Gullah

Gullah, Black American ethnic group that chiefly inhabits a region stretching along the southeastern coast of the United States, from Pender county in southern North Carolina to St. Johns county in northern Florida. This geographic area is sometimes referred to by its National Park Service designation, the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, but it can be more generally characterized as the Low Country and Sea Islands. The Gullahs are primarily differentiated from other descendants of enslaved Africans by their preservation of traditional West African practices and by their unique creole language, facilitated by their relative isolation. A further distinction is commonly made within this ethnic group in the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor between the Gullah, who are found in the South Carolina Low Country, and the Geechee, who reside in coastal Georgia and northeastern coastal Florida.

The Gullah people are descended from enslaved western Africans who were abducted from what is now Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Côte d’Ivoire, and Angola. Many of those enslaved Africans were transported to the West Indies to be “seasoned” (habituated to the conditions of slavery and the diseases of the Western Hemisphere) before being taken onward to the port of Charleston, South Carolina, where they were subsequently sold to plantation owners. The owners exploited the prior agricultural knowledge of these enslaved individuals by forcing most of them to work in rice fields along the coast. Other enslaved individuals farmed cotton—which, like rice, was native to their homelands—and indigo, which was found in parts of Africa. Enslaved farmers built complex systems of irrigation and dams, transforming as much as 236,000 acres (about 96,000 hectares) of untouched land into about 120,000 acres (about 49,000 hectares) of tidal rice fields and roughly 116,000 acres (about 47,000 hectares) of inland rice fields. This development would eventually turn the region into one of the most productive and profitable in the antebellum South. As a consequence, the enslaved population in the region continued to grow, even after the United States outlawed the importation of enslaved Africans in 1808.

The Gullahs were able to develop a distinct culture and language because of the relative geographic isolation and harsh conditions of the Low Country plantations. There yellow fever and malaria, which were endemic in western Africa and to which many of the enslaved individuals had developed an immunity, ran rampant in the hotter months of the year. Plantation owners were often absent during the spring and summer to avoid these illnesses, leaving control of the plantations to heavily outnumbered overseers, who were unable to quash unification and cultural development among the enslaved. Upon the approach of Union forces during the first year of the American Civil War, owners and overseers fled the Sea Islands (some for good, others to return after the war), leaving behind an effectively emancipated Gullah population. The newly freed people founded churches, hospitals, and schools throughout Georgia and South Carolina.

The most thoroughly studied demarcation of the Gullahs as a specific recognizable group is their language. The Gullah language, sometimes called Geechee or Sea Island Creole, is an English-based vernacular that is still spoken today. It is thought to have emerged from the mixing of the Krio language of Sierra Leone and other West African languages with colonial English. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries Gullah solidified into an identifiable language that allowed its speakers to communicate among themselves. The language is characterized by free morphemes and multiple negatives. It is most similar in grammar and sound to Bahamian English, though it maintains some unique features. Gullah is not spoken as widely as it once was; indeed, it is considered to be an endangered language. However, cultural preservation efforts and a resurgence of pride in the language suggest that its death may not be imminent. The Gullahs’ avoidance of total linguistic assimilation is reflected in other aspects of their culture.

Many Gullah traditions, passed down through generations, exist along the southeastern U.S. coast. They include basket weaving, indigo dyeing, and a unique cuisine that consists largely of preparations of seafood, rice, and seasonal coastal vegetables, such as okra and field peas. Oral history and folkloric traditions persist as well. Their central figures are dually inspired by African and biblical mythology. “Haints” (spirits of the neglected dead that trouble the living), “boo hags” (humanlike creatures that peel off their skin at night and steal the breath of their living victims while riding them), witches, and devils populate Gullah folklore. In “ring shouts,” people dance in an increasingly frenzied circle until they reach a climax of possession by the Holy Spirit.

Though scores of Gullahs left the Sea Islands in the 20th century to seek prosperity elsewhere, many returned, wishing to reclaim and preserve their heritage. American photographer Doris Ulmann photographed the region in the late 1920s, hoping to chronicle its folksways, and many of her images of the workers on the plantation of her friend Julia Peterkin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Scarlet Sister Mary (1929), were used to illustrate Peterkin’s book Roll, Jordan, Roll (1933), documenting the vanishing Gullah culture.

Today many self-identified Gullah people continue to live in the Low Country and Sea Islands. While the continued development of the area along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts into a vacation destination has forced many Gullah people off Hilton Head and James islands (South Carolina), communities persist on Wadmalaw and Johns islands (South Carolina) and Sapelo Island (Georgia). During the 20th and 21st centuries groups of Gullahs have gone on “heritage tours” to Sierra Leone, reestablishing long-broken cultural ties.