What it Was, Was Gullah! Thomas A. Williams I grew up in a two-story house at the corner of 33rd and Bull Streets in Savannah. This was in he late 1930s and early 1940s. My neighborhood was its own little universe, an unlikely cosmopolitan oasis in a deep Southern world. Across the street was the Irish-Catholic stronghold of Sacred Heart Church. A block further south was Gottliebs Delicatessen and a block to the north Gottliebs Bakery. Around the corner was Tony Rousakis Italian Confectionery, where I did a thriving business selling bundles fat pine kindlin' wood and where I met my first pinball machine. A couple more blocks took you to the imposing columns and roman portico of the Bull Street Baptist Church and, directly opposite, the ornately-domed Greek Orthodox church. I accepted this amazing diversity without a thoughtit was just the way things were. All this I took for granted., What caused real wonder to me were the regular Saturday incursions into my neighborhood of the stately, proud Black women who walked our streets, lange handwoven baskets perched securely on their heads (how did they do this, I wondered?). They announced themselves in the very early morning with the sing-song cry of Butty bean Oh, yeh fiel pea! . . . Butty bean, Oh, yeh fiel Pea! Truth be known, I never quite understood the words between Butty bean and fiel pea. There was usually more than one of these vegetable ladies, as I thought of them, and I loved to hear them talk to one another. The words, sounds and rhythms of their speech were of an essence with the place where I lived, yet it was different, somehow more elemental that the schoolbook English I had been taught to use. What it was, was Gullah What I was listening to was Gullah, the language spoken by the African-American inhabitants of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. The relationship between the people of Daufuskie Islandjust down and across the Savannah River and off the South Carolina coastand Savannah was particularly close. There was a regular traffic of boats, large and small, between Bloody Point on the south end of Daufuskie and River Street in Savannah. Some islanders took powerboats; some had small sail boats sailed; others even rowed. They all came to Savannah to sell the goods they produced and to buy the supplies they needed. And on Saturday mornings they reached my house at 33rd and Bull, bringing their Gullah language with them. How languages develop Where did this language come from, and why was it different from the English I spoke? Languages develop in several ways. Sometimes isolation alone can allow sounds to drift and slowly change until a brand new language is formed. This, for instance, is what happened to Latin. Latin never died, contrary to what we may have learned in school. It just became something else. The Alps separated Italy from France, and the Pyrenees separated France from Spain. In the resulting isolation, the old Latin became French, Spanish and Italian. Languages can also result from a mingling of large numbers of individuals from different linguistic groups who, by necessity, must find a way to communicate. Gullah originated in this way, as a mix of original African languages as a base and an overlay of English and other languages from colonizing European countries like France and Portugal. Gullah had both these elements going for it. Captured Africans from many West African tribes were gathered at places like the infamous Bunce Island, off the coast of Sierra Leon. There they were imprisoned together until they could be sold into slavery and transported to the American colonies. Their desperate need to communicate with each other as well as with their captors literally forced the development of a new language. When those lucky enough to survive the horrendous crossing of the Atlantic got to t his country, they found themselves relatively isolated. The rice plantations on

the sea islands had no bridges to the mainland, and even the plantation owners themselves were often not in residence, preferring the comforts of Charleston and Savannah to the rigors and social isolation of island life. In this environment, the Africans talked mainly to one another, without outside influence, and their language thrived and became the vessel of the cultural traditions of a people. Whence Gullah It is not known when the island people began to be called Gullah nor where the name itself came from. The most likely origin comes from the shortened form of the place name Angola, a country from which many Africans were indeed shipped. There is another possible source in the tribal name Gola found in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Some suggest that the name Ogeechee and Gullah may have had a common origin in an Indian name. It is also saidin fact, often saidthat Gullah and Geechee refer to the same language, especially as used by the Gullah speakers themselves. As a boy shaped by the languages of the Southern tidewater in the 1930s and 40s, I do not believe this to be wholly accurate. My friends and I all knew what Geechee was: a peculiar way of pronouncing vowel sounds indigenous to the coast, but strictly an English phenomenon. Gullah to us was something quite different. It was the language of the