DL Open Thread Sunday Magazine: November 30, 2025

Gullah Geechee Families  Seek Return Of Homeland Seized By Government:

A once thriving Black community along the Georgia coast called Harris Neck is now covered with greenery. During its heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the area boasted a schoolhouse, general store, firehouse and seafood processing plants, and supported 75 Black households on 2,687 acres. The inhabitants were Gullah Geechee people, the descendants of formerly enslaved west Africans, who remained on the Sea Islands along the south-east US where they retained their distinct creole language and culture following the civil war.

In 1942, though, the community was razed to the ground when the federal government kicked the families off of the land using eminent domain to build an army airfield. For nearly 50 years, the descendants of the Harris Neck community have fought to regain their ancestral land through peaceful protests and lobbying local and federal governments to no avail.

Tyrone Timmons’ great grandfather’s oyster factory on more than 300 acres of land was one of the casualties during the government takeover. A few years ago, Timmons and his family walked the former oyster factory grounds for the first time in decades. A clearing lined with shrubbery and oak trees with low-hanging limbs led to a bluff that overlooked marshland. It was a profound experience for 52-year-old Timmons, “to be able to just walk on that property”, Timmons told the Guardian, “to just be able to feel that sense of being home, feeling complete”.

Now, as the president of the advocacy group the Direct Descendants of Harris Neck Community (DDHNC), Timmons has continued his family’s legacy of watching over the grounds, even if he doesn’t live on them himself. Two advocacy organizations composed of descendants – Harris Neck Land Trust established in 2005 and DDHNC started in 2019 – have worked to educate the public and petition the government to return the land.

The story of Harris Neck began after the civil war. In 1865, the plantation owner Margaret Ann Harris left in her will more than 2,000 acres of land to Robert Delegal, whom she formerly enslaved. Delegal later sold the land to 75 Gullah Geechee families. By the late 1800s, Harris Neck was a self-sufficient Black community.

“We knew the land, we were farmers and fishermen,” said Wilson Moran, who is Gullah Geechee and an adviser for the Harris Neck Land Trust. “We did the crabs, the shrimp, the fish, the horses, the clams, the conch. We did rice, cotton and other agricultural products. So we became quite successful … we had our own fire station at our own school, and we had our own community.”

The airfield was only in use for about a year.  There really is no remaining reason for the land not to be returned to the ancestors whose families created this thriving community.

Highly-recommended.

‘Village Jill’ Makes Her Substack Debut!  The village, of course, being Arden.  I read the following piece at first out of a sense of obligation (after all, I inflict my song lists on her monthly), but then out of a sense of appreciation.  Nothing I like more than an inquisitive mind who writes pieces that make me think.  Like this one:

In a college sociology class, I first learned about the invisible labor of women—the unseen tasks that keep a household running: tracking birthdays, buying gifts, scheduling vet visits, keeping an eye on the milk. It was a new concept in the early ’90s, but once I learned it, I couldn’t unsee it—even in my own household. Mark and I started our own family soon after college. Mark was an engaged partner, we had been warned of the imbalance, and still, so many of those invisible tasks fell to me.

Now, thirty years later, the conversation about lopsided roles in heterosexual couples has expanded to include the emotional realm. Mankeeping, a term coined by psychologist Angelica Puzio Ferrara, describes the unpaid, often invisible social and emotional labor many women perform to manage the relational lives of the men they love. It’s the housekeeping of connection—checking in with his friends, smoothing over misunderstandings, remembering birthdays, keeping family ties alive. In short, it’s maintaining the social fabric, so he doesn’t have to think about it.

And because she often becomes the social bridge, she also becomes the emotional one—the sole outlet for his emotional processing. What begins as care can quietly become containment: her energy holding the charge of his inner world. Over time, that kind of emotional labor doesn’t just hold the relationship—it holds him.

