Trip of the Tongue (20 page)

It is this latter-day version of the cheval-de-frise that you find on the fences surrounding a number of Charleston's historic homes.

Even in this modern age of outlandishly conspicuous public security measures, it was disconcerting, to say the least, to see such openly brutal defensive installations. But the incongruence of their location—surrounding impeccably preserved Georgian mansions in a city some declare to be the country's most “well mannered”—is flat-out startling. Unfortunately, the reason for their construction is less startling when you take into consideration the historical facts.

It all started in 1781 when a slave known as Telemaque was purchased and brought to Charleston. Eighteen years later this slave—by then known as Denmark Vesey—won the lottery, bought his freedom, and established himself as a respected freedman and Methodist. By 1822, however, Vesey's fortunes had changed. That year he was arrested and executed for plotting what would have been the largest slave insurrection in American history.

Whether he was inspired by the Haitian Revolution, inflamed by the city's antagonism toward the African Methodist Episcopal Church, enraged at his inability to free his wife and children, or some combination of the three, Vesey took it upon himself to attempt to coordinate the uprising of more than 8,000 slaves. They planned to kill their white owners and take control of the city before fleeing to Santo Domingo. But before his plan could come to fruition, his co-conspirators leaked information to the authorities, and in the end more than a hundred men were arrested. Thirty-five, including Vesey, were hanged.

Residents of Charleston responded by implementing a slew of increased security measures, from the construction of sturdier fences and chevaux-de-frise to the creation of a standing municipal guard (which would eventually be housed at a newly constructed arsenal known as the Citadel). Charleston's most famous example of chevaux-de-frise is found, not coincidentally, at the Miles Brewton house, on the corner of King and Ladson. The house is otherwise known for its exquisite Palladian architecture; Brewton is otherwise known for being one of the leading slave merchants of his time.

The Slave Mart, the Work House, the chevaux-de-frise—these are the most shocking artifacts of Charleston's African American history. In my opinion, however, the most expressive is the statue found in Marion Square, a small park near the College of Charleston. In the square, atop a lofty column, stands a likeness of John C. Calhoun, a U.S. senator and the vice president under John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. The current statue is the second to stand in this location; the first was removed by the Charleston Ladies' Calhoun Monument Association on account of what they considered to be a deformed index finger and inappropriate attire.

Nearly as striking as the statue is the column it rests upon, an addition to the second version of the monument for reasons that had little to do with the aesthetic or moral judgments of the Ladies' Association. This second statue was lifted up to protect it from the city's black population, which had been regularly defacing the monument since its unveiling in 1887. Calhoun may be considered one of the state's most illustrious historical figures, but he was also a staunch supporter of slavery. In 1837, while speaking on the issue of slavery on the Senate floor, he declared it to be a “positive good”:

But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding States is an evil: far otherwise; I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be to both, and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition. I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually.

Many blacks in Charleston today still pronounce Calhoun's name “Kill-houn.”
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And, revealingly, the column the statue now rests on is—fully, defiantly—eighty feet high.

I find it impossible to imagine that I could live in Charleston without feeling a constant, low-level hum of historical awareness. Charleston is, more than any other city I have ever visited, obsessed with history and preservation. So although Charleston is a bustling, modern place, it still has the character of an obstinate antediluvian. Everywhere I went there seemed to be an implied challenge in the city's character, a championing of the Way Things Used to Be over the Way Things Are. This is not necessarily a bad thing—provided you ignore the fact that human bondage was a Thing That Used to Be. Charleston may be a city of great houses. But it is also a city of great fences.

After a few days in Charleston I left the city behind and headed to Beaufort and St. Helena, the heart of Gullah country. In Charleston I had focused on context and background. I figured that if I wanted to understand the relationship between English and Gullah, then first and foremost I needed to reacquaint myself with the historic tensions between white and black. But down in St. Helena I hoped to find specifics. I hoped to learn more about the Gullah language itself and the men and women who speak it.

Beaufort, about an hour and a half south of Charleston, is a deceptively sleepy town. Its lush vegetation and antebellum charm may be straight-up Margaret Mitchell, but Beaufort is just five miles from Parris Island, which means that every other weekend, friends and families of Marine recruits stream in to attend basic-training graduation. Accordingly, all the hotels and tourist destinations are filled with Marine Corps merchandise, Parris Island maps, and advertisements for Der Teufelhund, Beaufort's “only military shop.”
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As a result, the town is an improbable combination of southern languor and military vigor.

I was in Beaufort because it is the gateway to St. Helena Island, home to the Lowcountry's largest Gullah population. The first thing I realized about St. Helena is that it is and always has been an extremely isolated area. Even today there's only one road in and out—your only other option is to swim. Back in the nineteenth century, however, the area was even more cut off. St. Helena's primary industry for decades was agricultural production, and most of its land was under the purview of various plantations. But you won't find the same grand plantation houses here that you might in other parts of the South. On account of the miserable climate and working conditions, few white slave owners lived here permanently. The conditions were so difficult, in fact, that most didn't even try to employ white overseers. Instead that task was entrusted to senior slaves. And the few white farmers who did live on the island fled when the Union Army captured nearby Port Royal soon after the start of the Civil War.

When Union forces took control of St. Helena in 1861, then, they found an island populated entirely by slaves. The Union, eager to reap the product and the profits of the island's cotton cultivation, promptly liberated the slaves and offered wages and land as an enticement to stay and harvest the cotton. Though the initiative—known as the Port Royal Experiment—was ended by Andrew Johnson in 1865, a great deal of property on the island nevertheless made its way into the hands of former slaves. Many of St. Helena's 10,000 residents today live on land that their ancestors worked more than a century ago.

