Broken spell: Medicinal remedies still a part of Lowcountry life

Bobby Middleton of St. Helena Island remembers the day his adopted brother got bitten by a snake.

The childhood memory has his adopted mother getting a frog, cutting it in half, soaking a rag with its blood and tying it around the snake bite to pull out the poison.

Middleton can laugh about it now that he's 81 years old and three punches on a cell phone from having an ambulance show up in his yard.

"In those days we rarely saw a doctor," he said. "We used herbs and practices handed down from the elders."

People don't cut frogs in half for snake bites any more in the Lowcountry.

Neither do they gather a plant called "Life Everlasting" and boil it into a tea to cure a cold. And few Gullah today would dig up a sassafras tree to make tea or a poultice like they did half a century ago.

They don't make pine-top tea for neck aches. And they don't boil Spanish moss, or stuff it into shoes, to relieve aches and pains.

But in a little shop in Bluffton, remnants of the medicinal tradition remains.

FULL CIRCLE

Lynn Ravare mixes both worlds at her Bluffton store.

She well remembers as a child on Hilton Head Island seeing people gather medicinal herbs for health care.

"I saw life-everlasting in a field," she said. "After the harvest in the fall, a lot of medicinal plants start drying in the field when the temperature drops."

She laughs.

"We don't have fields anymore."

She said she never saw plants or roots used for voodoo. She only saw it used for medicinal purposes.

As an adult, the only place she sees this kind of harvesting is in her store on May River Road. It's called Back To Nature.

She holds up a box of Celestial Seasonings peppermint herbal tea.

"The natives of Hilton Head would plant peppermint," she said. "It's the same thing then as now. They used it to settle the stomach."

And they would make peppermint oil for quick, temporary relief from toothaches, she said.

Ravare reaches for a box of the plant mullein. A picture on the box shows exactly what she still sees growing on Hilton Head.

"It was made into a tea, mostly for respiratory issues," she said.

Garlic was planted by the Gullah for use in regulating blood pressure and fighting infections, she said.

"I want to stress that it wasn't because of a lack of access to the outside world that islanders used these plants," she said.

"These were things people had used forever and they knew they worked," she said. "Agriculture began in Africa. These people had skills. They were not just laborers. They came here knowing these remedies. They knew how to identify plants. The Indians did the same thing. Naturally, you use what you know."

But that era is gone, she said. Today, her customers are from all cultures and ethnic groups. They are seeking non-processed products. They are bringing medicine and health full circle.

"You can still use herbs for health benefits," Ravare said.

There are others too who are trying to preserve the traditions.

The Gullah Museum of Hilton Head Island honored 15 people last year for offering such medical care long before there was a hospital.

Among them was Adrianna Ford, a midwife and healer who walked the island roads in the 1930s, '40s and '50s dressed in a sharp uniform.

"We must not forget to remember," museum founder Louise Cohen said at the time.

Follow columnist and senior editor David Lauderdale on Twitter at twitter.com/ThatsLauderdale and facebook.com/david.lauderdale.16.

This story was originally published January 22, 2016 at 2:50 PM with the headline "Broken spell: Medicinal remedies still a part of Lowcountry life."