It’s not that men don’t value connection—it’s that many have never been taught how to sustain it on their own. Women grow up surrounded by networks of care: we debrief with friends, process aloud, pass feelings around until they lose their sting. Many men, meanwhile, are taught that intimacy belongs at home, if anywhere at all. Their partners become their social planners, confidants, and emotional first responders—a system of one.

No, this isn’t a screed.  It’s a statement of the issue, which she goes on to address:

I don’t think the world needs another essay telling men to open up or women to set boundaries. What we need are better spaces—and better scripts.

Research shows that men communicate more comfortably side by side than face to face. It’s why so many of life’s most honest conversations happen while driving, fixing something, seated at a bar, or walking a trail. That shoulder-to-shoulder posture lowers the stakes. You’re not performing intimacy; you’re simply inhabiting it.

So maybe the way forward isn’t more instruction, but design: creating environments that invite connection instead of demanding it. A weekly walk. A standing coffee meeting. A shared project. Places where silence isn’t awkward and emotions can surface casually and without announcement.

And then—time. These things don’t happen overnight. You can’t schedule one conversation and expect instant intimacy. Real connection is layered—built from repetition, reliability, and shared experience. Trust and the ability to be open accumulates in small but steady increments, like rings inside a tree. Over time, those layers become a living record of presence, vulnerability, and care.

The Kelce brothers didn’t redefine masculinity, but they reminded us that it can be nuanced; that laughter, tears, and loyalty can coexist with strength. My hiking group didn’t engineer emotional fluency for men, but it offered a space where it could unfold on its own.

This relationship insight is at the heart of what living in Arden is teaching me—and what I’m hoping to pass along: how community, in all its forms, can hold what no single person should have to carry alone. And how we might break broader societal issues into smaller, human-sized pieces—problems we can address at the community level.

They Are The Walruses (Walri?):

Scientists have discovered a new walrus haul-out on a stretch of shoreline in Svalbard – a remote archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, found between mainland Norway and the North Pole.

The enormous marine mammals, which can weigh almost two tonnes, were spotted using satellite imagery as part of Walrus from Space, a conservation project organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).

Question: If the walri can use satellite imagery, do they really need our help?  But, I digress:

The walrus is what is known as a keystone species, meaning it plays a pivotal role in supporting the ecosystem it lives in. But today, melting sea ice as a result of climate change is putting increasing pressure on these powerful animals.

Being able to monitor them is therefore more important than ever. And that’s exactly what the Walrus from Space project aims to do, delivering a census of Atlantic walrus populations in Canada, Greenland and the Norwegian Arctic using satellite imagery – information which can then be used to explore what might happen to them as the climate changes.

“Walruses are big, powerful animals, but they are also increasingly vulnerable to the implications of the climate crisis, as the sea ice is literally melting out from underneath them,” says Rod Downie, Chief Adviser at Polar & Oceans for WWF.

Consider–The Theremin:

The Austrian composer and sound artist Dorit Chrysler was at a marketplace years ago, in the Serbian town of Gornji Milanovac, when an Orthodox priest shoved a cross in her direction. She had been playing the theremin and “he thought it was the work of the devil,” Chrysler recently recalled.

His reaction wasn’t exactly unusual. Since its invention in the 1920s, the theremin, an electronic instrument that emits a beguiling, oscillating sound, has often been perceived by people as weird and uncanny. It was used extensively in the scores of 1940s and ’50s science fiction and horror films, for one thing. And thereminists appear to carve sound out of thin air, using their hands to prompt a distinct whir from its wooden, lectern-like body by manipulating the electromagnetic fields around its two antennae. (No touching is required.)

But according to Chrysler, who is a co-founder of the New York Theremin Society, a nonprofit that promotes the visibility and application of the instrument, the “distinct, scary vibrato” often heard in old Hollywood movies is only one of its “many sides.” The society is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, and Chrysler is determined to prove that the theremin — which appears in music by Karen O, Aldous Harding and Erykah Badu — is as deserving of a place in the pantheon of “established musical instruments” as violins, keyboards and synthesizers.