Storyteller brings Low Country history to Santa Rosa students

Students at Cesar Chavez Language Academy were treated to two on-campus weddings Monday: First-grader Quauhtemoc Anguiano, 6, married Principal Rebekah Rocha and third-grader Jackie Mendez, 8, wed Wuelby Soriano, a first-grade teacher.

Well, kind of.

The two happy couples held hands and jumped over a walking stick just before 10 a.m. in the Cesar Chavez Language Academy cafeteria. The ceremony was officiated by Anita Singleton-Prather, whose stage name is Aunt Pearlie Sue, a Gullah storyteller from Beaufort, South Carolina, and was a re-enactment of the way slaves were married in the South by “jumping the broom.”

Singleton-Prather was on campus to teach the first- through third-grade classes about the African culture of South Carolina’s Low Country - the Gullah culture. With African linguistics and culture preserved by the former slaves’ rural isolation, the Gullah have a language called Geechee and still have traditions, music and cuisine heavily influenced by Central and Western Africa.

The 120 antsy scholars gathered were - for the most part - enraptured by it all.

Dressed as Aunt Pearlie Sue, a character modeled after Singleton-Prather’s grandmother, she wove the history of South Carolina slave culture into an hour of song and dance during which the elementary schoolers could hardly stop giggling.

They took special delight in playacting where boys asked the girls to marry them, and the girls responded by wagging their fingers and saying, “No, Johnny, no.”

Singleton-Prather was invited to the school by Lindajoy Fenley, a substitute art and music teacher at the school who met her through Arts Midwest, a nonprofit organization that puts on performances and exhibitions that Fenley has been involved with since 2003.

Singleton-Prather, 59, wasn’t always a performer. She began as a teacher, where she honed her message of fostering love and diversity, and embracing innate talents often overlooked or underappreciated in students, she said.

That message was one she brought with her to the students at Cesar Chavez, a Pre-K-3 dual language immersion school that opened in 2013.

“I challenge you to plant the seed of love everywhere you go,” she said at the end of the hour. “And the world will be a better place for it.”

Fenley said that as the students filed out, a first-grader came up to her, saying, “I’m going to do what she said.”

“What I try to teach kids is that your greatness comes from the inside, and it’s already there,” Singleton-Prather said after the performance.

“The bottom line is kids still need to feel they’re valued. ... When we get kids to feel good about themselves, you can teach them anything, because they become self-motivated.”

The lesson is one that, Fenley said, is perfectly suited to a school like Cesar Chavez.

“It’s a message of love and diversity and those are values that we promote here,” Fenley said. “This was the perfect school for that, but those lessons of diversity and love are good anywhere.”

You can reach Staff Writer Christi Warren at 707-521-5205 or christi.warren@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @SeaWarren.