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 importations were 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.