I started my visit to St. Helena at the Penn Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of Gullah culture and a historic site in its own right. The center got its start in 1862 when two missionaries—Laura Towne, a Unitarian from Pennsylvania, and Ellen Murray, a Quaker from Rhode Island—decided to found a school for the freed slaves on St. Helena. They were joined by a black schoolteacher from Massachusetts named Charlotte Forten, and soon enough they were holding classes in the dining room of the main house at what had been Oaks Plantation. The school eventually moved into the island's Brick Baptist Church, but when it outgrew that, too, the women were given fifty acres of land by Hastings Gantt, a freedman who would later be elected to South Carolina's House of Representatives. Over the years the center has expanded and shifted its focus from schooling to community outreach, but today it can still be found on this same fifty-acre tract of land.

The Penn Center would be famous enough were it just one of the first schools for freed slaves. But it cemented its status in the history books in the 1960s when Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council used the complex for strategy sessions. It was here that King planned the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965.

And it was also here that I began to learn about Gullah's relationship to African languages and cultures.

The lexicon of Gullah is so heavily influenced by English that for decades many believed there to be no relationship whatsoever between it and any non-English language, much less any African language. The linguist George Philip Krapp, for instance, wrote in 1924 that it was “reasonably safe to say that not a single detail of Negro pronunciation or of Negro syntax can be proved to have any other than an English origin.” These early theories about the development of Gullah largely relied on the assumption that slave owners and drivers would simplify their language when speaking to their charges. Scholars, therefore, believed that the source of Gullah could only be English—or, perhaps, a combination of English dialects.

It is true that some slaves arrived in South Carolina already speaking a form of English. When it was initially founded, Charleston was in large part populated by the sons of successful colonists in the West Indies, particularly those from British outposts like Barbados. And so in many cases the slaves they brought with them had already been exposed to English. But a 1717 tax shifted the slave trade away from the Caribbean and toward Africa, and thereafter the importation of African slaves into South Carolina continued unabated until the start of the Civil War.
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In light of this, it seems inconceivable that Gullah would exhibit no African influence. Moreover, the direct influence of English was surely limited due to the fact that so few white owners or overseers chose to live on their Sea Island plantations. In fact, as linguist Patricia Causey Nichols points out, after 1715 the majority of new slaves wouldn't have had much interaction with English at all. “Instead,” she writes, they “would learn the common language in the slave quarters from those who spoke English as a second (or third or fourth) language—all with the imperfections that accompany such indirect learning.” And indeed, more recent research has found overwhelming evidence of African influence in Gullah's syntax, phonology, and vocabulary.

Some of the earliest support for the existence of a relationship between Gullah and African languages came from the Gullah tradition of nicknaming. In Gullah communities, many children are traditionally given nicknames called basket names—that is, a name given when the baby is still small enough to sleep in a basket. Many of these names do have English roots, my favorite examples being Beep-Beep (“The individual so nicknamed was saved from possibly fatal injury by the timely sounding of an automobile horn”) and Dukey (“The bearer of this name is a great admirer of the actor John Wayne”). But there is far more African influence to be found in basket names than there is English influence.

There is, for instance, a tradition in many West African cultures of naming a child based on the day they were born. Similar names found in Gullah include the name
Aba
, which corresponds to the Twi name
Ya
—in this case, a girl born on Thursday. The Gullah name
Afiba
, meanwhile, is related to the Ewe for a girl born on Friday.
Akaba
, the name of a ruler of the kingdom of Dahomey (modern-day Benin), represents a more direct borrowing of a proper name. Meanwhile,
Birama
, the Mandingo form of Abraham, is a borrowing of a borrowing.

Through naming practices alone, linguists have been able to identify links between Gullah and the African languages Bambara, Bini, Bobangi, Djerma, Ewe, Efik, Fante, Fula, Gã, Gbari, Hausa, Ibo, Ibibio, Kongo and Ikongo, Kimbundu, Kpelle, Mende, Malinke, Mandinka, Mandingo, Nupe, Susu, Songhay, Twi, Temne, Tshiluba, Umbundu, Vai, and Wolof.

But names are far from the only evidence of African influence in Gullah. In his groundbreaking and authoritative work
Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect
, linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner also found links to African languages in Gullah's sounds and structure. He notes, for instance, that the lack of passive voice in Gullah (“he was beaten” in Gullah would be “dem beat im”) mirrors the same phenomenon in Ewe and Yoruba. He also observes that in Gullah the word
pass
is sometimes used to indicate comparative degree of adjective, as seen in the phrase “he tall pass me” (“he's taller than I”). Turner found this very same structure—including the use of an equivalent verb—in a number of African languages.

Turner also cataloged a great many African influences in Gullah's lexicon, recording long lists of Mende and Vai words that are used in Gullah songs, stories, and prayers and finding that—almost astonishingly—many Gullah-speakers still counted using African numbers generations after their ancestors had arrived in the United States. Some, as he writes, even counted using more than one African language:

As regards numerals, I interviewed several older Gullahs, each of whom could count from one to ten in a different African language. A few in Georgia could count from one to nineteen in the Fula language. Usually the Gullahs did not know the name of the language in which they counted, but said that they learned the numerals from older relatives or friends. A few, unknowingly, would draw upon two or more African languages in counting from one to ten.

Though Turner's work shows unequivocally that words, sounds, and structures from African languages have been carried over into Gullah, it bears mentioning that Gullah is more than just an African word stew. Gullah is the product of a complex series of linguistic and cultural interactions. And, like all languages, it continues to develop and change with each passing day. Labeling Gullah an “African” language is hardly more meaningful and appropriate than labeling it “corrupted” English. What I find particularly compelling about Gullah's African roots, however, is not their existence (or the extent of their existence) but rather the information this analysis has revealed about the origins of the Gullah people.