The last Gullah sermon? End of an era looms for endangered language

On a recent Sunday morning, Pastor Edward Alston approached a pulpit draped in immaculate white cloth and began to preach the gospel.

The reading came from Mark, chapter 12, verse 30 – Jesus’s great commandment. Alston looked down on the Bible as its red cover flopped out from his hand. He cleared his throat and began to read the noted scripture with a rare variation.

“Ya mus lob de Lawd ya God wid all ya haat, an wid all ya soul, and wid all ya mind, an wid all ya scrent,” he preached. “‘Ya mus lob ya neighba de same way ya lob yasef!’”

Those in the modest congregation nodded and called “amen!”, acknowledging the reading had been delivered in Gullah, the creole language of their ancestors. It was drawn from a translated text, De Nyew Testament, the first longform written work published in the language.

Here at Queen Chapel, a small, historic African Methodist Episcopal [AME] church, that sits on the north of Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, Pastor Alston has preached the gospel in Gullah every Sunday for over a decade. He is, according to community elders, the last clergyman doing so left here, and thought to be the only one in the entire 475-mile heritage corridor spanning coastal communities from North Carolina to Florida, which make up the ancestral lands of Gullah Geechee people.

As these shrinking communities have battled against the erasure of their land, from gentrification , predatory seizure and the climate crisis , so too have they fought to preserve culture. Gullah, a unique, centuries-old dialect formed by enslaved people, is a blend of west African languages along with English, and bears relation to other creole dialects spoken in the Caribbean. It is listed by linguists as endangered .

Pastor Alston grew up in Hilton Head speaking the language. And at 75, he must – under AME laws – retire later this year, leaving the future of Queen Chapel’s regular Gullah readings in jeopardy.

“If the person who replaces me [is] not able to speak or read the scriptures in Gullah, there’s a gap and a loss for the culture of the island,” he said after the service. “Reading it is a matter of history, of embracing our culture.”

Queen Chapel was founded in 1865, shortly after the end of the US civil war, by two passing AME missionaries forced to shelter on Hilton Head en route to Charleston. Today, its small steeple is partially hidden behind a large oak tree draped in Spanish moss, and its nave backs on to a municipal airport. The drum of small aircraft punctuates the quiet.

Alston’s few dozen parishioners are all “native islanders”, meaning they trace their ancestry on Hilton Head back to emancipation or further, and about half of them can speak and understand the language. Many have worshipped here for generations amid a population decline of Gullah people on Hilton Head from around 40,000 at its peak to an estimated 1,500 .

As the pastor pivoted from Gullah to English, reciting the passage back, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul … ” the congregation rose to its feet and sang a hymn of preparation, accompanied by a lone pianist.

Most of the service is conducted in English, but those small moments in Gullah resonated throughout the assembly.

Paulette Singleton, 72, who has worshipped here for over 50 years, thought of deceased elders as she heard the reading.

“It reminds me of my grandparents, of older days,” she said. “Of the elder Black people on this island, because we don’t hear it too much now.”

Stephanie Gadson, 53, nodded in agreement. It gave her “hope and inspiration”.

“It lets us know that we’re still here,” she said. “That we are still heard.”

Among those in the pews that Sunday was an esteemed guest, Dr Emory Campbell, a community leader and the former executive director of the Penn Center , the foremost educational and historic preservation institution in the Gullah Geechee community.

Campbell, who is 82 and a towering 6ft 4in, said the readings made him feel “even taller in my heart”.

“To know that the congregation was listening, and even if they didn’t understand it, I’m sure they were curious enough.”

Campbell has obvious reasons to feel pride. He was among the small committee that toiled for 26 years, between 1979 and 2005, to translate the New Testament into Gullah. The work began as the project of two outsider biblical translators who had moved to St Helena Island, adjacent to Hilton Head, and presented the idea to community members. It was initially met with skepticism.

“I had been taught that Gullah was bad English,” Campbell recalled. “And that you shouldn’t ever encourage Gullah speech.” At the time, the Penn Center had been assisting younger community members to learn English instead in a bid to help them secure jobs in the local tourism industry, which had rapidly swept the islands.

But as the value of the project became clear, Campbell and others in the community became actively involved – translating small passages at a time into handwritten text, and then presenting them to a group of peers who assessed their accuracy and offered feedback.

Gullah is an oral language, with no dictionary, so spellings were improvised and translation drawn from memory.

“It was painstaking,” Campbell recalled. “I look back now and I wonder: why? But the motivation was preserving Gullah culture. And this – the language – is the core of it, because when you hear the speech, you know that person knows more: they know how to cook, they know how to weave a net, to knit. Those are pure Gullah people.”

Ron Daise, an acclaimed Gullah performer and writer , who served on the feedback group throughout much of the translation effort, recalled the sense of awe among the community as passages were read aloud.

“They would marvel,” he said. “They understood it. But many said they could no longer speak it because they had it beaten out of them, and honestly that’s what they meant.”

“We [as children] would always be corrected if we said a word in Gullah.”

The translation was released in 2005 to media fanfare . Daise remembered later efforts to play recorded sections of the translation to community members on St Helena and other Gullah communities.

“Many said that they understood the word of God better hearing the translation, because of the imagery, the pictures the language paints.”

Simple phrases like “Holy Sperit”– Holy Ghost in English – were instantly more relatable, he recalled.

Daise has gone on to use the translation as the basis for dialogue in his own works of fiction . “One of the things of great import to me was linguists informing us there was no need to use apostrophes when writing words in Gullah, because that would mean it was broken English. That something was missing.”

For Sunn m’Cheaux, an expert who teaches Gullah at Harvard, De Nyew Testament should be viewed as a “beginning point and not an end” to explore the language, which he says continues to evolve through generations.

“The issue with translating Gullah to text, and this happens a lot with creoles that are formed in conditions of oppression and under duress, [is that] there [were] laws and restrictions in place to stop it from being written. So a lot of how you preserve and pass on the language cannot really be standardized without excluding certain aspects of the language, certain speakers.”

m’Cheaux continued: “I would caution our community to eschew the very idea of standardization, and ‘correct vs incorrect’. I think you can normalize a thing [writing in the language], without standardizing.”

Since its debut, De Nyew Testament has sold 47,000 copies around the world. And in 2007, a copy was used to swear in the South Carolina congressman Jim Clyburn as US House majority whip. The lawmaker, whose late wife had Gullah ancestry, has been the most prominent advocate in Washington of Gullah cultural preservation.

Campbell said the intention was also to have the translated text placed into active use at churches on Hilton Head and surrounding communities. Around 2012, community leaders convened a meeting with pastors on the island to encourage regular use of the book at service.

Of the small handful that took it up, only Alston remains.

***

As the Sunday service at Queen Chapel drew to a close, with a communion delivered in English, Alston stood by the doors of his church, shaking hands with parishioners as they trickled out into the morning humidity. He is the longest serving preacher in the congregation’s history, having led the parish for 30 years.

The prospect of retirement brought with it a sense both of satisfaction and melancholy. Asked of his own legacy, the preacher paused for a moment and reflected on watching many of his congregants age with him.

“It is one of loving and caring and concern, not only about the members of this congregation, but of the entire island,” he said. “My concern is that our young adults would collectively embrace and be more involved in the life of this church.”