MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
It's time now for StoryCorps. J. Herman Blake is a member of the Gullah community. The Gullah are descendants of enslaved West Africans who worked on coastal plantations from North Carolina to Florida. The Gullah still have strong ties to their African roots. At StoryCorps, Blake told his wife, Emily Moore, about a holiday celebration he attended in 1969 on Daufuskie Island off the South Carolina coast. The celebration was called Making Christmas, and it cemented his relationship to the Gullah.
J HERMAN BLAKE: People said we make Christmas, and I didn't understand what that was. Christmas morning, a young lady came on her Marsh Tacky.
EMILY MOORE: What's that?
BLAKE: That's a horse.
MOORE: Oh.
BLAKE: She knocked on the door and said, you come over to we house and y'all make Christmas. And I got to her house and there's ham and there's chicken and there's greens, cornbread. And there's beer and a little wodka (ph), as they call it. And then the man in that house said, let's we take a walk. And we went to somebody else's house, and they said, welcome. Go to the table and make Christmas. And that day, with this man, I went from house to house. And the man of that house would welcome us. We'd eat and dine. And...
MOORE: Now, would that man follow you?
BLAKE: That man would join us.
MOORE: So then it would be three of you.
BLAKE: By the time we got halfway through the day, it was about six or seven of us, and they were at various states of inebriation.
MOORE: Making Christmas.
BLAKE: Yeah, they would lit up. We went till late that night when the moon was out, and the last house we had to go to, they wanted to take a shortcut across a alligator pond.
MOORE: Oh.
BLAKE: And you had to walk across this plank.
MOORE: (Laughter).
BLAKE: 'Cause, you know, you didn't want to wake...
MOORE: Fall in.
BLAKE: ...Up a gator.
MOORE: Yeah.
BLAKE: They sent me across first.
MOORE: (Laughter).
BLAKE: Well, I made it all the way across that plank carefully and got up on the hill. Then everyone of the others that came after me fell in that pond.
(LAUGHTER)
MOORE: The drinking.
BLAKE: When they hit that water, they almost walked on...
MOORE: (Laughter).
BLAKE: ...Getting out and getting up on that hill. As we continued walking, I noticed you had to go to every home, so you couldn't be out of sorts with somebody. And they'd make amends - ain't no use me to be mad with one another. You know, that was childish. And they would hug and make up. And it was the most joyous time because there was this resolution of conflict, of hostility and planning for the next year to begin in harmony.
MOORE: Yeah, a new year starting together.
BLAKE: Yes.
MOORE: Yes.
BLAKE: And so I came to my understanding of making Christmas.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: That is 91-year-old J. Herman Blake and his wife, Emily Moore, at StoryCorps. Their conversation is part of the StoryCorps Brightness in Black Project and is archived at the Library of Congress. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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