Gullah Erotic

The Gullah are identifiable first by how they talk. Along the tidal coast of South Carolina and Georgia, on the barrier islands and in the marsh towns behind them, people speak a creole built from English words on West and Central African grammar, sound, and sense. Georgians more often say Geechee, and Gullah Geechee has become the usual name for the whole. For most of two centuries outsiders heard the language as broken English. Then Lorenzo Dow Turner worked through the vocabulary in the 1930s and 1940s and came back with thousands of items traceable to Mende, Vai, Wolof, Kikongo, Twi, and Mandinka, including the private basket names families give children alongside their English ones. Gullah has relatives: Bahamian, Krio in Sierra Leone, and Afro-Seminole Creole, carried into Florida and later to Texas and Mexico by people who ran. The culture held together for a reason that is not romantic. Lowcountry planters wanted rice, and they bought captives from the Rice Coast of Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Senegambia who already knew how to grow it in tidal fields. Those plantations ran on a Black majority, sometimes an overwhelming one, and the owners left for higher ground every fever season. Isolation did the rest.

Religion is Baptist and Methodist on the surface and older underneath. Communities worshiped in praise houses, small plain buildings where the ring shout is still done: a counterclockwise shuffle, feet never crossing, driven by clapping and a stick beaten on the floor. Candidates for baptism go through seeking, a stretch of solitary prayer and dreaming guided by a spiritual mother. Root doctors treat what the clinic does not, and porch ceilings get painted haint blue to turn away spirits that travel over water. Coiled sweetgrass baskets, the same form as the Senegambian fanner used for winnowing rice, are still sewn and sold in Mount Pleasant. The historical hinges are sharp: Igbo Landing in 1803, where captives walked into a Georgia creek rather than into slavery; the Port Royal Experiment of 1861, when Union forces took the islands, the planters fled, and freedpeople worked the land for themselves years ahead of emancipation; the Penn School on St. Helena, founded in 1862 and a century later one of the few places in the South where Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC could meet across the color line. The present threat is quieter. Bridges reached the islands, resorts followed, and land held as heirs' property, passed down without wills and owned in common by dozens of descendants, is easy to force onto the auction block. Congress drew the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor in 2006, from North Carolina to Florida. Families keep going back to Sierra Leone.