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The Black Seminoles of Brackettville, Texas
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15408 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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12 / 1989 |
4,357 Words |
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Ian Hancock
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I first heard that there were Black Seminoles in 1975, over a pitcher of beer at an Austin watering hole near the University of Texas campus. Like most people, I associated Seminoles with Florida, and I had assumed that they were a Native American population. Thus I was surprised to learn that a community of African descent calling itself Seminole lived some two hundred miles due southwest in a small town called Brackettville.
The topic came up during a discussion about African-Americans on the western frontier. One of the group mentioned that she'd had a student who was interested in the Texas Cavalry, who had gone to Brackettville to interview an elderly surviving member of the Seminole Scouts. The following day, I located all I could on the Texas Seminoles--the standard work is still Kenneth Wiggins Porter's The Negro on the American Frontier--and learned that they were indeed from Florida, but had come there mainly from Georgia before that and had spent some time in Oklahoma and Mexico before reaching Texas in 1870. My interest being primarily linguistic, it seemed to me that if the Brackettville Seminoles had come from Georgia and had then spent time in Spanish-speaking Florida and Mexico, with a stop in the Indian Territory in between, there was a good chance that they would have spoken--and may even still speak--Gullah among themselves, an Afro-English Creole language surviving today along the Georgia and South Carolina littoral. Lack of contact with English in the Seminole community suggested a good environment for the ancestral language's maintenance.
I located the student, Walter Wakefield, seeking to learn just what his impressions were of the Black Seminoles' speech. He told me that he had heard only English when he visited the community and doubted that they spoke anything else, but that he had tape-recorded his conversation with the surviving Seminole Scout, Alfred Gordon. The conversation focused on military topics, but it was clear to me, based on my work with creolized languages over the years, that Gordon's first language was Creole, not English, and that he was making some effort to adjust to standard American for the interview. I heard such constructions on the tape as "his niece them" (his nieces), "you duh mean the old Caesar" (you mean the old Caesar), "must been bring the money" (must have brought the money), "that was we own" (that was ours), "he husband" (her husband), "she studying fuh nurse" (she is studying to be a nurse), and so on. These features were reminiscent of those found in the Gullah spoken along the southeastern U.S. seaboard and of Creole languages spoken throughout the Caribbean and in West Africa.
I wrote to the late Professor Porter to ask him whether he'd encountered Gullah in Brackettville. I received a pointedly written reply stating that he had lived for over thirty years among the descendants of the Seminole Scouts and could assure me that all they spoke was an English "typical of the Negro Americans," as well as some local Spanish; if anyone should know what they spoke, he should. Likewise, Joe Dillard, in his seminal work on the speech of African Americans, Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States, reported that his field trip to Brackettville "tended to confirm the notion that the dialect of the adults is essentially that of Black English everywhere in the United States" (Dillard 1972, 182).
Although it didn't look promising, I decided to make a trip to Brackettville myself in the late spring of the following year. It was a fairly
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