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well as in South Carolina, said he thought he could explain that.
    Those plantations down in the Carolina Low Country were the largest of all and the owners were the richest, he said. The plantation owners contracted with the slave traders to buy Gullahs straight from Africa, kept them in herds when they worked the crops, and put them under lock and key at night. There were only a few girls and women among them—only enough to do cooking and housework—and when one of them had a baby, it was as black as the rest of them.
    For another thing, the owners didn’t need females to breed like it was done on the small farms in the upland country. The owners down there could buy new slaves at auction or have them shipped from Africa a lot cheaper than they could be raised on the plantation. It would’ve hurt their profits if they’d had to provide living space and feed young ones till they were twelve or fourteen years old and strong enough to do a man’s work in the fields.
    And there’s still more to it. To keep the white overseers and guards from wanting to mix with the few Gullah slave females, which would’ve produced babies the plantation owner didn’t want to be burdened with, they paid white women to come from England and let the overseers and guards pick and choose among them to marry. This is the main reason why the Gullah females in the Low Country never had a chance to have mulatto babies and why the race stayed pure black.
    Then when the Civil War was over and the Gullahs were freed, most of them went straight to Charleston and never left it. Charleston was where they landed when they were brought from Africa, and maybe they thought they could get on a ship and go back there to stay.
    Anyway, he said, Charleston is a pinched-in little place almost surrounded like an island by rivers and bays, and people who live there, white and Gullah, have grown to be satisfied to stay and die right there. A few Gullahs in Charleston who happened to be born mulatto are the only ones likely to leave it and go North. All this is why there’re enough pure-blooded Gullahs in Charleston to keep them being the blackest Negroes you’ll find anywhere this side of Africa.
    I asked my uncle if he thought Bisco’s parents or grandparents were Gullahs who had left Charleston and moved to Middle Georgia.
    That wouldn’t be likely, he told me. Gullahs never went far in that direction. They weren’t the roaming kind. They stayed close to home even after being freed slaves. That’s because they were always hoping that ship was coming to Charleston and take them back to Africa and they didn’t want to miss it and be left behind.
    The Georgia slaves were Geechees, and Geechees lost no time turning mulatto and quadroon and all the lighter colors. I don’t know where they came from in Africa, but they were called Geechees to start with and they’ve been Geechees ever since. They were given that name because when they were brought from Africa and landed at Savannah, they were shipped right away up the Ogeechee River for a hundred miles and more and then auctioned by the traders to plantation owners all over East and Middle Georgia. Those plantations were a lot smaller than the ones in the Carolina Low Country and slaves cost much more delivered there than they did at the seaports. That’s how they came to be so widely scattered over Georgia and so few of them to a plantation.
    What made the real difference in Georgia, he said, was that female slaves were just as valuable deep in the country as males were because it was cheaper to breed and raise slaves there than it was to buy them in Savannah.
    And one more thing. There weren’t many white women in Georgia in those days, but there were plenty of Geechee girls. It stands to reason that the white owners would put them to doing housework and such things instead of sending them to work in the fields. What I’m trying to say is that the best looking of them were probably kept close to the