Blame it on the bean (Part 1)
**Over the next five blog posts, Michele will talk about the process, decisions and evolution of the influence the Gullah-Geeche language played in her award-winning novel.**
When I began research for my first novel, set in Charleston in the first half of the twentieth century, I did not set out to commit what many consider to be a mortal sin of fiction writing: the use of phonetic spelling to convey the sound of how a character speaks. Yet, commit it I did, though never with abandon. Of that at least, I can assure my harshest critic, and beyond that, all I can say is, blame it on the bean.
In his foreword, Pat Conroy wrote that the novel presents a “street level perspective of Charleston, one that breaks new ground on every page.” It is indeed more Catfish Row than South of Broad, telling a tale of two working class Catholic women from 1893 to 1946: Meliah Amey Ravenel is African American and Cassie McGonegal is Irish American. I suspect few visitors to the Holy City realize that the hulking brick building overlooking the harbor in the Eastside community was once the world’s largest cigar factory. In its heyday, the factory employed over a thousand women, black and white, who were kept rigidly segregated and unaware of the conditions the other experienced.
The fictional story of these two families, however, resides in the decades leading up to the historic 1946 tobacco workers strike. What Meliah Amey and Cassie cannot see, of course, are the many ways they are more alike than different. They share a devotion to Catholicism, yet each retains a strong belief in supernatural forces to heal and protect the vestiges of their ancestral homelands: West Africa and West Ireland, respectively.
In the novel, language and food, and the language of food, reveal a strong commonality between the two families. Cassie and Meliah Amey never take their family’s next meal for granted. These women work to put food on the table in a time with limited refrigeration, no supermarkets, and no processed foods. Cassie will get out of more than one potentially fractious event by putting a pot of sivvy beans on the stove, knowing it will be at least an hour before they are tender enough to eat. Meliah Amey’s husband Joe is a captain in the legendary group of African American fishermen known as the Mosquito Fleet.
One morning, as she watches them rowing out of the harbor, Meliah Amey wishes for Joe to come home with red snapper. “Red snappuh be a good eatin fish, that’s right, a good eatin fish.” She plans to marriage’um (a Gullah cooking term meaning to mix or blend together) to sivvy beans, tomatoes, and rice, making a perlo (a Gullah stew) for supper. If I had to pick only one thing that has given Charleston its unique language and food, it would be the influence of the West African based Gullah-Geechee culture.
One used to hear the terms Geechee or Gullah, now the official designation is Gullah-Geechee and it refers to the people of African descent who were enslaved and brought to the Sea Islands of the southeastern United States. The National Park Service’s Gullah-Geechee Heritage Corridor extends from Jacksonville, Florida to Wilmington, North Carolina. Slave traders sought people taken from the West African “Rice Coast” countries because of their skills and knowledge of the intricacies of growing rice.
Being from different countries, they spoke different languages. To communicate with one another, as well as with white slave holders, a creole language developed. Gullah has primarily English vocabulary but many African words, as well. Grammar, syntax, and pronunciation have features from several African languages.
