African and African-American cooking styles and flavours also influenced barbecue in the South, award-winning pitmaster Rodney Scott tells me. At the High Wire Distillery, I sample his delicious “whole hog barbecue”: smoky, deeply savoury pulled pork, meaty ribs the size of my forearm, collard greens, and unctuous mac and cheese. Afterwards, Scott, who has restaurants in Charleston and Birmingham (Alabama), spoke about the local significance of barbecue. “I grew up in the southeast of the state in a town of 400 people,” he says. “At the end of the harvest, for graduations, birthdays, weddings, one person would cook a whole hog for a few families. It was a communal activity.”
On my final day, I explored Charleston's French Quarter, which boasts some of the town's finest architecture. In the heart of the neighbourhood is the excellent Old Slave Mart Museum, once an indoor slave market, now a place that tells the story of slavery in South Carolina and its abolition.
Outside I got chatting to guide Crystal Kornickey, who told me there were once 40 brick-making plantations in the state. “Enslaved people not only built the buildings of Charleston, they also made the building materials,” she says. “If you look, many bricks still contain the finger or even hand prints of the enslaved people who made them.”
I hadn’t noticed any fingerprints before my conversation with Crystal – afterwards, I saw them everywhere. A left thumbprint in the wall of the Shops of Historic Charleston Foundation. A right thumbprint near the Dock Street Theater’s box office. Two tiny finger marks below a wrought-iron balcony.
Today, Gullah communities face significant challenges, notably the loss of traditional land because of a lack of clear property titles, rising property taxes and pressure from developers. In Hilton Head, the contrast between modest Gullah neighbourhoods and the island’s palatial gated communities is stark. But there are also signs of hope. At Mitchelville, Ahmad Ward is running an educational programme to develop the leadership skills of local high school students, some of whom are descendants of the original Mitchelville residents. “Gullah history is a lost history [but] we believe the story of Mitchelville has legs,” he told me. “For young people, it says: ‘If they can do it, so can we’.”
Shafik’s trip was provided by Explore Charleston. He stayed at the Westin on Hilton Head, the Beaufort Inn in Beaufort and Hotel Bennett in Charleston.