MARY MORAN: Reunited with a Sierra Leonean Matriarch in the US
Amadu Massally
Today I was able to do special things, among the many different things that I have seen in the Low Country that really moved me. I discovered that Sierra Leonean descendants are here in St. Simons and of course we know they are in Harris Neck, GA because Wilson W. Moran's family is there.
The second BIG thing for me is that I met a woman, Mary Moran, whose mother, Amelia Dawley was recorded by Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner, singing a funeral dirge. I mean we met flesh to flesh. I find that profound! I am sharing a personal photo of her and I, and I told her that I bring much love and prayers from the entire country of Sierra Leone from where her ancestry starts.
I have done quite a few things over the past week from attending the Heritage Festival at Penn Center to touring historical Savannah. Many thanks to Wilson, my brother, who has made it all possible. That our roots are prominent in this country sums it all up. Oh, she also sang the song for us...
AMELIA'S SONG
Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay tambay
Ah wakuh muh monuh kambay yah lee luh lay kah.
Ha suh wileego seehai yuh gbangah lilly
Ha suh wileego dwelin duh kwen
Ha suh wileego seehi uh kwendaiyah.
English Translation
Everyone come together, let us work hard;
the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace.
Everyone come together, let us work hard:
the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be at peace at once.
Sudden death commands everyone's attention,
like a firing gun.
Sudden death commands everyone's attention,
oh elders, oh heads of family
Sudden death commands everyone's attention,
like a distant drum beat.
The Language You Cry In tells an amazing scholarly detective story reaching across hundreds of years and thousands of miles, from 18th century Sierra Leone to the Gullah people of present-day Georgia. It shows how African Americans have retained powerful links to their African past despite the horrors of the Middle Passage and the long years of slavery and segregation. The film dramatically demonstrates the contribution of contemporary scholarship to restoring what narrator Vertamae Grosvenor calls the “non-history” imposed on African Americans: “This is a story of memory, how the memory of a family was pieced together through a song with the powers to connect those who sing it with their roots, their silent history.” The story begins in the early 1930s with Lorenzo Turner, an African American linguist who cataloged more than 3,000 names and words of African origin among the Gullah people of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Turner also made the spectacular discovery that some Gullahs could recite texts in African languages handed down for generations. Among these linguistic gems, Turner’s widow recalls, he especially cherished a five-line song that he learned from Amelia Dawley, a woman from a remote Georgia fishing village. Although Amelia did not know which language the song was in, a Sierra Leonean graduate student in the United States recognized it as Mende, his native tongue. Amelia’s song is almost certainly the longest text in an African language known to have been preserved by a black family in the United States.
"While historians seek change over time, linguists and anthropologists (thank goodness) have an eye and an ear for continuities. The Language You Cry In links Africa and America, past and present, in a compelling story that helps us to examine violence and redemption, then and now. I am delighted that this moving and well-made documentary is just the right length to show to my History classes; it will prompt students to think about our collective past in fresh ways."
Peter H. Wood, Professor of History, Duke Uiniversity
------
“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.”
—Dr. Paul Farmer
Chief Strategist & Co-founder
