FOREWORD
Just under the left shoulder of Africa, which juts out boldly into the Atlantic, as though to meet half way the right shoulder of South America, lie, between Sierra Leone and the Bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, the Ivory Coast, and the Gold Coast. It was the lure of gold and ivory that brought to these shores the enterprising traders who first offered the African slave-holders a stable foreign market for the captives of bow and spear and knobkerrie.
Out of this fetid armpit of the Dark Continent came the first black bondsmen to curse the Western world. Thence, across the narrowing ocean, but a night’s flight for Walt Whitman’s “Man-of-War-Bird”—
“At dusk that look’st on Senegal, at morn America”—Portuguese and Spanish traders, but a few years after Columbus had set foot on San Salvador, transported their first human cargoes to the plantations of Brazil and the rich islands of the Caribbean. Here the labor of the blacks proved so profitable that the envious English soon engaged in the traffic, and during the reign of the virginal Elizabeth certain of her noble subjects sought concessions for the monopoly of the West Indian slave trade.
A generation or two later, the first slaves filtered through to the mainland colonies of North America from the Barbados, Antigua, and other West Indian Islands. After the institution had become firmly established, the New England eye, not lacking “speculation,” saw the promise of the East, and New England, pocketing her prayer book while pouching hermusket balls, freighted her bluff-bowed ships with red flannel and glass beads with which to accentuate, if not to clothe, the heathen nakedness, and set sail for the rising sun. Thenceforth the New England slavers sailed in cycles, and their course was charted by rum, slaves, and molasses. The “black-birders” bartered their human cargoes for West Indian molasses, which, by a spirituous, if not a spiritual, process, became New England rum. “Old Medford” filled their holds, westerly winds filled their bellying sails, and the rum was soon converted into more slaves, to be in turn converted again into molasses in completing the gainful cycle.
For a hundred and fifty years Rhode Island and Massachusetts competed successfully with England for the North American trade, and these colonies (with “God’s grace”) throve exceedingly. In the early years of the last century, however, the importation of slaves was interdicted and the last Yankee slaver converted the last rum-bought slave into cash, then, converting himself, he became an Abolitionist, and the well-known “New England conscience” was developed.
But the Puritan slaver, whatever “woes unnumbered” he brought upon his own race, was, in transferring these bought or stolen blacks to the humane Cavalier planters of the South, an unconscious benefactor to thousands of Negro captives and to millions of their descendants, whose masters gave them Christianity and such a measure of civilization, that, in the short space of two hundred years from the cannibal savagery of the stew-pot and the spit, they were fitted, in the New England mind, at least, for manhood suffrage, which came to enlightened England only after more than a thousand years of development!
None of the encyclopedias mentions the Gullah Negroes, nor does the name appear in the dictionaries. Mr. John Bennett, the well-known writer of Charleston, who has, for twenty years, been gathering data concerning this interesting people, places the Gullahs among the Liberian group of tribes; “formerly powerful and numerous, they have been crowded and overrun; their remnant remains about thirty miles inward from Monrovia;” but in 1822, in a publication by the Charleston City Council at the time of the attempted Negro insurrection, reference is made to “Gullah Jack” and his company of “Gullah or Angola” Negroes, thereby making the suggestion that “Gullah” is a corruption of Angola. As Angola and Liberia are at least fifteen hundred miles apart, the former being nearly one thousand miles south of the Equator, these two opinions seem to be in hopeless conflict.
Mr. Bennett says further: “Among the many African tribes brought to this country, the presence of very many Gullah Negroes is apparent from the earliest times. On some plantations, before the days of experienced precaution, it is highly probable they formed a majority of the hands. As early as 1730 a plan had been hatched against Charleston by these Negroes....
“The dialect of the West Coast, from which came these Gullah Negroes, was early commented upon as peculiarly harsh, quacking, flat in intonation, quick, clipped and peculiar even in Africa. Bosman, the Dutch sailor, described its peculiar tonality, and calls its speakers the ‘Qua-quas,’ because they gabbled like ducks.
