Originally Posted by
Hogg
WHEN IT COMES TO GULLAH, BORDER PATROL AIN' FOH KNO'
By Jack Leland
News and Courier Staff Writer
Turn five Wadmalaw Island Negroes- complete with Gullah dialect- loose in an East Coast Florida town and you've got a language problem.
When the five shrimp trawlermen arrived in a Ft. Myers Beach, Fla., last week (without a Dictionary of Charlestonese), they were promptly arrested by the US Border Patrol on suspicion of being aliens.
Their white employer, Billy Townsend, of Rockville, who speaks the same type of Sea Island brogue, managed to rescue them only after proving they were South Carolinians.
The five men were with Capt. Townsend aboard a shrimp trawler bound for Key West. They tied up at Ft. Myers Beach because of bad weather. The Negroes were sitting in front of a packing house when three US Border Patrolmen drove up. They were looking for West Indians who had been slipping into the country aboard fishing boats.
Calling one of the Negroes over to the patrol car, the officers began asking questions.
They were answered in the rich Gullah dialect of Wadmalaw, which the Border Patrolmen couldn't understand at all. The same result followed in the questioning of the others so the patrol placed the men under arrest.
One- managing to break through the language barrier- was given permission to go to the boat at a nearby dock where he found Capt. Townsend.
"De poleece done grab dem boy and we ain' do a God's ting," he told Townsend.
Townsend reported: " I went up there and told the patrolmen that we were all Untied States citizens. He couldn't understand me either so I showed him my credentials."
Then, according to Townsend, the patrolman turned to the other officers and said: "Turn them loose, their boss doesn't talk any better than they do."
Bookmarks