"Gleaning after the reapers have passed: A new look at attestations of Creole in the Ex-Slave recordings."

Based on "The Voice of the Ancestors: Evidence from the 19th and early 20th0 centuries on prior AAVE and creole", a paper given at the Conference on African American Vernacular English - The state of the art. University of Georgia, Athens GA, October 1998.

The paper is supplemented by evidence from other published records of 19^th- and early 20^th-century African American speech. The paper also discusses a previously unpublished narrative of an encounter by Ex-slave Elder Laura Smalley's mother with Native Americans in the early 19^th century, and gives an account of some of the "micro-switches, or small intrusions of creole-derived features" in a short connected passage by Ex-slave Elder Billy McCrae, describing the arrival of Northern troops in his community at the end of the Civil War.

Sutcliffe's conclusion is that "creole-like features seen to occur in modern AAVE do after all have an earlier precedent… a 19th plantation creole or semi-creole evidently spoken outside the recognized Gullah area." Sutcliffe sees this as leading to a synthesis of the formerly opposed dialectologist and creolist positions on AAVE, namely that it descends either directly from a dialect of English or directly from a Creole.