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The language of class and nation

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References

  1. Kelly Miller,Out of the House of Bondage, (New York, 1971), p.20.

  2. Origo, “Domestic Enemy,”Speculum, XXX (July, 1955), 338.

  3. Thomas Kochman, “Rapping in the Ghetto,” in Lee Rainwater, ed.,Soul (Chicago, 1970), p. 74.

  4. I have drawn especially on J.L. Dillard,Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States (New York, 1972), and the work of William A. Stewart, which greatly influenced that of Dillard. See esp. Stewart, “Sociolinguistic Factors in the History of American Negro Dialect,”Florida Foreign Languages Reporter, V (Spring, 1967), and “Continuity and Change in American Negro Dialects,”Florida Foreign Languages Reporter, VI (Spring, 1968); the papers of Roger D. Abrahams, esp. ” ‘Can You Dig It?’: Black Uses of Black English,” as well as hisDeep Down in the Jungle (rev. ed.; Chicago, 1970) andPositively Black (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969); and an unpublished paper by Mervyn C. Alleyne, “The Linguistic Continuity of Africa in the Caribbean.” The earlier work of Herskovits enormously influenced the more recent work.

  5. Herkovits argues this matter strongly inMyth of the Negro Past, p. 50, andLife in a Haitian Valley, pp. 22–23. Of special importance is the work of Joseph H. Greenberg; see “Niger-Congo,” in R.O. