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As Hurricane Florence made landfall this week, I was reminded of the film “Daughters of the Dust,” Julie Dash’s 1991 masterpiece about a Gullah community that lives on the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast.

The narrative of the film, which is set on a summer day in 1902, is centered on one family’s decision to migrate to the American mainland, and the spiritual and emotional costs of leaving their home on the island.

Gullah communities still exist along the Carolina, Georgia and Florida coasts. Today, on St. Helena Island, in South Carolina, there are about 5,000 Gullah people, the descendants of slaves who worked on rice plantations before the Civil War.