Land is not just dirt it is archive. The land remembers what we forget. It remembers the footpaths carved by bare feet long before the plantations. It remembers the whisper of praise songs that rose in the dark when freedom was still a rumor. It remembers the pain and the planting, the weeping and the waiting. When we walk the Lowcountry’s marshes today, we walk through layers of memory — a geography of endurance. The sweetgrass, the tides, the rice fields — all speak a language older than any deed. These landscapes are not merely scenic backdrops. They are archives, storing centuries of struggle, skill, and survival.
The Land as Witness
On Hilton Head, the live oaks still twist like arms raised in prayer. At Harris Neck, Georgia, the descendants of the displaced still fight to reclaim their ancestral acres, taken during World War II for a military airfield that was never returned. Each lawsuit and community meeting there is more than a legal process — it is a spiritual one. It is an argument between memory and forgetting. The same soil that once bore the weight of bondage now carries the seeds of reclamation. When descendants stand on that land, the ground does not see ownership papers; it recognizes bloodlines. Every storm and harvest rewrites the archive, reminding us that memory is alive.
Across the Atlantic The Other Shore Remembers Too
Far away, in Sierra Leone’s Sherbro River and Bunce Island called Bensali by locals — the land bears a similar ache. The mangroves grip rusted cannons, and the tide carries shells across the graves of unnamed ancestors. Yet when descendants from the Carolinas and Georgia visit and pour libation, something ancient stirs. The Atlantic is not just a barrier; it is a bridge that connects memory to itself. In 1989, when the first Gullah delegation stepped onto that island, they sang: “We bring Sankofa… the circle is now complete.” That song wasn’t for ceremony. It was for the land a calling to reopen dialogue with the soil that birthed them. The earth listened. The circle began to close.
Land as Archive, Land as Heirloom We live in a culture that sees land as commodity something to own, sell, or fence. But to the ancestors, land was kin. To lose it was to lose language, to lose rhythm, to lose place in the great conversation of being. That is why the fight for Harris Neck, Sapelo Island, and St. Helena is not nostalgia — it is continuity. On St. Helena Island, elders still say, “Dis land don’ belong to we — we belong to dis land.” That statement reverses everything Western law taught about ownership. It means that the earth itself has memory, and we are simply its stewards for a brief moment.
The Proof Is in the Soil
Science now confirms what oral tradition always knew. Soil samples from old rice fields still carry the same grain DNA as the upland varieties from the Upper Guinea Coast. The patterns of irrigation mirror Mende and Temne systems in Sierra Leone’s inland swamps. The knowledge crossed the ocean, buried in bodies but not erased. The land on both sides of the Atlantic tells a continuous story.
The Work of Re-rooting
To stand on ancestral land whether Port Royal, Beaufort, or Bunce Island — is to feel time collapse. The question isn’t just Who were they? but Who are we becoming because they endured? Preservation without participation is just storage. True remembrance demands re-rooting — working the land again, reviving the language, rebuilding what was scattered. The hush that once hid our prayers must now guide our plans. When we return to the land with awareness, we turn memorial into movement. That’s what A Coven of Heirs is about — not simply remembering the past but entering into covenant with it.