street vendors and the sellers of produce and seafood at the old City Market and on the streets. Still, no less an authority than supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, who grew up in the Georgia tidewater, calls this language Geechee: When I was 16, Thomas remembers, I was sitting as the only black kid in my class, and I had grown up speaking a kind of a dialect. It's called Geechee. Some people call it Gullah now, and people praise it now. But they used to make fun of us back then. It's not standard English. When I transferred to an all-white school, I was self-conscious, like we all are. It's like if we get pimples at sixteen, or we grow six inches and were taller than everybody else, or our feet grow or something; we get self-conscious. And the problem was that I would correct myself mid-sentence. I was trying to speak standard English. I was thinking in standard English but speaking another language. It is clear that the language Clarence Thomas learned in his mothers arms had strong and definite roots and that those roots reached back to West Africa. Though influenced by English traders in Africa and later in this country by white plantation owners and overseers, Gullah retained many African words, phrases, and sentence structures. Any lingering doubts about the African origin of Gullah were overcome in 1940 when the linguist Alonzo Turner published the results of two decades of painstaking research in his book, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Turner catalogued over three thousand words and names of African origin in recordings he had made of Gullah speakers. Examples included food names like okra, yam, benne, cush, goober, cala (a rice-based sweet) buckra, (white man), hoodoo, (sorcery), and cooter, (turtle). A fishing trip I remember once going fishing in the Ogeechee River my Uncle Edward. We had caught a mess of Red Breast perfect for pan-frying and, for temporary storage, had strung them on a line tied to a tree branch so that they would dangle in the cool, running water. When we got ready to leave and pulled our string line up, we found that the lower half of each fish had been eaten away. What happened, I asked my uncle Cooter got em, he replied. He was a man of few words, my uncle. Neither he nor I realized that he was using a Gullah word. Other Gullah words have entered general use in Southern speech. I remember on day standing in the barnyard of my grandfathers farm. I was puzzled by the many names we gave to the chickens scratching there for food. There were hens, laying hens, roosters, pullets, fryers and, in the spring, my favorites, the tiny, yellow biddies that we were raising to keep our supply of drum sticks constant in spite of the chicken-yard slaughter occasioned by our traditional Sunday dinners. I pointed at the little, yellow chicks. Why do we call them biddies? I asked.

Because they are just little, biddy things, my grandfather replied. His explanation did not satisfy me. I wanted to know where the word came from. Well, now I know. The word bidi means small bird or chicken in the Kongo (or Kigongo) language in south central Africa and was brought to this country by Africans who were sold as slaves and who incorporated the word into their Gullah dialect. A very useful word, it was quickly passed on to their white captors. Not only my uncle, but my grandpa, too, was speaking Gullah. The infamous juke joint If you grew up in the South you know what a juke joint is. It is a dive on the edge of town with motorcycles, hot rods and pickup trucks outside, where one goes of a Saturday night for beer, music, companionship and a fist fight or two. I knew what a juke joint was, having frequented more than one of them in my younger days. But where did the word juke come from? Its easy to say that it referred to the jukeboxes found in such spots. But that begs the question. Why are the music machines called jukeboxes? Turns out that the juke joint was not named after the machine, but the machine after the joint. Lorenzo Turner points out that the word juke has its roots in the Gullah word juk, which means "infamous" or "disorderly. The Gullah word itself, Turner says, goes back to the West African Wolof tribe word jug, meaning to lead a disorderly life and jugu," meaning a wicked, violent, or naughty person. Another mystery solved. The Rice Coast and the Sea Islands If there was a Gullah homeland, it was probably in present-day Sierra Leone. It was only natural for plantation owners interested in growing rice, the chief crop of the islands until the time of emancipation, to seek workers who were familiar with its cultivation. Africans who were natives of Sierra Leone and adjoining regions in West Africa, an area known as the rice coast, supplied this need precisely, and many were brought to the Lowcountry islands, where rice constituted the main cash crop. The African rice coast stretches from Senegal, through Sierra Leone to Liberia, but the Gullah peoples seem to have come predominantly from tribes in Sierra Leone. It is known that speakers of the Kris language in Sierra Leone, which already incorporated many borrowings from English, and Gullah speakers of older generations would have been intelligible to one another, much as modern