“Lowcountry Creoles”: Rethinking the History of the Gullah Geechee

Though anthropologists Sidney Mintz and Richard Price advanced a theory which they called “creolization” to analyze how enslaved communities created new cultures in the New World, they divorced the cultural process of “creolization” from Creole languages. Other historians, such as Ira Berlin, Linda Heywood, and John Thornton, borrowed the term “creoles” and apply it to cultural processes, but without understanding the linguistic processes which the term originally described. Linguists, such as Salikoko Mufwene, have examined a variety of “ecological” factors in the emergence of Creole languages: Western African languages brought to the New World by the enslaved; European languages with which enslaved Africans were in contact; and population structures that determined social interactions.

This paper will argue that the masses of Blacks in the Lowcountry did not think of themselves as one group of people or identify themselves as “Gullah” or “Geechee” before the early twentieth century. Those who did, like “Gullah Jack” of the Denmark Vesey rebellion, did not infuse the term with the same meaning as we do today. It will coin a new term, “Lowcountry Creoles” to identify Blacks in the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida Lowcountry before the twentieth century. The paper will build a model of creolization using tools from Creole linguistics and apply it to the historical development of the Low Country Creoles and subsequently the Gullah Geechee.