"Miss Willamina"
"The Geechee Dialect"
by
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"The Geechee Dialect"
An excerpt from the poem, "Miss Willamina",
by Carmen Uter
Nowadays I miss her,
And that beautiful music which was her
voice,
and I have to accept that, 'cause that's God's choice.
But, down through the years I have come to realize,
that while "proper-speakers" may have sophistication and grace,
and social airs, not too easily replaced,
It was, paradoxically, at the university where I first began to appreciate,
the true value of speech called "illiterate".
And it was also there that I began to grow much wiser, and then to know,
that the most beautiful sounds I've ever heard,
...are (ironically to me), none other than
the "illiterate", non-grammatical speech,....spoken by a Geechee.
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About the Book
The author tells of cultural rituals which awakened within her a respect for her grandmother's sea island culture.
This book introduces the sounds of a creole-idiom which is a Southern lingua-franca that is spoken on the coastlines of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
When colorful and expressive vernacular of the Geechee language is heard on the accompanying voice-tape, it immediately brings to life this creole-language which is nowadays threatened with extinction.
About the Author
"Miss Willamina" is the author's first book, copyrighted in 1989, based on a poem.
Being born to two Creole parents, ...(a mother of Portuguese & Angolan ("Geechee") descent, ...and a Portuguese-Melungeon (aka Wesort-Piscataway) father),... set the stage for her dual function as a state-certified teacher of Spanish and multicultural education to inner-city youth.
Her second book, entitled, "The Geechee Lady", (subtitled, "Grandma And The Secret Castas"),...is an adaptation from the poem, "Miss Willamina", which describes her adjustment to the cultural rituals of her maternal grandmother's people, the "Geechees" of South Carolina.
The author uses her 4th book, "Wesort Woman", to emphasize and validate her own dichotomous self-identity,... by telling first, about her paternal grandmother, a mulatto-Indian woman ("mulindian"), who was born 1889, into the "bird clan" of the Piscataway Indians of Maryland, called "free-people-of-color-of-Charles County, Maryland". The author also makes it a point to emphasize the one cultural trait of which she is most grateful for making her feel whole; that cultural trait being the fact that each of her grandmothers was the wife of a Portuguese man, making the author a multi-ethnic woman of color, who is proud to be "Portuguese-Creole" on both sides of her family tree.
In honor of those two Portuguese grandfathers, her third book,...entitled, "Ancient Laws of The Secret Castas",... is a bilingual, Spanish/English translation of a rare-book she found in Spain. The book details the ancient regulations which historically had governed the Latin American caste system, "mestizaje".
To the keen and intelligent observer, a close analysis of those colonial times is self-explanatory as to why the Wesorts evolved into an insular and very clannish separated segment of society, choosing isolation rather than suffering the devastating treatment that automatically would have been their destiny had they allowed themselves to freely socialize, marry, and otherwise inter-mingle with the masses of colored society.
The author is a professional genealogist residing in New York City.