These Entrepreneurs Are Building a Food Legacy Along the South Carolina Coast

The students tend crops, from sowing in the greenhouse to harvesting. The program also gives their families seeds to start home gardens to cultivate Gullah land connections that have been lost to time, off-island migration, and encroaching development. But Green remembers, and she wants to teach because it pains her to hear some youngsters say of agriculture, “I don’t want to do that ‘slavery job.’”

Tia Clark is the founder of her Casual Crabbing With Tia, a ecotourism venture

The Call of the Water, Brittlebank Park

Tia Clark gently shakes the contents from a crab cage onto a pier off Charleston’s Brittlebank Park. She holds aloft a cerulean Atlantic blue crab, fingers safely away from its flailing claws. This beauty is a male. “You can tell by the pattern. People say the males have a Washington Monument on its underbody, and the mature female a Capitol with a pointed dome,” she says.

Clark, founder of her Casual Crabbing With Tia ecotourism venture, sounds as if she’s always known these things. Black people have worked the waves around Charleston since kingdom come. But though she’s a beenyah—Gullah for “been here,” or a native, as opposed to a comeyah—this was recent knowledge for her.

Clark found the waters after she left behind years of bartending and hard drinking. A cousin took her out crabbing, and heeding a call she didn’t quite understand then, she began fishing alone.

She “made the outdoors my gym,” shedding pounds and gaining peace. Today she leads popular tours during which guests accompany her on the water, keep some of the catch they net, and take it home or to a local restaurant partner to cook.

“We all have a right to these natural resources, and it doesn’t matter where you came from, how much money you’ve got,” she says. “And I want to empower and teach young Black kids [in the region] that our culture is directly connected to the water…. If you don’t have a relationship with this water and know this water, you probably don’t know who you are.”