“The clinging together of these Gullah tribesmen, as indicated above, and their apparent resolute and persistentcharacter, evidently assisted in impressing their dialectical peculiarities on weaker and more plastic natures brought in contact with them, and fixed the tonality of the Negro dialect of the Carolina low-country....
“For the above reason, of prevalence and domination as a peculiar dialect with singular and marked tonality, the characteristic patois of the districts where these Negroes most abounded, came to be universally referred to as the Gullah dialect.”
Whatever the origin of these Gullahs, Mr. Bennett is probably correct in his estimate of their influence upon low-country Negro speech.
Slovenly and careless of speech, these Gullahs seized upon the peasant English used by some of the early settlers and by the white servants of the wealthier Colonists, wrapped their clumsy tongues about it as well as they could, and, enriched with certain expressive African words, it issued through their flat noses and thick lips as so workable a form of speech that it was gradually adopted by the other slaves and became in time the accepted Negro speech of the lower districts of South Carolina and Georgia. With characteristic laziness, these Gullah Negroes took short cuts to the ears of their auditors, using as few words as possible, sometimes making one gender serve for three, one tense for several, and totally disregarding singular and plural numbers. Yet, notwithstanding this economy of words, the Gullah sometimes incorporates into his speech grotesquely difficult and unnecessary English words; again, he takes unusual pains to transpose numbers and genders.
On some of the sea-islands and on portions of the mainland, sparsely inhabited by whites, the Gullah speech still persists in its original “purity.” The explanation for this is that the Negroes, before and after the war, were in so tremendous a majority on the great plantations of the low-country that only the house servants came in frequent contact with their masters’ families, and these house servants, certainly those who had been “in the house” for generations, spoke with scarcely a taint of Negro speech. The field hands, seldom coming in contact with whites, had neither opportunity nor temptation to amend their speech. There was none to “impeach” their language, and so virile was this Gullah that, in some sections higher up the state, as in Barnwell and Sumter counties, where, in the settlement of estates certain families or colonies of coast-bred Negroes were sold before the war, the Gullah tongue, although with difficulty understood by the other Negroes of the community, still persists like lingual oases in the desert of up-country Negro speech.
This Gullah dialect is interesting, not merely for its richness, which falls upon the ear as opulently as the Irish brogue, but also for the quaint and homely similes in which it abounds and for the native wit and philosophy of its users. Isolated from the whites as were these coast Negroes, and having no contact with the more advanced slaves of the up-country, who, belonging as a rule to small slave-holders, were in close touch with their masters’ families, the coast Negroes retained more of the habits and traditions of their African ancestry and presented, therefore, a more interesting study of the Negro as he was, and to a certainextent “ever shall be.” Living close to nature, they were learned in woodcraft and the ways of animals and birds and fish, and used this knowledge to illustrate their dealings with their own kind.
The peasantry, the lower classes generally, are the conservators of speech. Writers who have exploited the white mountaineers of the Appalachian ranges of North Carolina and Tennessee have heard from their lips Biblical and Shakesperean English now almost forgotten among educated people. So these coast Negroes still use fragments of Shakesperean English long obsolete among their former masters.
To Mr. Bennett and other philological investigators must be committed the task of working out the sources of many words of this interesting tongue. The purpose here is simply to record the oddities of the dialect as the Coast Country Negroes use it. After all, grotesque and interesting as is this speech to those familiar with it, it is only a vehicle for carrying to the reader the thought and life of an isolated group among the varied peoples that make up the complex population of this Republic.
There have been many writers of Negro dialect. Some stories that have come out of the North, feminine effusions chiefly, have been fearfully and wonderfully made; the thoughts of white people, and very common-place thoughts at that, issuing from Negro mouths in such phonetic antics as to make the aural angels weep!
