Trip of the Tongue (21 page)

If you're an African American who is descended from slaves, putting together a family tree that goes back any further than the twentieth century—much less back to Africa—will likely be a real challenge. It isn't just a matter of pulling up the Census data or logging on to Scotland's People. And despite what the commercials tell you, Ancestry.com might not be of much help. Not only is much of the documentation related to individual slaves convoluted or incomplete, but because many owners deliberately set out to obscure their slaves' genetic relationships, some of it is flat-out wrong.

The Gullah language, though, has helped give its people a better sense of their likely African origins. First, Turner's research identified significant influences from languages such as Mende, Vai, and Fula, all of which are spoken in and around Sierra Leone. Then the historian P. E. H. Hair, building on Turner's work, concluded that 25 percent of Gullah's African names and 20 percent of its African words have their origins in Sierra Leone. And more recently a linguist at the University of Texas named Ian Hancock identified remarkable similarities between Gullah and Sierra Leone Krio, the English-based creole that is today spoken by about 97 percent of Sierra Leone's population. Many of these similarities—which include, for example, the use of the same metaphorical expression for “greedy” (
big eye
in Gullah,
bigyai
in Krio)—are so striking that Hancock concluded the Gullah people must be closely related to slaves from Sierra Leone.

On very rare occasions Gullah has been used to help trace individual families back to specific villages in Africa. When conducting his initial research in the 1930s, Turner recorded a Mende song sung by Amelia Dawley, a Gullah woman who lived in Harris Neck, Georgia. More than fifty years later, anthropologist Joseph Opala, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt, and linguist Tazieff Koroma went to Sierra Leone to try to pinpoint the exact origin of Dawley's song. Astonishingly, they found a woman living in a remote village who sang a nearly identical song. In Sierra Leone, as in Georgia, the song had been passed down from generation to generation, from grandmother to mother to daughter.

Since 1989 Gullah groups have made three official visits to Sierra Leone, one of which allowed Amelia Dawley's daughter to visit the remote village her ancestors came from. They refer to these trips as “homecomings.”

Whenever I think about the wealth of knowledge contained in the Gullah language—remnants of history and culture and even blood heritage—I have to admit that my mind invariably slips back to those grass mats at the Aiken-Rhett House in Charleston. Each mat is carefully cleaned with conservation-grade equipment, then rolled up and placed in a tube filled with inert gas before going into storage. While I don't doubt that these artifacts are instructive and valuable in their own way, I nevertheless can't help but marvel at the distribution of resources. If anyone ever found his or her family in a nineteenth-century floor covering, I would love to hear about it.

Though the Penn Center is the most visible institution associated with the island's Gullah culture, it is far from the only one. During my time on the island I visited the Red Piano Too gallery, a onetime agricultural cooperative that now houses room after room of local art and crafts. Here I found a copy of the Gullah New Testament (
De Nyew Testament
) and learned about Jonathan Green and Sam Doyle, two prominent Gullah artists. I also saw the dining room at Oak Plantation and ducked into one of the island's four remaining Praise Houses, tiny, low-ceilinged structures slave owners built for their slaves' religious services so as to prevent any large, potentially seditious gatherings.

And just across the highway from the Red Piano Too gallery I ate shrimp and shark at a little place called Gullah Grub. It's not precisely what I would call a hole in the wall, but it looked small and empty enough that as I drove up I wondered if maybe it was something of a hidden gem. My oft-ignored opportunistic side perked up and demanded attention, and I found myself putting together a pitch to a travel magazine before I even walked in the door.

I sat down and ordered an iced tea while I took stock of the interior, scrutinizing the decor in the hope it might suggest to me a particularly clever turn of phrase. It took me a moment to realize a TV was on in the background. At first I tried to ignore the noise, absorbed as I was in doing my best Elizabeth Gilbert impression. But after a moment, I realized I was hearing a voice I recognized. I snapped to attention, whipping around to confirm what I already suspected and dreaded.

It was an episode of
Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations
—the one in which he ate Frogmore Stew at Gullah Grub. I felt my momentary fit of ambition wither once more into fretful inertia. One day, I told myself, I was going to meet Anthony Bourdain and ask him to stop bogarting all the best assignments.
^aq

Luckily, the waitress came back at that moment to distract me. I asked her if I should order the fried shrimp or the BBQ ribs, and after looking at me for a long moment, she said solemnly, “See, I have a theory about the shrimp. If you're going to get the shrimp, you'd better get the shark, too.”

“Shark?” I asked. “Seriously?”

“I was born in the city, too,” she said, “And when I moved here I wasn't ready for these country ways. The first time they brought shark meat back to the kitchen I said, ‘What is that? Are you killing dolphins?' But now I try to eat some shark and shrimp every single day.” She paused. “It's definitely better than stingray.”

With an endorsement like that, what else could I do but order the shark and shrimp? And it was delicious.

It probably could have made a great magazine piece, too.

The longer I spent on St. Helena, the more I appreciated how out in the open its Gullah culture was. In Charleston I'd felt like I was reading lemon juice on paper: I knew I'd find something interesting there if only I could figure out how to see it. But on St. Helena it was all right there in front of me. Gullah food, Gullah art, Gullah history—just about anything I wanted to learn was there for me to study.

Gullah language, however, was another story.

