In a white-painted, one-room building on St. Helena Island, Joseph “Rev.” Bryant was singing “Oh Lord, come by here.”  His voice filled the spare, shed-sized structure, with its benches of narrow boards nailed together, one bare bulb in the ceiling. After the spiritual, Rev. got back to telling stories – talking fast, mixing in Gullah-Geechee pronunciations. He told of moral lessons and Gullah traditions, of plucking fiddler crabs from the pluff mud as a child, and of “sour sally,” the red flowering sourgrass weed “that you can suck on when you’re walking and thirsty, but it’ll put a real knot in your face… more sour than a lemon.”

Describing himself as “the real deal,” Rev. is a one-man tour business, the kind where he’s a passenger in the tour-goer’s own car, giving directions and pointing out sites on St. Helena and nearby sea islands, all within about a 75-mile drive south from Charleston. Along the way, he tells stories and describes the scenery he knows so well from driving a local school bus for many years – the family and community names (often from former plantation owners), the Reconstruction-era houses that are still standing, the cottage that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. used as a writing retreat, and the dirt road through the pine woods that you can follow a ways to see a 19th-century cemetery.

An ordained Baptist preacher and Navy veteran, Rev. Bryant fell into song that morning when we stopped inside one of the community praise houses, where, he explained, the descendants of formerly enslaved Africans still meet between church services to share information, pray, sing, and shout. As I sat and listened to his claps and choruses, I let the sights and sounds sink in as much as I could. Glory be.

The storytelling, singing Joseph “Rev.” Bryant, above. The copy is an excerpt from an “On the Road” travel feature I wrote for the July 2009 issue of Charleston Magazine, just published.

– Sandy Lang, July 2009 (Images by PFE.)