Louise Miller Cohen

Louise Miller Cohen is a fifth generation native Hilton Head Islander. As rooted as she always was on this history-rich sea isle, with its gentle beaches and sanctuaries of oak forest that echo with the praise of her ancestors, Louise found that something was missing.

"Growing up as a child, especially after I found out about slavery, I started to wonder, where did they come from?" said Louise of her early curiosity about her ancestors. "I couldn't go back in my mind because it was just a blank, and I thought, I don't know who I am if I don't know where I come from."

It wasn't until recently that Louise began to delve deeply into her past. Through careful research, she uncovered the story of her grandmother's father, William Simmons, a former slave and Civil War veteran. He escaped from a Lady's Island plantation by borrowing a pass from a man who had permission to go to the military base to sell berries and oysters to the troops. Using that pass, Simmons enlisted in the army and, many years later when he applied for his pension, recorded much of his personal history in his deposition. The 15 acres of land Simmons purchased on Gum Tree road is where Louise grew up.

The tale of another ancestor, her grandfather's grandfather, was preserved in the family's oral history. Cesar Jones was a slave on Rose Hill Plantation when he too escaped, taking his wife and three children across the water to Buckingham in a flat-bottomed bateau. When the youngest baby started to cry and couldn't be consoled, Cesar told his wife to "throw that gal overboard" because he refused to let anything come between his family and freedom. But lying on the bottom of the boat was a mattress stuffed with corn shuck, and instead, the mother took her baby and rolled her up inside the mattress to muffle the cries.

"If she had obeyed his orders, I wouldn't be talking to you today, because that baby was my great grandmother," said Louise. "There's a lot of history around here, but if no one told you the stories, you would never know it."

It has become Louise's mission to tell those stories. Though at first she tried to "get away from it," she soon found that something inside her wouldn't let her rest until she had shared her reclaimed heritage with others. Beyond just keeping history alive for the benefit of her own family, she aims to preserve Gullah culture for everyone living in or visiting the Lowcountry. A captivating storyteller and speaker of Gullah-the language she grew up with despite the fact that back then it was looked down upon-Louise does presentations at festivals and celebrations throughout South Carolina and Georgia. She also makes CDs and DVDs of the traditional songs she heard as a child, which she had to learn on the sly because grown folks did not allow kids to come to the "shout."

"It was something so awesome about that clappin' and that stompin'," she recalls. "I don't care what we were doing, we had to stop and listen."
Louise hopes that the focal point for her work will be a new Gullah Museum, a project she has undertaken on the ancestral Gum Tree Road property. Several historic structures, including the house where Louise grew up, are being restored and furnished with heirloom pieces from Louise's own collection.

"I want to take us back before the bridge," she said. "I want to show the children and the visitors that come to Hilton Head how we survived on this island. Somebody's got to keep it alive, and that seems to be my mission. I had to step out and preserve this culture."