ME AND THAT BUCKRAH GAL: Gullah Geechee Story of Faith, Music, and Identity Hardcover – February 26, 2026

Set against the humid, soul‑stirring backdrop of 1940s and 1950s Chucktown, South Carolina, this novel follows a young Black man born between two worlds. His father is a respected minister. His mother is a juke‑joint singer with a voice that could stop a room. And he—caught in the middle—is being pushed toward the pulpit while secretly dreaming of a life on stage.As he comes of age in a town shaped by tradition, faith, music, and the unspoken rules of the Jim Crow South, he falls in love with a white girl who sees his brilliance long before he does. Their bond forces him to confront the limits of the world he was born into and the possibilities waiting beyond it. He’s too big for the town, too full of promise to stay still, and too tangled in expectation to walk away clean.The people around him speak in the rhythms of Gullah/Geechee—a living, breathing language born from enslaved West Africans who preserved their identity through words, memory, and community along the coastal Lowcountry. Throughout the novel, readers will encounter this language as it is truly spoken. Spellings are intentional, drawn from the author’s lived memory rather than formal dictionaries, inviting readers to learn, feel, and experience the culture from the inside.From southern North Carolina to northern Florida, the Gullah/Geechee corridor forms the ancestral coastline gifted to emancipated slaves—a region rich with history, resilience, and story. This novel weaves that heritage into a tale of identity, love, ambition, and the long road toward becoming oneself.Filled with twists, turns, and deeply human choices, this is the journey of a young man discovering who he is, what he stands for, and how far he’s willing to go to claim his own voice. Read more