Celebrity with ties to Chester has ‘sweet’ childhood memories, helps host literacy event
Michael Smalls, a Gullah Geechee basket sewer wove sweetgrass into intricate baskets underneath a decades-old shade tree in Chester.
A dozen feet away, Anita Singleton Prather, or “Aunt Pearlie,” performed with the Gullah Kinfolk Traveling Theater in front of a modest crowd of spectators under an event canopy.
A half-dozen children painted a large mural of a building at Brainerd Institute where they were participating in Vivian Ayers’ “Workshops in Open Fields.” Ayers grew up in Chester and attended Brainerd.
And making her way around the activities, shaking hands and giving kind words, was Ayers’ daughter Phylicia Rashad, an award-winning Broadway and screen actress, director and producer.
Rashad said “Workshops in Open Fields” was held for several years, but the Covid pandemic made holding the event a challenge.
“This year we thought, well, let’s do something really different,” Rashad said. “Let’s do literacy through the arts and let’s invite the Gullah Geechee Corridor.”
The Gullah Geechee are descendants of enslaved people who developed a unique culture while working at plantations on isolated islands in the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. The Gullah Geechee are known for their basket weaving, storytelling, dancers and artists.
“The Gullah Geechee is kind of a keeper of African Heritage,” said Pete Stone, a program volunteer and spokesperson for Ayers.
At Saturday’s event, Smalls and Singleton Prather showcased their crafts, along with the Gullah Family Slide Dancers, storytellers, and other artists.
Singleton Prather said her traveling group hails from Beaufort, S.C., and has traveled to West Africa, Barbados and the West Indies to showcase their “rich, rich culture that we all share a piece in.”
“We’re coming to celebrate the Gullah Geechee and to continue to spread the love of the culture and the love itself to bring our community, our country together,” Singleton Prather said.
“Workshops in Open Fields” is not original to Chester.
Ayers, who will be 99 in July, moved to Houston, where she raised Rashad, her sister Debbie Allen, also an actress and director, and two sons. Ayers started “Workshops in Open Fields” in the 1970s in Texas when she served on the board for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ayers wanted to bring “Workshops” back to Chester and started the program in 2017.
“When she returned here to Chester to be here at Brainerd, the school that she attended, that her parents attended, that her grandparents attended, she saw the possibility of preschool literacy,” Rashad said Saturday.
Rashad purchased Brainerd in 1999. Ayers was concerned because plans were in place to build apartments on the property, Rashad said. Only one building remains on the 14-acre campus built in 1866 to serve local children of freed slaves. The buildings were never demolished, she said, and were left to decay.
Rashad said she would play on the grounds when she was a child, visiting her grandparents who lived nearby. She would roller-skate on the old tennis court. And every night, they would dance in the basement of a building, where they would play records.
She said her memories of Chester are “sweet.”
“I remember feeling safe here and secure. I remember community and how community came together to support one another. I remember peach cobblers and blackberries…Brainerd is the embodiment of all of those memories,” She said. “So much happened on these grounds, so much goodness happened here and when people come here, they feel it.”
This story was originally published June 19, 2022 at 1:10 PM.
