There wasn't a lot until I saw stuff about Gullah people, not even Gullah Geechee. I don't think we've been calling ourselves that collectively for very long.
I was familiar with the word Gullah. I'm a child of the nineties, so of course I saw Gullah Gullah Island, and I had this book that my mom used to read to me called The People Could Fly, and some of the stories are written in the Gullah language.
So I was familiar with that, but I didn't know how that was connected to me in any way. And so I would come home, and I would ask questions, and seemingly nobody knew what I was talking about, because I was saying the word “Gullah.”
So I gave up, because the stuff I found online was stuff about dying culture, dying language, and it didn't connect to North Carolina at all. Ten years later, 2019, I tried again. And this time, when I looked online, I saw the corridor map. And when I saw the corridor map, Southport is right there, and that is where my family is from. And I said, “I knew I was not tripping.”
And then I go back, and I think of our family accent—back in the day, when my grandparents were living, we used to call it the Southport accent.
We didn't know that it was a Gullah accent.
And we didn't even know that a lot of the words we were saying were actually Gullah.
We had no idea until I started making these connections.
