Words by Tony Thompson
It all started with his first taste of puppy love and adolescent heartbreak in the ninth grade. His first pretty, little girlfriend had broken his tiny heart, so the Charleston, S.C. native aptly called Da Geechie Poet took to paper and pen to release his emotions.
Sitting in study hall penciling his heartfelt prose, a close friend who was seated next to him read over the paper and encouraged him to continue to cultivate his craft.
Geechie didn’t think much of it at the time, but he would often use his every free moment to write stanza after stanza about the world around him, his feelings and his experiences. After noticing how he excelled in English, added to the fact that both his grandmother and best friend were adamant about him publishing his poetry, becoming an author didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
“After having a number of composition notebooks filled with so much potential, I told myself it was time,” the 31-year-old Geechie reveals.
That time didn’t come until after high school graduation when he was enrolled in college at Trident Technical College. Financial aid was giving him the run-around about his tuition, saying that his parents earned too much money for him to qualify for the state lottery financial assistance. And in order for him to continue his education, he would have to come out of pocket for school.
“If I’mma pay to go to school, I might as well do just the things that I was going to school to do,” he explains. “The professor would be talking in class. I’m supposed to be taking notes, but I’m writing rhymes.”
With this dilemma in front of him, the young scholar came to a crossroads in his life. “I came to the conclusion that I either give these people my money and take these math classes and these English classes for something the I’m trying to strive for,” he reveals, “or I can just put it all on the lines and get the book published. And that’s what I did.”
He adopted the pseudonym Da Geechie Poet as a reflection of his Gullah Geechee heritage, which is derived from descendants of enslaved West and Central Africans in North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Georgia.
The Gullah people and their creole dialect of English are called Geechee, and their culture has preserved much of their African linguistic and cultural customs from their crafts, farming and fishing to folk beliefs, music, cuisine and story-telling traditions which trace their lineage to Central and West African cultures.
“If you hear me another Geechee talking, you probably wouldn’t understand what we were saying,” he points out.
Born in the historic city of Charleston, the largest slave port in the United States at one time, and raised in the West Ashley section of town, Da Geechie Poet came up full of pride of his family legacy. And he knew that if he became a published author, his culture had to be on the forefront of anything he would do.
And although he had his plan well put together and systemically thought out, execution was a beast all on its own. At the time, getting books published on Amazon wasn’t possible, so Geechie started calling several publishers to distribute his book.
Each company he called told him to send them his entire manuscript, and they would quote him a price for their services. “Several companies told me this, and I was like ‘Nah, I can’t do that,’” he contends.
Continuing his search for a distributor, he stumbled on Xlibris Publishing and released his first book through the company in 2013. His book was available in Barnes & Nobles, Books A Million and on e-book.
Since then, he has published poetry books Carolina Bird: Geechie Boy in 2015 and Erotic Flight in 2020. Carolina Bird contains urban-styled poetry with worldly views, love themes and various encounters of life. Erotic Flight has more mature themes for adults only.
To his influences, he credits the likes of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maya Angelou, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Edgar Allan Poe and Tupac Shakur, to whom he acknowledges as being a catalyst for his true-to-life subject matter like the time he and his friends were harassed by the cops simply for being black.
“Tupac had a very big influence on me to write and not be a rapper,” he reveals. “There’s nothing wrong with being a rapper, but what I do is very, very different.”
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