“The clinging together of these Gullah tribesmen, as indicated above, and their apparent resolute and persistent character, 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 certain extent “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!