Daughters of the Dust

The Gullah-Geechee people (referred to in the text as Geechee) are an ethnic group who live on the Sea Islands of the Atlantic coast, also known as the South Carolina Lowcountry. The Gullah-Geechee are descended from enslaved Central and West Africans who were brought to the Sea Islands to work on rice, cotton, and indigo plantations. These enslaved people brought with them a multitude of distinct languages and cultures, and the creole culture that arose from the mixture of these influences became known as Gullah-Geechee.

Several circumstances encouraged the development and proliferation of a unique culture on the Sea Islands. Mosquito-borne illnesses proliferated in the hot and marshy region. While the enslaved Africans had already developed some immunity to these diseases, Europeans had not, and the rapid spread of yellow fever and malaria drove white enslavers away from the islands. Enslavers continued to bring enslaved people to the islands to work on the profitable plantations; however, the enslaved people were then left largely to their own devices, leading to the development of a culture that had little interaction with white society.

After the Civil War, most free Black people in the South chose to forego working in the Sea Islands due to the dangerous terrain and the risk of illness. Still, the Gullah-Geechee culture continued to develop in relative isolation, allowing for the preservation of West African traditions, spiritualism, and linguistic patterns. These cultural artifacts appear in abundance throughout Daughters of the Dust, from Nana Peazant’s strip-cloth quilt to the pervasive presence of ancient West African religious figures.

Gullah-Geechee people speak Gullah, a creole language heavily influenced by African languages. Accordingly, most characters in Daughters of the Dust speak Gullah, and their dialogue is faithfully reproduced by the author, who makes it a point to utilize African loanwords like “buckra” for white. Gullah incorporates many linguistic structures and loanwords from Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, and Sierra Leone. Gullah-Geechee spiritual practices also reflect an eclectic mix and are influenced by Christianity and Islam as well as by African folk spiritualism.

Although urbanization and the passage of time have altered the landscape of Gullah-Geechee communities considerably, approximately 1 million Gullah-Geechee people still live on or around the low country as of 2022. The tension between Gullah-Geechee culture and the pressures of modernization is a key theme of Daughters of the Dust, the storyline of which follows Amelia Varnes as she tries to track the history that her family lost after taking part in the Great Migration. Through Amelia’s journey to reconnect with her culture, Dash creates a rich and vibrant portrait of the Gullah-Geechee community.