Oh, I'd learned about it plenty, that's for sure. But I hadn't heard it anywhere on the island. In fact, in all the time I spent in South Carolina I only heard Gullah twice. The first time was on Mr. Brown's tour. The second was in Mount Pleasant, a suburb about seven miles east of Charleston. I was there for the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Festival, which has been held in Mount Pleasant since 2005. I spent some time there talking to a Mount Pleasant–based basket maker named Marilyn Dingle. She'd been sewing baskets for more than sixty years, and though many in the community no longer practiced the art, she had taught her daughter, sister-in-law, and granddaughter. She told me that it had been the most difficult to teach her sister-in-law, who was left-handed. Throughout our conversation she worked serenely, weaving palmetto, sweetgrass, and bulrush without hardly having to look.

Eventually I asked her if she spoke Gullah. She ducked her chin down and her voice lowered in a chilly, almost defensive way. “Yes, I do,” she said. Slightly taken aback by her demeanor, I apologized if I'd been out of line. She looked back up. “Ever since integration,” she said, “we stopped speaking Gullah because everyone told us it was bad English.” I asked her then if I could hear some, and she let loose a stream of words I couldn't begin to understand. Then we smiled at each other awkwardly until I eventually staggered away.

I knew heading into my visit that when it came to their language, Gullah communities were famously wary toward outsiders. This wariness extends not just to tourists but also to scholars—even those who speak Gullah. Patricia Jones-Jackson, a linguist who spent nearly a decade studying Gullah language and culture on the Sea Islands, recalled how, no matter how hard she tried, she was never able to pass as local:

In fact, during my first few years on the islands, I learned that I should not try to pass myself off as an islander by an attempt to imitate the Sea Island language. While I may have had the syntax right, I was never able to perfect the accent, and it is the stress and intonation that give one away. When I asked the islanders how they were able to detect such small differences, I was often told, “I ain't know how I de know, but I de know.” And they did know.

Now, there's nothing particularly unusual about a bilingual speaker electing to use the language his or her conversation partner speaks most fluently. In fact, it's something of a well-documented phenomenon, and there are all sorts of reasons for it. What interests me, rather, is the fact that so many Gullah-speakers refuse to speak the language even when asked. Take, for example, the story of Emory Campbell, one of the Gullah-speakers who helped translate the New Testament. In an interview with National Public Radio, Campbell spoke of his experience with visiting linguists. “I didn't want to admit that I knew or spoke Gullah,” he said. “These two linguists who came into the area to translate the Bible into Gullah pretty much worked alone for the first year or two, before any Gullah-speakers would assist them.”

When asked why he didn't want to divulge his knowledge of Gullah, Campbell responded simply, “Well, when we spoke Gullah, we were put down.”

The Gullah people aren't just using English to communicate with outsiders; they're avoiding Gullah to protect themselves.

And no wonder: for years the language has been maligned and disparaged. Before Lorenzo Dow Turner published his research on the African influences in Gullah, there had been little to no reputable research conducted with regard to the Gullah language, and derisive attitudes are frequently found in the works of men who were considered experts on the language. The most prominent work on Gullah was written by an English professor at the University of South Carolina named Reed Smith. He concluded that Gullah was mostly a form of English African slaves had learned from their white masters, and he made sure to pass along an informant's opinion that Gullah “is the worst English in the world.”

Meanwhile, Ambrose Gonzales, the son of a plantation owner who grew up speaking Gullah and published a number of pieces on the language in the newspaper he founded, wrote things such as this:

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.

The tenor of scholarly debate didn't begin to change until Turner came on the scene—and I think it's no coincidence that he was the first African American to study the language. Along with his determined and repeated public avowals that the Gullah language was not simply degraded English, Turner's exhaustive and careful research helped reshape linguistic conceptions not just of Gullah but of all creole languages.

Outside the linguistic community, though, Turner's work had little impact. Consider this excerpt from a question-and-answer session with Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. In it, he was asked about his infamous reticence during oral arguments. He responded with a story about Gullah:

When I was 16, 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 at your age, I was self-conscious, like we all are. It's like if we get pimples at 16, 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 midsentence. I was trying to speak standard English. I was thinking in standard English but speaking another language. So I learned that—I just started developing the habit of listening.

There are two things about this that particularly drew my attention. First of all, Thomas was born in 1948, just a year before Turner published
Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect
. Even so, popular conceptions of Gullah were still clearly negative enough to instill Thomas with a sense of shame when speaking his native language. The second item of note is that this Q&A took place in 2000—fifty-one years
afte
r Turner published. And yet Thomas still refers to his language as “a kind of a dialect.”

Now, it's unclear just how self-serving this story is meant to be. Feel free to form your own opinion as to whether or not this justifies Thomas's conduct in court. Nevertheless, the way Thomas describes his native language—“a kind of a dialect,” “not standard”—provides an indication of the ways in which Gullah is still to this day denigrated by speakers and non-speakers alike.

A lot of people assume my interest in language means that I'm necessarily someone for whom minute quirks of English style and usage are of great importance. I won't pretend I'm not particular about words and the way I use them. But generally I am extremely impatient with gotcha-style grammarians. They are usually wrong, and they are always rude.

More to the point, they create a pervasive culture of insecurity around the use and study of language. I can recall with troubling specificity the times I've been corrected on usage or pronunciation: the use of
nauseous
instead of
nauseated
, reprimands about sentence-starting
hopefully
s, or, most vexingly, suggestions about my pronunciation of the word
often
. For eighteen years of my life I used
often
without a second thought. But ever since I was corrected there's been a tiny part of me that has to stop and think, then feel insecure for having to stop and think, and finally feel annoyed that I'm feeling insecure for having to stop and think before I can actually say the damn word.