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 Gottlieb’s Delicatessen and a block to the north Gottlieb’s 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 thought—it 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 hand-
woven 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 Island—just down and across the
Savannah River and off the South Carolina coast—and 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 said—in fact, often said—that 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 we’re 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 mother’s 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 grandfather’s 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? It’s 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 add—as 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!