Review of Blue Roots: African-American Folk Magic of the Gullah People. By Roger Pinckney. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1998. 35 illustrations, Bibliography, and Index. Paperbound. ISBN 1-56718-524-X Pp. xi + 170. $ 12.95.

by Jim Vandergriff
Knox College
Galesburg, IL

I found Blue Roots to be a very interesting book and recommend it to anyone with lay interest in the subject of Gullah root medicine. The book offers a general, and highly personalized, glance into the nature and extent of the practice, a brief -- perhaps too brief -- discussion of its African origins and American evolution, and of the extent of its current acceptance among both Whites and Blacks of the area the book covers -- Beaufort County, S. C., and especially St. Helena Island.

The author, Roger Pinckney, is a native of the area, which perhaps made his research easier, and may also account for the occasional zinger, such as the first several paragraphs of Chapter One, in which he seems to try to blame slavery on Africans themselves, among others. I find them minor annoyances, but suspect that other readers will find them more troubling, as they will what seems a patronizing attitude toward the Gullahs in general.

Two things about Pinckney’s portrayal of the Gullahs bother me. One is his representation of their language. For instance, someone says, "We saw off de bedposts, so they can’t roost, but it ain’t done no good." (p. 14) I’ve read enough about the Gullah people to know that their language diverges widely from other English varieties, so I assume that Pinckney is attempting to represent that. If that’s the case, why doesn’t he represent it more truly? Pinckney’s representation strikes me more as the Stepin Fetchit patois popularized by vaudeville blackface comedy than real language of real people. I would rather he not have attempted the dialect at all than to have used this cartoonish representation. That leads me to the second piece that bother me: his portrayal of the people themselves. The characterizations ring so loudly of the "Mr. Bones" stereotypes -- jealous women using charms to destroy a strayed lover’s sexuality, ingenuous day laborers expressing their fear of ghosts, economically successful Gullahs wearing expensive clothes and driving big Lincolns, etc. For all I know, these could be honest descriptions of real people. But, even if that’s the case, I would have enjoyed the book more, been less uncomfortable as I read it, if Pinckney had avoided them.

There is another whole area I feel like I have to criticize. That’s Pinckney’s less than scholarly use of secondary sources. He refers throughout to other works on Gullah history and beliefs, all of which he lists in the bibliography. However, he often refers to them indirectly -- without even stating the name of the work that he’s referring to or its author. Furthermore, he never, even when he is directly quoting, cites a page reference. I find that very frustrating. Not only do I want to know where he got his information, I want to know the exact page it was on in that reference so I can check up on him if I want to. Maybe I’ve been in academia too long, but I consider that kind of referencing to be simple courtesy. I’m also surprised that the publisher let it go by.

Let me reiterate, though, I really enjoyed reading this book. It has some interesting, if amateur, photographs. It tells me many things I didn’t know before. It is reasonably engagingly written. For those reasons, I recommend it to lay persons. It is not a scholarly book, though. It’s fieldwork methodology is suspect. (Can a hometown southern White boy whose daddy was an "employer" really collect reliable belief data from southern Blacks?) Too, the study is a bit too unfocused. Is he talking about root medicine or about beliefs in general? And does the quite interesting treatise on Gullah basket-making deserve, relatively speaking, as much space as he gives it?

So, it’s not a scholarly book, but I did find it very interesting.