Gullah in the Stories and Novels of William Gilmore Simms

Abstract

LLlAM GILMORE SIMMS was the Srst important American writer to VV use the Gullah Negro as a character in a short story. In 1833, almost one hundred years before Ambrose E. Gonzales published his Gullah stories in The Black Border,l Simms's 'A Scene of the Revolution,' a short story in which a Negro character speaks the Gullah dialect of the Carolina Negr'oes, was published in The Book of My Lady.2 As a character, the Negro Tom is almost a complete nonentity; yet he has a slight literary importance: he was probably the Srst Negro character to speak accurate Gullah in an American short story. Simms wrote four other stories in which Negroes are employed as characters and at least nine novels.3 In considering the dialect used in Simms's stories and novels, one must remember that it is the language of 'a special group-type of Negroes, limited historically and geographically to the sea-islands and the narrow tidewater strip bordering the coast counties of South Carolina and Georgia and a small section of north-east Florida.'4 Perhaps an even more important consideration is that this particular dialect 'constitutes a patois