"who they out there?"

The story of African Americans in cities often begins outside of cities. John Boles' study of South Carolina reveals, among many things, people of African descent's ties to land including land in the South. “The South is the blacks’ land, too,” he writes, “and southerner is a biracial term." While presenting the unique features of the oppressive slave era, including slavery’s development in Africa, Boles also draws attention to the eighteenth century when “blacks learned to communicate with one another…began to create families and develop a sense of black community." But as this scene in Julie Dash's 1991 "Daughters of the Dust" depicts, some of the earliest families of African descent in the United States also understood the degree to which there was a world beyond the immediate land around them. This world was quite different from their distinctive culture. If it is true African Americans are composed of many ancestral parts, as the Gullah people in Dash's film reveal, how does culture persist when people move to new locales? How is it altered?