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    Gullah Ghosts: Stories and Folktales from Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry with Notes on Gullah Culture and History
    Gullah Ghosts: Stories and Folktales from Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry with Notes on Gullah Culture and History
    Gullah Ghosts: Stories and Folktales from Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry with Notes on Gullah Culture and History
    Ebook71 pages37 minutes

    Gullah Ghosts: Stories and Folktales from Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry with Notes on Gullah Culture and History

    By Lynn Michelsohn

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    About this ebook

    Meet . . .
    ~ the shrieking spirit of Crab Boy lost forever to a fierce marsh creature . . .
    ~ an ingenious slave matching wits with his plantation owner . . .
    ~ the unique inhabitants of isolated Sandy Island in the Carolina Lowcountry . . .
    These are the "ghosts" of African-American Gullah culture once so alive along the South Carolina coast.
    This collection (10,000 words, four illustrations, 84 pages in paperback) of charming Gullah stories and folktales, including one actual ghost story, as well as observations on Gullah history and culture, comes from Lynn Michelsohn's longer work, "Tales from Brookgreen," stories of ghosts, romantic heroines, historical characters, and mysterious visitors in the South Carolina Lowcountry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLynn Michelsohn
    Release dateDec 4, 2011
    ISBN9781466112056
    Gullah Ghosts: Stories and Folktales from Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry with Notes on Gullah Culture and History
    Author

    Lynn Michelsohn

    Travel, history, and folklore often come together in Lynn Michelsohn's books. Ghost stories associated with particular historical locations especially interest her, as do fascinating characters and quirky facts about places she loves--the South Carolina Lowcountry, the American Southwest, and the Galapagos Islands. A Message from the Author: I write for three reasons. First of all, it's fun. Secondly, it keeps my brain alive and functioning as I learn new things. Finally, and probably most importantly, it keeps me out of my sons' hair (I just know I could run their lives, if only they would let me!). Several years ago, I closed my long-time New Mexico practice in clinical and forensic psychology to devote more time to writing--and beachcombing. My husband, a former attorney, and I now divide our time between Santa Fe and Hutchinson Island, Florida, where our two adult sons visit us regularly (but not often enough). Wow! This writing (and beachcombing) is really great! I recommend it to all of you who have ever thought about starting that memoir or article or novel. Kindle makes publishing incredibly easy, and who knows, you might even sell a few hundred thousand copies (I haven't yet)! After years of living in Roswell with its sometimes offbeat attractions and history--the Roswell Incident, for example--writing "Roswell, Your Travel Guide to the UFO Capital of the World!" gave me the chance to share these interests with visitors to the Land of Enchantment. Next I wrote a book about a distinctly different region, one I have loved since my childhood spent knee-deep in the marshes and saltwater creeks of the South Carolina coast. "Tales from Brookgreen: Folklore, Ghost Stories, and Gullah Folktales in the South Carolina Lowcountry" recounts stories from Brookgreen Gardens, South Carolina's popular tourist attraction near Myrtle Beach. I am happy to see that the three shorter collections of tales from this longer work are quite popular on Kindle: "Lowcountry Ghosts," "Gullah Ghosts," and "Crab Boy's Ghost." Recently I released two new short collections, "Lowcountry Hurricanes" and "Lowcountry Confederates" in a new series called "More Tales from Brookgreen." I hope to add more lowcountry ghost stories and folktales to the series soon. Did you know that Herman Melville, of "Moby-Dick" fame, wrote a series of articles describing the Galapagos Islands? Neither did I until recently. I've had fun putting Melville's articles together with wonderful photographs taken by my son Moses in the Galapagos Islands, and writing introductory material to create a book for the modern visitor to the place Melville referred to as "The Encantadas." We call the book "In the Galapagos Islands with Herman Melville" and hope this glimpse into the "Enchanted Isles," written over 150 years ago, will enrich the visits of today's travelers. I've also put two shorter ebooks from it on Kindle that feature even more of Moses' great photos: "Galapagos Islands Birds" and "Galapagos Islands Landscapes." Recently I've gotten interested in researching the famous New Mexico outlaw Billy the Kid, especially the time he spent in Santa Fe. Did you know that more movies have been made about him over the years than about ANY OTHER individual? I have already completed one short book, "Billy the Kid's Jail," and one longer book, "Billy the Kid in Santa Fe, Book One: Young Billy." It is the first in a non-fiction trilogy exploring Santa Fe of the 1870s and 1880s and the time Billy spent there. I'm currently working on "Book Two: Outlaw Billy," describing his stay in the Santa Fe jail during the winter of 1880-1881. It's hard to avoid detouring into writing more about Santa Fe itself as I often get lost in reading local newspapers from that era. So many fascinating details!

