In Search of Bisco Read Online Free PDF Page B

were more or less the same in appearance. Then one day at the railroad station my uncle and I saw a Gullah-speaking Negro who had come to Newberry County on the train from Charleston to preach at the African Baptist Church.
    The evangelist with the shiny coal-black skin was no larger in size than any other Negro I had ever seen, and he wore ordinary clothing like everybody else, but he was so startlingly black that he looked as if he had been smeared with stove-pipe soot. I was sure he had come straight from Africa and not from anywhere in South Carolina.
    My uncle had been to Charleston and he said he would recognize a Gullah-speaking Negro from the Carolina Low Country at first sight anywhere in the world. More than that, he said, he would be able to recognize a Gullah in pitch-black darkness without even being able to see him, because Gullahs spoke in a strange mumbling dialect of their own that even baffled other Negroes. He said if you wanted to hear what a foreign language sounded like, all you had to do was close your eyes and listen to Gullah.
    The Negroes who went to the African Baptist Church were not able to understand a word of the Gullah preacher’s sermon. They said he talked in such an unknown tongue that there was no chance of their being able to get religion in a whole week of preaching. Instead of staying to preach for a week at the revival meeting, he delivered only one sermon, took up only one collection, and then got on the next train to go back to Charleston.
    As I recall what my uncle told me, the Low Country Negroes came to be called Gullah because that was the sound of the word they uttered when they tried to say they had been brought from Angola to America by slave traders. Since the Angola slaves on a Carolina plantation received no schooling whatsoever and had no opportunity to learn English, they created a dialect of their own by trying to apply the English pronunciation of their white overseers to the words of their African language.
    My uncle said that after many years of associating with Gullahs following the Civil War the white people of the Low Country acquired the same Gullah dialect in order to be able to do business with them in stores and to give them instructions as servants and laborers. Ever since then white Charlestonians have always been able to understand each other when they talk, and Gullahs likewise understand them, but Carolina uplanders have never been able to comprehend much of what they are trying to say.
    This was when I asked my uncle why some Negroes were brown or tan in color like Bisco and others were shiny coal-black like the Gullah preacher from Charleston. He said I was at the age when I ought to know about such things and that it was a good time to tell me.
    First of all, he said he was not going to tell me what he thought was right or wrong about race-mixing, because the best education a man could get was in learning how to think for himself about such things so he could form his own conclusions about what was good or bad in life.
    Then he said that when the first Negroes were brought from Angola in West Africa and sold at the slave markets in Charleston, all of them were as black as the Gullah preacher we had seen. Most of them were kept on the large plantations in the Low Country near Charleston and never got any farther inland than that, but that some of them were taken a hundred or two hundred miles away to work on the small farms in the uplands of South Carolina.
    The slaves that were brought to Newberry County were spread over the country in small groups of one female and two or three males to a farm. The farms there were much smaller in acreage than the plantations in the Low Country and a farmer did not need as many slaves as the planter who owned thousands of acres. The reason why there were girls and women among the Gullahs when they were brought to the uplands from Charleston was because every owner wanted a female slave so that children would be