In fact, no Northern writer has ever succeeded even indifferently well in putting Negro thought into Negro dialect. Even Poe, in “the Goldbug,” put intothe mouth of a Charleston Negro such vocables as might have been used by a black sailor on an English ship a hundred years ago, or on the minstrel stage, but were never current on the South Carolina coast. To recent Southern writers, therefore, one must turn for intelligent understanding of the Negro character and the recording of his speech, which varies in the different sections of the South.
Thomas Nelson Page, recognized as the outstanding exponent of the Virginia Negro in literature, has yet touched his field lightly, considering chiefly the old family man servant and his relations with his master’s household. Very beautifully and tenderly, because very truthfully, Mr. Page has portrayed the ante-bellum Negro man servant; but as to the younger Negro, Negro life before and since the war, and the relations of Negroes to one another, it is to be regretted that he has contributed little or nothing.
The genius of Joel Chandler Harris, who, with Judge Longstreet and his “Georgia Scenes,” fixed Georgia firmly upon the literary map of the world, embalmed the Negro myths and folk-tales of the South so subtly in the amber of his understanding that “Uncle Remus” is known and loved by the children of half the civilized world. There was little creative work in “Uncle Remus.” Mr. Harris claimed to record the stories only “like hit wer’ gun ter me.” These myths were known and told by Negro nurses to the white children over all the Southern states, and in the West Indian Islands as well, but the artistry of Harris lay in the sympathetic understanding of children prompted by his kindly heart, and the human appeal of the tender relations of “the little boy” andthe old Negro family servant was irresistible, not only to the children, but to those happy grown-ups who loved them.
It is interesting to know that in the low-country of South Carolina, instead of “Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox,” it is invariably “Buh Rabbit en’ Buh Wolf.” Strange, too, because wolves must have been found in upper Georgia and Carolina for more than a hundred years after they were exterminated along the coast, within whose forests still abound the grey foxes whose natural prey is the rabbit.
Encouraged by the success of the “Uncle Remus” stories, which greatly surprised this singularly modest man, Mr. Harris wrote novels and other stories of Georgia life among whites and blacks. While these were published successfully, it is upon the animal tales of “Uncle Remus” that his fame has been permanently established.
In the introduction to one of his volumes Mr. Harris has made a rather exhaustive study and analysis of the origin of these Negro myths. That they are of African origin none can doubt, but as on the West Coast of Africa, whence the slaves came to the American continent and the West Indian Islands, there are neither wolves, foxes, nor rabbits, it would be interesting to know what African animals were their legendary prototypes. In Jamaica many of the “Uncle Remus” tales are current and have been told to English children by their black nurses for generations, but there the Anancy Spider, a black, hairy tarantula-like creature, is substituted for the rabbit in the mythical triumph of mind over matter—cunning over physical strength—while the tiger does duty for the outwitted fox. Whencecomes the Jamaican tiger? One can only surmise that tales of the strength and ferocity of the Jaguar (“el tigre” to the Spaniards) the great spotted cat of South and Central America, were brought from the mainland to the West Indies by the Indians of the Caribbean Coast or the earlier Negro slaves; but in Jamaica even the saddle-horse story is told complete in all its details, the spider, clapping spurs to the tiger’s flanks and riding him up to the house of the “nyung ladies” (Mis’ Meadows an de gals) hitching him to a post and walking boldly in to love’s conquest. For the “Tar Baby” story, instead of the violated spring, the drinking preserve of fox or wolf, a “tar pole” is set up in a banana grove, and to this sticky lure the pilfering spider is found stuck fast by the lord of the plantation when he makes his morning rounds.
Harry Stillwell Edwards, of Macon, is another Georgian whose charming stories in the up-country or cotton plantation dialect have given pleasure to thousands. With an unusual knowledge of the Negro character—the first consideration, if one would present truthful pictures of Negro life—he combines a charming literary style, and his writings deservedly rank high among Negro stories.
