I Am Gullah, I Do Not Fade
- Bradford Pazant
- May 20
- 3 min read
The marsh remembers before we do.
Before I understood the language of cultural preservation, before I read
histories about erasure and resilience, I knew the feeling of Beaufort.
The smell of salt in the air. Spanish moss hanging like old prayers from
oak branches. Elders laughing on porches
while music rolled through the humidity like memory itself. I knew what
it felt like to hear Gullah spoken not as performance, but as life.
This weekend, the Original Gullah Festival returns to Beaufort, South
Carolina. For many people, it is a celebration. For me, it is also
inheritance.
My grandmother, Rosalie Pazant, was one of the original co-founders of
the festival alongside my aunts and family friends. Long before
conversations about “cultural preservation” became institutional
language, they understood something simple and urgent: if we did not
protect our stories, someone else would flatten them into caricature,
tourism, or silence.
The festival was never just about entertainment. It was about survival.
That understanding sits at the center of my poem, I Am Gullah, I Do Not
Fade .
“Dem tried fo wash us ‘way wit time,
tryin’ fo tin our blood like rivers bend,
but Gullah don’t break, don’t go quiet.
We are de past dat will not end.”
I did not write the poem out of nostalgia. I wrote it out of refusal.
Refusal to disappear.
Refusal to let Gullah identity become aesthetic without ancestry.
Refusal to let the culture of the Sea Islands be reduced to fragments
disconnected from the people who carried it forward through slavery,
segregation, migration, land loss, and erasure.
The Gullah people are descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the
coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida
during the transatlantic slave trade. Through geographic isolation and
fierce cultural continuity, they preserved language, storytelling
traditions, foodways, music, craftsmanship, and spiritual practices with
extraordinary depth .
But history alone cannot carry culture forward.
People do.
Families do.
Art does.
That realization has shaped not only my writing, but my visual work as
well. Recently, I created a digital art print titled Geechee Girl, a
contemporary portrait rooted in the beauty, resilience, and living spirit
of Gullah identity. Unlike the poem’s rough black-and-white liberation
aesthetic, the print embraces color, texture, and vibrancy — because
Gullah culture is not frozen in the past. It is still evolving. Still breathing.
Still creating.
The same is true of the apparel pieces I’ve been designing through my
Etsy shop. Hoodies and shirts with phrases like Gullah Soul, Black,
Blessed, & Geechee, and I Am Gullah, I Do Not Fade are not simply
products to me. They are acts of visibility. Small declarations against
cultural disappearance.
Memory can live in books.
It can live in poems.
It can live in paintings.
Sometimes it can even live in cotton and ink.
That is part of what We Were Never Meant to Beg for Light: A Poetic
Testament of Black Love, Resistance, Resilience, and Liberation has always
been about for me. The collection is not only poetry. It is testimony. A
reminder that Black cultural memory survives because ordinary people
chose to carry it forward anyway.
This weekend, as Beaufort gathers again for the Original Gullah Festival,
I find myself thinking about legacy. About my grandmother. About the
people who built spaces so future generations could still recognize
themselves in the mirror of history.
And I think about the line that still feels truest to me:
“I am de child of dem who ain vanished...”
Neither did the culture.
Neither will we.
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