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      Book preview

      Gullah Ghosts - Lynn Michelsohn

      Gullah Ghosts

      Stories and Folktales from Brookgreen Gardens

      in the South Carolina Lowcountry with

      Notes on Gullah Culture and History

      by

      Lynn Michelsohn

      Published by Cleanan Press, Inc.

      Roswell, New Mexico USA

      Copyright 2004 Lynn Michelsohn

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Preface

      Chapter 1. A Cultural Note: The Gullah Language

      Chapter 2. Crab Boy’s Ghost

      Chapter 3. Don’t Tief!

      Chapter 4. A Historical Note: Class Leaders, Parson Belin, and the Methodist Mission to the Slaves

      Chapter 5. The Great Sandy Island Expedition

      Chapter 6. A Historical Note: Phillip Washington, Sandy Island Community Organizer

      Additional Reading

      About the Storytellers: The Hostesses of Brookgreen Gardens

      About the Author

      A Selection from Lowcountry Ghosts

      Other Books by Lynn Michelsohn

      Preface

      These are some of the stories told by Miss Genevieve and Cousin Corrie, two charming Hostesses at Brookgreen Gardens in the South Carolina Lowcountry during the middle of the Twentieth Century (described in the chapter, About the Storytellers: The Hostesses of Brookgreen Gardens). They alo appear in my longer collection, Tales from Brookgreen: Folklore, Ghost Stories, and Gullah Folktales from the South Carolina Lowcountry. I hope you enjoy them.

      Lynn Michelsohn

      Chapter 1. A Cultural Note: The Gullah Language

      Miss Genevieve, one of the Hostesses at Brookgreen Gardens in the mid-Twentieth Century, explained the development of the Gullah language spoken by descendents of slaves in the South Carolina Lowcountry like this . . .

      Nobody can tell you for sure how the Gullah language developed but people who have studied it do have some idea about its history and this is how they explain it.

      Slaves brought to South Carolina came from different parts of West Africa. Each African area and tribal group had its own language and customs. When slaves arrived on Lowcountry plantations, communication was a big challenge. Slaves and planters spoke different languages and often fellow slaves even spoke different languages yet all had to understand each other well enough to live and work together.

      A pidgin language developed that contained words and grammatical structures from English and from various African languages. Planters and overseers kept speaking English and slaves kept speaking their own various languages but each also learned to speak the pidgin language, called Gullah, to communicate with each other. People who study languages tell me that at this stage Gullah was a pidgin language because no one spoke it as his native language but those speaking different languages used it to communicate with each other. Some people think the name Gullah came from the word Angola, which was the homeland of many of the slaves.

      As new generations of slaves were born in the Lowcountry, these children grew up speaking Gullah as their native language. Gullah became a creole language, which is one whose words and grammar are a combination of different languages but one which is now the native language of a group of people, in this case, the descendants of the slaves brought from Africa.

      Planters and other whites continued to speak English, of course, but also spoke Gullah to communicate with their workers. Planters and their families often learned Gullah as children from nurses and other household servants who helped raise them.

      Chapter 2. Crab Boy’s Ghost

      Cousin Corrie loved ghost stories and anything related to the supernatural, from ancient Egyptian tales of the mystical powers of cats to present-day theories of ESP. She often entertained teenage cousins with table turning, an old-fashioned group activity designed to contact the spirit world. Like many in the Lowcountry, Cousin Corrie had grown up accepting the spirit world as just another aspect of reality, whether this spirit world was based on religious beliefs preached from the Sunday pulpit or on the folklore of haunts, hags, and plat-eyes that she learned from her Gullah family servants. The story of Crab Boy was one she heard as a child

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