Hilton Head Gullah strike back at cancer in delicious way

Take 100 pounds of potatoes.

Peel them and put them in ice water for what’s left of the night.

In the morning, slice them, boil them and mix them into potato salad to serve 100. Then hope that many people come to buy a plate of Gullah home cooking on Hilton Head Island for $10 to help three women — all kin, all from the same area and all fighting cancer.

Collard greens, red rice, white rice, green beans, fried chicken, baked chicken, fried fish, ribs and blueberry corn bread.

That’s the way natives of Hilton Head show the love, salve life’s wounds and bless the ties that bind.

It’s how the Gullah survived on this sea island with no bridge, electricity, phones, running water or high school for a century. And even if the old communal culture is on the ebb, Queen Esther Bryan will stand over a stove full of hand-peeled potatoes this week and tell you flat out it ain’t dead yet.

She’s among a host of relatives and neighbors along Squire Pope, Gum Tree and Wild Horse roads who responded when her brother, Walter Young Jr., suggested the dinner. Now they are making the food to be sold beginning at 11 a.m. Saturday at the Rowing and Sailing Center at Squire Pope Community Park on Squire Pope Road.

Native islanders know it as the site of the Hilton Head Fishing Cooperative, which gave Gullah shrimpers a chance to net a bigger share of the money paid for their haul. Saturday’s event returns a cooperative spirit to the place on Skull Creek.

They’re calling it a Cancer Awareness Fundraiser Dinner.

It is to benefit Celesta Johnson, Veronica Young and Tonya Miller.

Celesta was diagnosed last June with breast cancer.

“It was a shocker to everybody,” said Tonya Miller.

But then came the same diagnosis for Veronica Young.

And on Jan. 7, three days before her 39th birthday, Tonya Miller was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, in the fourth stage.

While doctors tried to figure out what the problem was, she kept hearing, “It can’t be that. You’re too young. You’re too young.”

Her brothers Reco and Brandon and their wives, Keva and Jaala, did a fundraiser with purple T-shirts emblazoned with #TonyaTough. And on that day — April 9 — they declared Facebook would be turned purple with people modeling the T-shirts.

“That’s when I really, really realized people love me,” Tonya told me Thursday, two days after a 5-hour chemotherapy treatment.

A friend organized a benefit gospel concert that Tonya called “a night filled with praising God. There was no sadness.”

And then she said, “That’s what I’m going on — God is going to have my back through all of this.”

Her 9-year-old daugther Kennedi has some difficult days trying to understand it.

She hasn’t yet seen how her culture reacts to troubled waters, like the time they cooked to help her great-grandparents, Benjamin and Ida Mae Stewart, rebuild after their house burned.

Tonya said the ways of Benjamin Stewart, who spent his working years out on the water running a shrimp boat, taught her the solace of an island.

“The water is my place to go for peace,” she said.

You wouldn’t think she’s had much time for it. In the home of Floyd and Betty Miller, everyone was expected to get up, get out and work. Her first job was busing tables at Abe and Charliemae Grant’s seafood restaurant, but her main job growing up was at Harris Teeter. She got her undergraduate degree at Frances Marion University and master’s degree from Webster University, and for 12 years has worked at the S.C. Department of Vocational Rehabilitation in Beaufort.

Tonya will be busy, too, on Saturday when people come to the water’s edge to buy plates of traditional Lowcountry food. She also will be going to see Kennedi play the Queen of Bula Bula in the musical “Dear Edwina Jr.” at Hilton Head Elementary School.

Her community hopes she can go with plenty of potato salad — and lifted spirits.

This story was originally published May 5, 2016 at 4:28 PM with the headline "Hilton Head Gullah strike back at cancer in delicious way."