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including a Creole language that’s still spoken today. Den-
nis himself speaks Gullah, a lilting amalgamation of Eng-
lish and African dialects he breaks into when excited. He
incorporates aspects of it on social media, interviewing
elders and captioning photos for his Instagram followers:
“Dem boi say e fool up wit dat one pot mux!”
ORN IN CHARLESTON and raised in a squat
brick ranch-style house with a basketball
hoop next to the garage, Dennis grew up
Gullah without thinking about it. He learned
early how to pick vegetables from his grandfather’s garden
and crack the crabs in his mom’s seafood gumbo without
breaking a tooth. He wanted to be a video game designer
but flunked out of the College of Charleston his freshman
year and instead got a job washing dishes at Hyman’s Sea-
food. He worked his way up the line, earned a culinary
degree from a local community college, bounced around
some popular downtown restaurants. Then he spent
four years cooking in the Caribbean—a turning point
that would come to define the rest of his career.
“St. Thomas taught me to be unapologetic about black
culture,” Dennis says. Seeing statues of black leaders and
hearing actual Creole on TV stirred something inside him.
Maybe he could use what he knew—food—to bring this
sense of cultural celebration back to Charleston. To shine
a light on his own community.
Doing so would mean challenging the contemporary
narrative of Charleston’s food scene, which for the past
decade has centered on the work of white chefs like Sean
Brock at Husk and Mike Lata at FIG. National media (Bour-
dain included) heralded these chefs for their use of heir-
loom crops and traditional techniques while relegating
decades-old Gullah mainstays like Martha Lou’s Kitchen
and My Three Sons to the background, context-builders
rather than the main event. But then here was Dennis,
a chef with a foot in both worlds, a bridge between the
insular Gullah community and the downtown restaurant
scene. Here was a chef who could not only acknowledge
the Gullah Geechee origins of his dishes, but make those
origins—and their present-day implications—his focus.
“I wanted to help the next generation of Gullah Geechee
chefs get their just due,” Dennis says, “to walk in the door
and not get lowballed.”
Michael W. Twitty, the author and culinary historian,
has been following Dennis from the start. “He is it,”
Twitty says. “But the thing about it is, he’s not trying to
be it. He’s trying to raise a whole generation of people to
pick this mantle up. We don’t want to be icons; we want
to be griots.”
Griot is a word I have to look up, but when I do, it all
makes sense: “a West African historian, storyteller, praise
singer, poet, or musician...sometimes called a bard.”
EDISTO ISLAND IS JUST an hour from Charleston,
separated from the mainland by a few slender waterways,
but crossing over to it feels like stepping back in time.
A man sells melons out of a truck parked beside the road.
Mossy oaks hang low, forming living tunnels of green and
gray. “Most of the Sea Islands look like this,” Dennis says.
“Funny enough, this is how West Africa looks too. When
[enslaved people] stepped off here, they thought it was a
cruel joke.”
We’re driving through the heart of the 425-
mile Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor
on a mission, or rather, two distinct but parallel
missions: mine, to write a profile of BJ Dennis.
His, to turn my profile into something else
entirely. Which is why asking him questions
about himself falls on the difficulty scale some-
where close to herding cats.
As he says, this isn’t about him. It’s about
Gullah culture. People have said it’s disap-
pearing, but that’s just because they don’t know
where to look: the no-frills roadside restaurants,
the home kitchens, the family farms that dot
the Low Country’s sun-soaked archipelago. To
understand what it means to be Gullah (which
is, of course, tantamount to understanding Den-
nis himself ), we must leave Charleston alto-
gether, go to Edisto and St. Helena in South
Carolina, and St. Simons Island, Savannah, and
Brunswick in Georgia. We must meet the people
who live this culture every day, taste the pots
of gumbo and greens their families have been
cooking in obscurity for generations.
“Too many chefs act like they’re the first to
do X, Y, Z,” Dennis says, “but everything comes
from a place. People were doing it before it was
glamorous.”
Ms. Emily Meggett is one such person, and
her little yellow house is one of the first stops on
our trip. At 86, she’s Edisto Island’s grand matri-
arch, which is to say everybody’s grandma,
though she has 10 children, 23 grandchildren,
35 great-grandchildren, and three great-great-
grandchildren (not to mention 21 cats) of her
own. She still cooks for 100-person weddings
and funerals, grows okra in her backyard, and
never lets anybody leave without something to
eat. On her back porch a plastic jug of home-
made blueberry wine has been fermenting for
nearly a year. “Grab a pillowcase, BJ,” she says,
“let’s strain it.” We watch her tip sugar into the
bucket of deep purple liquid as she reminisces
about the old days, when things were slower,
less crowded, more connected. She sets out plas-
tic cups of the sweet but kicky wine alongside
crackers with cream cheese and homemade pep-
per jelly the color of Christmas. “People don’t
treat you warm like this anymore,” she says.
IT TAKES AN hour and a half to zigzag from
Edisto to St. Helena, though the two islands are
technically less than 20 miles apart. “If we had a
boat it’d be faster,” says Dennis, whose great-
grandfather was a ferry driver, “but that life is
over now.” Today most of the docks are private,
the vessels recreational. It’s a different world,
but St. Helena still feels like an enclave. Home
to one of the country’s first schools for the for-
merly enslaved, today an African American
cultural institution called the Penn Center, the
island was a safe haven from the KKK during the
civil rights era. Here is where Martin Luther
King Jr. worked on his “I Have a Dream” speech.
To
understand
what
it means
to be
Gullah, we
must
meet the
people
who
live this
culture
every day.
B
