Mother Tongues and Captive Identities: Celebrating and “Disappearing” the Gullah/Geechee Coast

KENDRA HAMILTON University of Virginia Mother Tongues and Captive Identities: Celebrating and “Disappearing” the Gullah/Geechee Coast Every colonized people . . . —every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation . . . with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle. —Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks 18) INTHECHARLESTONOFMYCHILDHOOD,THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE HAD VIGOR and color and—not least—music. The pitches and tones of my grandmother’s voice rose and fell like song. The words were dense thickets of metaphor and proverb—“crack ee teet’” meant “smile,” “dayclean” meant “dawn.” And when she spoke to her friends, to her sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews—my “aunties” and “uncles” —the laughter and allusions piled on so thick and fast that I could not understand one word in three. Later I came to know this was intentional: the elders retreating behind the curtain of their “secret language” to discuss those matters not fit for curious little ears. Linguists speak of the rules of “universal grammar”—by which they appear to mean that a child placed in the environment of spoken language,anyspokenlanguage,learnsthatlanguagewithouttheslightest need to be taught. She learns because she cannot help learning. So it was thatI learned the speech of my environment—Gullah,asI’velearnedthe linguists call it though, to be sure, we thought we were speaking English (Mufwene 29)—and learned as well that, however natural it felt to speak that way, this language was also somehow wrong. “Don’t say ‘be.’ Say ‘is,’”—my mother’s daily refrain. An English teacher who had conquered one nonstandard tongue already—the hillbilly twang of her home in South Carolina’s red clay country—she would not be defeated by another. “What kind of talk is that? Don’t say, 52 Kendra Hamilton “’e ain go do’”— ’e being the all-purpose third-person pronoun substituted for he, she or it—“say ‘she isn’t going to do.’” “Don’t say ‘um’”—the all-purpose objective case pronoun—“say ‘him!’” Don’t say . . . Don’t say . . . she’d repeat, not always patiently, day after day. When I ironed out my speech—enunciated my g’s, flattened out my diphthongs, used he, she, or it rather than the ubiquitous ’e or um—I won the praise of my parents, who were teachers, and their friends, who were also teachers, but felt the subtle exclusion of peers, the sting of my cousins’ mockery. When I spoke as I wished to, as felt natural to me, it was with the full knowledge that I was being willful, disobedient, and defiant: a “bad girl” who was “like to break her mama’s heart.” It was a terrible struggle, this becoming a “good girl,” a struggle against nature. I was being offered a choice between my grandmother, the warmth of her lap and her kitchen, where there was always something good to eat and some beloved someone with whom to share it, and the World, which resembled nothing so much as my school: Immaculate Conception, a Catholic school for Negro children, with its heart pine floors, soaring ceilings, and acoustics perfect for songs sung in Latin; with its hard g’s and r’s, rulers stinging knuckles, and love offered only on condition of one’s ability to “uplift” the Negro race—an uplift we were assured we’d actively hinder if we remained burdened by what Paul Laurence Dunbar called in “The Poet” “a jingle in a broken tongue” (191). In offering these personal reminiscences I have chosen the stance of the “vulnerable observer,” Ruth Behar’s coinage for an approach to ethnographythatinterrogatesandrejectsthehierarchiesimplicitinboth the observer and participant-observer modes of inquiry, one that reveals the observer’s subjectivity and positionality even as the observer becomes not just visible but vulnerable to the subjects of study. While this term may be relatively new, “vulnerable” observation has a venerable history in black feminist writing, a...