards, on the ferry ride back to Freetown, the tension created by the walk through the slave yard was broken only by song, as Africans and African Americans shrugged off the pain.

♪ Oh freedom!

♪ (Freddie Cudjoe) I was surprised at my reaction, When we got to the ferry, I knew there was a way out.

I just said, "We escaped, we escaped!"

I started to sing "Oh Freedom"!

And everyone took it up.

♪ Freedom!

Freedom!

♪ ♪ Oh, freedom!

♪ Oh... ♪ (Baker) The Gullah people were not there to dwell solely on the past wrongs, but to find the things in their hearts that felt right.

In Mende country in a village called Taiama, Africa held her head high, opened her arms, and shouted to the Gullahs, "Welcome home!"

[people shouting] [drumming, singing] [drumming, singing] I tried--I tried to tell my wife, or describe that--that event of crossing the bridge.

The school children were there, and the villagers were there.

The drums and the guy was blowing the horn that were calling the tribes together.

[horn blowing] (Bailey) It was like being a guest in your own house.

You were away for a long time.

Everybody was saying, "Welcome back."

You're walking down between all these people on both side of the roads.

It was the most awesome feeling-- can't even describe how it felt.

It really felt good...simply put, it really felt good.

[speaking African language] (male translator) I venture--I venture all... [people clapping] (Atkins) It was funny because I knew I would look like them, but they never thought we would look like them.

They kept saying, "You look like us."

They would touch our hair... "Your hair is like mine."

[man speaking in African language] (Baker) Taiama treated the Gullahs like royalty and capped it off before hundreds of curious eyes, as Emory Campbell donned the ceremonial robes of chief, robes to go with his new name, Chief Pah Kory I.

[people clapping] [people speaking] [people shouting, clapping] (male) Okay.

(Baker) Chief Pah Kory and the Gullahs feasted on rice and greens, home cooking to them.

They played games, watched dances, and began to understand how the fields of rice must have looked to their grandparents.

[drumming] (Baker) This day was a joyous face of reunion for the Gullah.

For most, the journey would fill in gaps left dark and open for two centuries.

They didn't-- it just made us-- there got to be a connection between these people.

(Lance Cudjoe) No question about it, these are our people.

There's no question about it.

(Laurence Cudjoe) Got a homeland.

[drumming] (Glascoe) There are things I can't put into words.

We have this way of saying everything is everything, and truly, in Sierra Leone everything was everything.

There are things that are kind of submerged in African-American culture-- they're just part and parcel of us-- that were part and parcel of those people.

So when we're there, we're okay, you know.

[no audio] [waves breaking] [waves breaking] (Campbell) Without a doubt, a lot of wounds were healed in my soul, having gone back and had a chance to see perhaps where my ancestors came from, having had a chance to meet with my brothers and sisters there, and being greeted, being loved.

The main wound that's healed is the fact that now I know there is a place that I can go and call home.

I know where home is now.

Before then, somebody had described the Negro in America as a person without roots.

Now I know I have roots... that's been healed.

[waves breaking] ♪ Amazing grace, ♪ ♪ Amazing grace, ♪ ♪ how sweet the sound, ♪ ♪ how sweet the sound, ♪ ♪ that saved ♪ a wretch like me.

♪ ♪ that saved ♪ a wretch like me.

♪ ♪ I once was lost, ♪ but now am found... ♪ ♪ I once was lost, ♪ but now am found... ♪ ♪ was blind, ♪ but now I see.

♪ ♪ was blind, ♪ but now I see.

♪ ♪ 'Twas grace that taught ♪ my heart to fear, ♪ ♪ 'Twas grace that taught ♪ my heart to fear, ♪ ♪ and grace my fears ♪ relieved.

♪ ♪ and grace my fears ♪ relieved.

♪ ♪ How precious did ♪ that grace appear, ♪ ♪ How precious did ♪ that grace appear, ♪ ♪ the hour ♪ I first believed.

♪ ♪ Program captioned by: CompuScripts Captioning, Inc. 803.988.8438