Portuguese speakers can understand Spanish. Many words illustrate this close relationship. In Gullah the plural pronoun una has a meaning close to the ubiquitous Southern you all The word comes from West Africa and forms of it are common in the Caribbean. Area. Another instance of this survival of African expressions is the word duh, which indicates continuing action. In Gullah there is usually one form of a verb, and that form is made do for all used. To make, for instance, gives I mek, you mek, he mek, etc. To indicate that something is actually happening in the present moment, as in he is making, the Gullah speaker inserts the word duh before the verb. Thus He is making becomes he duhmek. And we are going, becomes we duhgo. In their isolated environment on the islands, the languages the Africans brought to America continued to change, borrowing more and more from the English-speaking bosses, and becoming more and more diluted. Nevertheless, we know that in the 1950s Justice Thomas was still having problems making himself understood. A Southernism that has always interested me is our way of adding and them after a name to indicate a person and those you normally think of as being in the same group. Thus, when we say Marcie and them we are referring to Marcie and her habitual groups of friends and associates. (Sometimes we prefer the expression and that crowd, but this has slightly pejorative overtones.) A similar usage exists in Gullah, where dem is attached directly to a name to mean that person and those usually associated with him. In Gullah Marcie and them becomes Marciedem. Whether the expression went from Gullah to English or

English to Gullah is a question to ponder. Another colorful English to Gullah adaptation is to addas is done in certain African languages an i to the end of an adjective: wicked becomes wikiti, and naked becomes nekiti. These formations have a certain charm. I can imagine a young man bragging to a friend, She was almost nekiti, and her sidelong smile was downright wikiti. A Gullah Story The Africans who came to the islands arrived on our shores with no material possessions except the ragged clothes on their backs, but they remembered who they were and where they came from, and they brought in their hearts a rich cultural tradition. Their close knowledge of the natural world survived intact, including the natural remedies for aches and pains of the body that underlay the skills of generations of root doctors, who applied this lore to local needs. They brought rituals of birth and marriage, and, when the body finally gave out, rituals of death and burial. The great folk wisdom of the Gullah people manifested itself in the many proverbs and animal stories they told to entertain each other and instruct their children. An example is the story of Buh Lion and Buh Goat, collected in 1888 by Charles Colcock Jones. Note that it tells a story and ends with a lesson, Aesop fashion. Buh Lion bin a hunt, an eh spy Buh Goat duh leddown topper er big rock duh wuk eh mout an der chaw. Eh creep up fuh ketch um. Wen eh git close ter um eh notus um good. Buh Goat keep on chaw. Buh Lion try fuh fine out wuh Buh Goat duh eat. Eh yent see nuttne nigh um ceptin de nekked rock wuh eh duh leddown on. Buh Lion stonish. Eh wait topper Buh Goat. Buh Goat keep on chaw, an chaw, an chaw. Buh Lion cant mek de ting out, an eh come close, an eh say: "Hay! Buh Goat, wuh you duh eat?" Buh Goat skade wen Buh Lion rise up befo um, but eh keep er bole harte, an eh mek ansur: "Me duh chaw dis rock, an ef you dont leff, wen me done long um me guine eat you." Dis big wud sabe Buh Goat. Bole man git outer diffikelty way coward man lose eh life. (Translation: Buh Lion was hunting, and he spied Buh Goat lying down on top of a big rock working his mouth and chewing. He crept up to catch him. When he got close to him, he watched him good. Buh Goat kept on chewing. Buh Lion tried to find out what Buh Goat was eating. He didn't see anything near him except the naked rock that he was lying down on. Buh Lion was astonished. He waited for Buh Goat. Buh Goat kept on chewing, and chewing, and chewing. Buh Lion couldn't make the thing out, and he came close, and he said: "Hey! Buh Goat, what are you eating?" Buh Goat was scared when Buh Lion rose up before him, but he kept a bold heart, and he made (his) answer: "I am chewing this rock, and if you don't leave me (alone), when I am done with it I will eat you." This big word saved Buh Goat. A bold man gets out of difficulty where a cowardly man loses his life.) ` Like so many other fine things in our world, the Gullah language is slowly giving way to relentless forces of standardization, and since it was not a written language Gullah is particularly vulnerable to these forces. Linguists and anthropologists like Lorenzo Turner in the 1930s and Joseph Opala today have worked and are working to preserve it both in recorded speech and in written form. But the best place to learn about Gullah would have been with me at the corner of 33rd and Bull Streets, hanging around the old Savannah City Market of a Saturday, or going down to river street in the old days to greet the boats as they came in from Daufuskie Island. And maybe even taking a ride back to the island on one of them!