Listen with Intention and Eat the Good Food. Five Gullah makers, a dozen core students, and over forty other students contributed work to this project. We have listened with intention, and we are ready to eat the good food. This project has three components: a sampler basket, publication, and digital platform.

Basket

• Indigo-dyed tea towel (Zenobia Harper, Gullah Preservation Society)
• Exclusive hibiscus tea blend (Jacque Williams, Passage Products)
• Rice seasoning (Sydney and Myles Matthews, Kidogo Farms)
• Oyster knife (Shimshown Ciphrah, Eye Strive Enterprises)
• Crocheted coasters (Thomasina Herman Green, Kre8tive Chainz)
• Selected seeds

Publication

The publication, Cock Hunnah Yez and Nyam Up de Good Bittles, is research and authored by students. It contains personal and research-driven chapters that feature five seeds alongside biographies of each of the makers and the seeds representative of their work:

• Rice: Introduction to Foodways
• Indigo: Zenobia Harper
• Okra: Memory
• Hibiscus: Jacque Williams
• Peas: Land
• Peppers: Matthews Family
• Watermelon: Cultural and Economic Value
• Cotton: Thomasina Herman Green
• Collards: Abundance
• Oysters: Shimshown Ciphrah

Digital Platform

The digital platform is home not only to the project, but also to the emerging questions that could not be fully explored in the project. It holds a description and links for each of the makers, new research and scholarships, and ways to interact with the project.

Box and Publication Available for Pre-Order June 25, 2026. 

Between the summers of 2025 and 2026, The Athenaeum Press at Coastal Carolina University, with its sister institute of the Joyner Institute for Gullah and African Diaspora Studies, shepherded a collaborative of students, community members, and faculty. We aimed to showcase Gullah foodways, focusing on Georgetown County and the surrounding region.

The resulting product is this narrative, a sampler box of materials by Gullah makers, and a digital platform. Each of these products is evidence of the underlying methodology of the project, captured in its Gullah title: Cock Hunnah Yeez and Nyam Up de Good Bittles, translated as Listen with Intention and Eat the Good Food.

This work was generously supported through a pilot grant from the Mellon Foundation, and the latest in a long line of community-university collaborations and storytelling initiatives. This past year, a core group of students and makers collaborated on the narrative and research underpinning this project, supplemented by shorter-term modules from six other courses ranging from photography to user experience design to literature. Each researcher took on a chapter, and the narratives were collectively edited by the leadership team. Each component is dependent on the other, and this draft is living.

Special Thanks

A special thanks to our community collaborators on Sandy Island.

Credits

Student Contributors

• Shyanne Bellamy, Researcher
• Tionna Wade

Project Leads

• Zenobia Harper, Director of the Joyner Institute for Gullah and African Diaspora Studies
• Alli Crandell, Director of The Athenaeum Press
• Shaun Wilson, Project Manager