‘This is who we are.’ Hilton Head’s Fish and Grits Music Festival celebrates Gullah-Geechie

It’s not easy being Geechie.

Latrese Bush says it hurt when people called her that after leaving the warm cocoon of her Lowcountry home.

Suddenly she was different.

“People would ask, ‘Are you from Kenya?’” she said. “I said, ‘No, I’m from Bluffton, South Carolina.’”

That wasn’t so bad, was it?

At home, Latrese was known as a daughter of Deacon Leon Bush, a civic and church leader, serial entrepreneur and vegetable planter known to his friends as “Boss Hog” and, according to his 2021 obituary, a gentle giant who rode the highways of Bluffton on his Kubota tractor.

She was known as a daughter of Laura Bush, who served 26 years on the Beaufort County Board of Education, and granddaughter of Minnie Mitchell, an oyster shucker and domestic worker who raised a bunch of kids, made a quilt for every grandchild and left land to her children.

She was known as sister of Leon “LJ” Bush Jr., one of the few athletes to astonish former Island Packet sports editor Terry Bunton. The quiet old scribe came back from a baseball game gushing about LJ’s line drive that was just beginning to rise as it ripped past the outfield fence. After a football game, he said LJ “mashed” a running back so hard the kid refused to come back in the game.

Latrese was in the paper a lot as a basketball star in the Hilton Head Island High School class of 1994: all-state, Class 3-A Player of the Year, and school athletic Hall of Fame inductee who earned a full ride to the University of Georgia where she played in two Final Fours and once sang the “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a game with Vanderbilt.

“I had to go to the University of Georgia to realize how special the Gullah-Geechie people are,” Latrese said from her home in Atlanta, where she makes a living as a musician with a voice so sweet she’s sung with 2020 Grammy winner Gloria Gaynor for more than 10 years.

Latrese is coming home to celebrate in a big, public way a culture she almost overlooked. It’s her own culture. She and her BurnBush Entertainment company along with the Hilton Head MLK Committee for Justice organized the inaugural Fish and Grits Music Festival to be held Oct. 1 at the Lowcountry Celebration Park on Hilton Head Island.

Latrese sees it as a thank you to the community that formed her.

She sees it as a way for that culture “to be seen.”

THE UGA PROFESSOR

The festival will include folk, funk, jazz, spoken word and R&B performers — as well as Gullah foods and crafts.

Musicians will include Angela Bonaparte and Company of Levy, Gwen Yvette of St. Helena Island, Charleston native Votte Hall, Latin percussionist Frankie Quinones and funk band La Bodega.

Hilton Head’s Louise Cohen and Bluffton native Vascola Stoney will tell stories.

The McIntosh County Shouters of Georgia will perform the ring shouts that have Lowcountry roots 300 years deep.

The festival has corporate sponsors, led by Watterson Brands, and non-profit support from the Native Island Business and Community Affairs Association, the Hilton Head MLK Committee for Justice and the Gullah Geechie Cultural Heritage Corridor.

Music has taken Latrese all over the world, but it all began at the First Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Bluffton.

She sang there with family, and debuted her first gospel album, “One More Chance,” there in 2003.

It’s where she learned that singing the “Gullah way wasn’t about melodies of having a Whitney Houston kind of voice. It’s really about the spirit.”

It’s also where she squirmed as a child, embarrassed when her father stood to speak because of his Gullah dialect.

Then one day at UGA, a professor told her class that a special people live along the coast of South Carolina. He said they were isolated long enough to keep alive their unique foodways, crafts, spirituality and language.

He showed a film of Emory Campbell of Hilton Head when people of the Lowcountry made eye-opening connections with people of Sierra Leone.

Latrese was again squirming in her seat. “I know him,” she was saying.

She went up after class and told the professor she was one of those people.

“He said, ‘You should be very proud.’”

Latrese ran to a pay phone to call home. She would never see the world the same way again.

GULLAH WISDOM

Latrese took it for granted that her father, like his father before him, could produce bumper crops from sandy fields.

She was stunned the time she asked him how much to charge a cousin for a mess of peas.

Charge her? Are you kidding? You don’t charge her. You tell her to get all she needs.

She figured all kids were raised by a neighborhood, and that everyone lived in a bartering economy of providing for each other.

But suddenly she recognized the sophistication and wisdom of her father.

It now stood out to her that her grandmother Minnie told her, “It’s not how much you make, it’s how much you put away.”

It clicked with her that her mother’s lifelong social work would lead her to establish the It’s Better To Give Back Fund, and that LJ, a longtime high school coach, would form the COIN Project (Changing Our Image Now) “to help young adults in the Lowcountry of South Carolina to find their purpose and discover hope where hopelessness resides due to external and internal challenges.”

Latrese replaced Geechie shame with Gullah-Geechie pride.

She sees the Fish and Grits festival as a way to show that.

“I’m here to say it’s who we are, and it is beautiful,” she said.

“Absolutely beautiful.”

David Lauderdale may be reached at LauderdaleColumn@gmail.com.