Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson: Cultural Stewardship and the Politics of Representation        

At the heart of this project is the work and wisdom of Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson—a sixth-generation Gullah woman born on Daufuskie Island and one of its most vital cultural stewards. A chef, author, historian, and guide, she has dedicated her life to preserving and transmitting the stories, language, and lived experience of Gullah Geechee people. Through the Sallie Ann Robinson Gullah Museum and Heritage Tour—the only Gullah-owned and operated cultural enterprise on the island—she sustains a lineage of place-based knowledge and community-led interpretation.

Born on August 4, 1958, to Albertha Robinson Stafford and Alton Ward Sr., Ms. Robinson attended the Mary Fields School on Daufuskie before continuing her education on the mainland.¹ Her childhood was deeply rooted in Gullah traditions: gardening, crabbing, praise house worship, and the spoken cadences of Gullah language.² She was among the handful of students taught by author Pat Conroy during his controversial tenure as a white teacher on the island. Conroy later fictionalized her as “Ethel,” a character in The Water is Wide based in part on his memory of Robinson during that time.³ While the book introduced Daufuskie to a national audience, it also signaled a pattern that persists: the shaping of Gullah narratives by outsiders.

Over the past four decades, Ms. Robinson has worked to reclaim and reframe that narrative. She is the author of two cookbooks and co-author of Daufuskie Island, a historical photo-documentary published by Arcadia Press. Her cookbooks—Gullah Home Cooking the Daufuskie Way and Cooking the Gullah Way, Morning, Noon, and Night—are more than culinary texts; they are vessels of oral history, seasonal wisdom, and cultural continuity.⁴ “I write so the children who come behind us can know how we lived,” she explains during her tours, often describing recipes as repositories of memory.⁵

As a heritage tour operator, Ms. Robinson does not rely on plaques or institutional signage. She narrates the island through embodied memory—identifying trees as landmarks, naming forgotten neighbors, and gesturing toward unmarked graveyards overgrown with brush. Her tours surface the histories left out of preservation frameworks: the labor of oyster shuckers, the traditions of praise house worship, the erosion of family land. In this way, her work exemplifies what scholars of Black geographies describe as counter-mapping practices—forms of spatial narration that refuse settler-colonial land logics and instead center Black epistemologies of place, kinship, and memory.⁶ Her interpretive labor is not merely educational; it is political and spatial, asserting a Gullah claim to land and story in the face of erasure.

Her stewardship extends to sacred spaces. Ms. Robinson has led efforts to protect family cemeteries and Black burial grounds that remain unmarked, untended, and increasingly vulnerable to private development. Her advocacy earned her a grant from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund to support restoration and interpretation of these sites.⁷ For her, these are not just burial places but sacred grounds—churches in their own right—where communion with ancestors continues.⁸

Perhaps most critically, Ms. Robinson challenges the frameworks through which Gullah culture is consumed—both by preservation institutions and by tourists who arrive with narratives shaped by non-Gullah voices. During our fieldwork, she offered a pointed reflection: “You can’t digitize a culture you never sat with. You can’t tell the story of this island from Google.”⁹ This was not just a critique of digital preservation without participation—it was a condemnation of the entire ecology of misrepresentation, in which developers, writers, and tour operators romanticize or distort Gullah life to serve commercial ends. One example she frequently highlights is the widespread myth of Haint Blue—a commercialized narrative that distorts both the color’s spiritual significance and its specific cultural origins. While often associated with St. Helena Island, its use on Daufuskie carried a distinct meaning: ceilings were painted indigo to prevent spirits picked up outside the home from lingering or entering the body during sleep. In popular discourse, however, the practice is frequently misattributed or flattened, with aesthetics elevated over ancestral knowledge. For Ms. Robinson, this kind of mythmaking is not harmless. Her critique is not nostalgic—it is political. Cultural preservation, in her view, demands accountability to living people, not just curated histories. It requires participation, precision, and the refusal of myths that exploit or oversimplify Gullah identity.

Ms. Robinson’s presence within this project is not ornamental—it is foundational. Her practice embodies a different epistemology, one grounded in relationality, ancestry, and self-definition. She reminds us that cultural preservation is not the fixing of a past in place, but the tending of practices that make Black survival and sovereignty possible. In doing so, she challenges institutional gatekeeping and insists on community-authored futures. She has lived what others come to study. She has returned to what others have left behind. And she continues to narrate Daufuskie not as a world in decline, but as one still unfolding.