Harris touched the Gullah dialect very lightly and not with authority. In “Nights with Uncle Remus,” a later collection of Negro myths, he puts into the mouth of “Daddy Jack” certain variants of the Uncle Remus stories told in the dialect of the coast, and in his introduction to this volume he acknowledges his obligation to correspondents in Charleston and elsewhere on the Carolina and Georgia Coasts for the Gullah stories. It is almost certain that helacked first-hand contact with the story-tellers, and thus missed some of the subtleties of their speech as well as the peculiar construction of their sentences, differing entirely, as they do, from those of the up-country Negroes. Mr. Harris also includes in his introduction a brief glossary of Gullah words, and expresses the opinion that this peculiar dialect is more easily read than the Georgia dialect of “Uncle Remus,” an opinion in which, unfortunately for the popularity of “Gullah,” few will concur.
In “Myths of the Georgia Coast,” Col. Charles Colcock Jones, of Georgia (and South Carolina, also, by the way) has given, in generally correct Gullah dialect, the stories current along the coast, many of them variants of those told in “Uncle Remus.” A careful lawyer, Col. Jones has set down, with most meticulous exactness, and without imagination or embellishment, the stories as they were told him on the plantation.
One familiar with Negro speech recognizes that these tales are recorded as they fell from Negro lips, and as such they must be regarded, as far as they go, as the most authentic record of Negro myths on the continent—probably the originals of many of the “Uncle Remus” stories, for the slaves first came from Africa to the coast, bringing with them their myths and legends which gradually infiltrated into the hinterland.
A comparison of Jones’s story of the rabbit and the tar baby with Uncle Remus’s version of the same tale will be interesting as showing, not only the richer and quainter dialect of the Gullah, but also his more direct and homely mode of thought.
The “Coteney” sermons of the Reverend John G. Williams, of Barnwell County, which appeared in the Charleston News & Courier about twenty-five years ago and were subsequently published in pamphlet form, purporting to be pulpit deliverances and consequently showing chiefly the Negro’s conception of his relation to religion, are full of homely wit, and, written in the language of the coast, constitute a noteworthy contribution to dialectal literature.
Mrs. A. M. H. Christensen, of Beaufort, although of Northern birth, enjoyed soon after the war unusual opportunities for acquiring folk-lore stories of the sea-islands and littoral, and she has set forth in a small volume certain of the tales that were told her, which are in the main variants of versions of those already related by Harris and Jones.
Another booklet, by the late J. Jenkins Hucks, of Georgetown, S. C., recording some of the cases that came before him as Magistrate, is, perhaps, the most humorous example extant of Gullah undefiled.
Following the Stories, will be found a fairly complete Glossary of the Gullah speech as used by the Negroes of the Carolina-Georgia Coast and sea-islands, perhaps the only extensive vocabulary of Gullah that has yet been compiled.
The words are, of course, not African, for the African brought over or retained only a few words of his jungle-tongue, and even these few are by no means authenticated as part of the original scant baggage of the Negro slaves.
What became of this jungle-speech? Why so few words should have survived is a mystery, for, even after freedom, a few native Africans of the later importationswere still living on the Carolina Coast, and the old family servants often spoke, during and after the war, of native Africans they had known; but, while they repeated many tales that came by word of mouth from the Dark Continent—the story-tellers were almost invariably of royal blood, and did not hesitate to own it—they seem to have picked from the mouths of their African brothers not a single jungle-word for the enrichment of their own speech.
As the small vocabulary of the jungle atrophied through disuse and was soon forgotten, the contribution to language made by the Gullah Negro is insignificant, except through the transformation wrought upon a large body of borrowed English words. Adopting, as needed and immediately when needed, whatever they could assimilate, they have reshaped perhaps 1,700 words of our language by virtue of an unwritten but a very definite and vigorous law of their own tongue.
In connection with the Glossary, certain characteristic features of this strange tongue are noted. Their consideration will facilitate the reader’s exploration of “The Black Border.”
Of the stories included in this volume, the last fourteen were written and published in The State in the Spring of 1892. The remaining twenty-eight were written and published during the year 1918.
Ambrose E. Gonzales.
Columbia, August, 1922.