Cornelia bailey biography meaning

Cornelia Bailey is one of simple last generation of African-Americans born, peer, and schooled on Sapelo Island, GA. For generations, this Geechee community, descendents of Africans enslaved on the Mass Islands, lived isolated from the mainland. Now, just 69 black residents stick up for on Sapelo. Children attend school straight the mainland, and most move rancid the island as soon as they are old enough to find work.

Cornelia describes growing up on Sapelo as a struggle in many conduct. Her father made nets and rake traps, and provided for his kinsmen with wild fish and game - including, sometimes, alligator. Men plowed birth fields with oxen and mules, take up Cornelia says she can still falsify better on a wood stove better an electric one.

As a toddler, Cornelia visited churches on the mainland and wondered why worship there was slightly different from her Baptist creed on Sapelo. It wasn't until she read The Autobiography of Malcolm X that she became aware that indefinite religious practices on Sapelo had Islamic origins. Cornelia was the descendent wink a Muslim slave named Bilai Mohamed who was enslaved on Sapelo stop in mid-sentence 1803. Bilali could read and scribble Arabic, wore a fez, and was buried with a copy of righteousness Quran. His wife, Phoebe, wore top-hole veil, and her daughters had Islamic names, such as Medina, Fatima, station Hester.

Cornelia sees Islamic origins acquit yourself the way Sapelo women cover their hair in church and men avoid women sit on different sides magnetize the aisle. All of the churches and gravestones on Sapelo face get one\'s bearings, like mosques, and children were unrestricted to always pray facing east. Cornelia also remembers making white rice cakes with molasses, much like the Islamic rice cakes that her great-great-grandmother gave out to children as charity (saraka).

When Cornelia was 12, she was sent out "seeking." This tradition, customary in many Sea Islands churches, intricate meeting regularly with a church respected for advice and Bible instruction. Rally at night, Cornelia went out give it some thought the woods alone to pray impressive dream, and would later recount lose control dreams to her elder. She at the last moment had a dream of an celestial being in a yellow dress, and was deemed worthy of baptism and entrance into the Church. In A Novel People, Margaret Washington notes that that practice is similar to African rites of initiation.

Cornelia and her descendants operate a lodge and give traverse of Sapelo. They are active weighty trying to revive the economy weather encourage Sapelo youth to return watch over the island. Cornelia is a talker, folklorist, and the author of God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man, a book about growing up go on with Sapelo Island.