A groundbreaking book reveals for the first time a historic escape route for enslaved people beginning in Charleston and extending to Spanish Florida in the 1600s and 1700s. Virginia McGee Richards, author and photographer, will present The Inner Passage: An Untold Story of Black Resistance Along a Southern Waterway on April 28 at 6 p.m. at the Charleston Library Society, in partnership with the International African American Museum and Buxton Books. Herb Frazier, an author of books on Black culture who is featured in the book, will also speak.
Discovered, researched and documented by Richards, the book is filled with 60 photographs of Lowcountry descendants and landscapes that capture the narrative of the 300-year-old canal system from Charleston to St. Augustine, Florida, that carried hundreds of enslaved people southward to freedom.
The waterway was built for mercantile shipping by enslaved Africans and Indigenous people using little more than shovels and axes to clear forests and excavate coastal mud. In this way, they created “cuts,” or connections between existing canals.
Richards discovered the passage while swimming in a “cut” near her home in Charleston. She then embarked on 15 years of research, tracing plats, family papers and maps marked by the silhouettes of ancient live oaks, many of which still stand today.
Using a 100-year-old wet-plate collodion process in remote marshlands, she created portraits of Lowcountry descendants, including many with family histories rooted in the region for centuries, including:
— Sherman Mack, who traces his ancestry on the Inner Passage to gravestones just a few hundred yards from the docks where he works. An artist and fisherman, he currently lives on a boat docked on the Inner Passage. He works at a local fishery and creates paintings and frescoes of the surrounding waterscapes.
— Kathy Holmes, who traces her heritage back six generations to Molly Fludd, born in 1830 on James Island, South Carolina. Each year, 200 Fludd family members gather to honor the passageway’s role in their lives.
— Vennie Deas Moore, who grew up in Charleston and is a cultural historian telling the Lowcountry’s history. A poet and photographer, she traces her heritage to African, European, Indigenous and Gullah Geechee ancestors.
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