When I first met Tia Clark, she told me she had recently hunted an alligator with a crossbow in the swamps of South Carolina. I saw the Gullah Geechee woman as a role model, a Black woman using her passion and athleticism to pursue a goal I’d been chasing — food sovereignty. For Clark, owner of Casual Crabbing with Tia, it’s like a call from the sea. “I don’t feel I’m choosing this. I feel like this is what I have to do,” she told Andscape.
Seven years ago, Clark didn’t fish, crab, or hunt. She was working in the food industry and experiencing health problems caused by inactivity, stress, and late nights. “If you had asked me then if I was gonna kill an alligator, I’d be like, ‘You better not get near me with no alligator,’ ” she said. But after returning to the water where her family found sustenance and meaning, Clark noticed a drastic improvement in her health. She was happier and stronger, lost weight, was no longer prediabetic, and felt spiritually at peace. “Before, there was a disconnect from my culture and my family, from everything. I would lose days and never take care of myself,” she said.
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These days, Clark teaches people to fish and crab because it’s fun and central to understanding Gullah Geechee culture and sustainability. The sea is in the blood of the Gullah Geechee people; it’s sacred and has provided most of their diet since their ancestors were taken from Africa and enslaved here. Due to gentrification and restrictions, the lack of access to fishing and crabbing sites has affected the diet of the Gullah Geechee people in South Carolina, so it is crucial to remind them to take their place in the seas. It also helps — via the saltwater fishing license Clark requires participants to purchase — for her to maintain the ecosystem of Charleston’s shorelines through her partnership with the city of Charleston.
Clark reminds people that being out here can help them connect to their ancestors and community. Hunting, crabbing, and fishing can help bring people back home to themselves, just as it has done for Clark. “My first memory is being hand-fed crab and shrimp in the dirt in my grandmother’s yard,” Clark said. “If I close my eyes, I can tell you where the table was, and I can tell you the taste of the sea in those crabs. All that stuff was already inside of me. And now being able to catch crabs brought it all back.”
That’s what sets sports like hunting and fishing apart from the others and what makes the exclusion of Black people, particularly Black women, from these sports all the more insidious. Feeding yourself is a form of self-defense. If we leave hunting and fishing to others, we leave ourselves and our communities defenseless. “The Atlantic Ocean is a mass graveyard,” Clark said. “That’s why, as Black people, we should reconnect with the water, because unless you feel these emotions yourselves, it’s easier to brush it off.”
There is a misconception that Black people are not interested in outdoor sports or activities such as swimming, hunting, and fishing. In South Carolina, where fishing was a path to freedom, a forced occupation, and an ancestral right limited by restrictions on enslaved people, folks have complicated feelings. Enslaved people built the maritime and fishing industry, wearing special badges that proved they had “permission” to be on the sea, or else they would be killed, jailed, or sold away. But they also called — and still call — the water home.
“There are all these stereotypes that say Black people don’t swim, don’t fish, don’t hunt. Those keep us away from those spaces. And when we are in those spaces, people look at us with suspicion because they’ve been told we don’t belong here,” Clark said, adding that she’s often overlooked and passersby assume white dockhands have more knowledge than she does about her business.
With an environment like that, do Black people even want to be there? Or do we, like Clark, want to build our own places away from values that emphasize extraction of resources — expensive hunting resorts, killing of wildlife, and illegal to illegal-ish hunting safaris? These aren’t just places where Black people aren’t welcome, but they are ones people like Clark actively reject.
“We need to get a mass influx of Black people to return to the water,” Clark said. “We do feel confident here, but we have to let our guards down some because the sea is powerful if you can get in, connect, and block out everything. I know that that’s not easy for everybody, so I try to take their phones, all the things that connect them to the outside world, and pull them into this world.”
For Black people, hunting and fishing are more than sports; they are usually not sports at all, not the way that others perceive them. It’s a way of communing with the ancestors, a form of community and individual self-defense, and a sacred responsibility. Clark is one of many mentors (including Chef Kimberly Tilsen-Brave Heart, Chance Renville, and Amethyst Ganaway) who taught me to respect the life that I took, to use it in a way that honored us all and brought us closer to sustainable futures.
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A hunt can become a way for the community to draw closer. After catching the alligator, Clark called her friends to fry it in buttermilk and spices, drenched in hot sauce. She gave alligator sausage and meat to those in the community who could use it, and she made a big pot of gator, shrimp, and okra gumbo for her family and friends. In this way, hunting and fishing become more than just lone sports but cultural inheritances passed down through families, elders, and friends.
Clark was one of the mentors who helped me prepare for my first duck hunt, where I cried like a child. Instead of focusing on teaching me to see it as a competition, Clark told me to recognize the sacred. “I’m telling you right now, your entire body’s gonna be trembling.” She recounted for me the story of her hunting the gator. “The boat was away from the gator, and the closer we got, the more the gator kept doubling and doubling in size. I stabbed him with the harpoon and shot the 45, and when I touched my chest, my whole body was convulsing, and I was in a primitive state. I couldn’t stop.”
Tia Clark with an alligator she hunted.
Tia Clark
I felt breathless listening to Clark, wondering about the gravity of the journey I was about to embark upon. It’s not just a sport. It’s a duty and a responsibility. We’ve trained ourselves to see food as an unserious thing that comes in plastic and paper. But it means something to catch your food. The fear and the sadness are natural. Trophy hunting is not.
Clark sees part of her mission to teach Black youth and Black women. “They’re where I put all my extra energy into because they will carry it into the future. It is their inheritance. And if we are not teaching them, then they are gonna be in a robot mode of going to the grocery store, buying the fake food, eating the fake food, and feeding their family off of it.”
For us, this is more than sport. It is healing. It is stewardship. It is communal. Black folks have always belonged to the sea, and Black women fishers like Clark are helping us reclaim our space out here, a place that is a homeland. As an African American and Caribbean descendant of slaves and migrants, I believe that the swirling center of the Atlantic Ocean is my home, my origin, and my birthplace. And Clark shared those feelings. “I would feel so strange … The hairs on my arm would start standing up when I went near the sea, especially near the spot where my family used to crab and fish,” she said.
“I asked my counselor, ‘What is happening to me? What is wrong with me?’ Then, this Black man told me it was an ancestral connection. Something we don’t know that’s causing that kind of reaction out of us when we get near that water,” Clark said. It’s a reaction she’s seen in others when showing people how to crab. “People are scared to get to the water. They don’t want to feel those feelings that it can stir up. They don’t want to go back to that trauma.” But it is not just trauma here, but our history. The sea holds great pain but also great love. Here, in these waters, with Clark as a mentor, Black people are not just engaging in a sport. They can commune with our ancestors, honor our past, and head toward the horizon of our food future.
Nylah Iqbal Muhammad is a James Beard Award-nominated writer with bylines in Travel + Leisure, Vogue, and New York Magazine. Her work explores culture, politics, food, and how they intersect, focusing on North American Indigenous, African Diasporic, and South Asian foodways.
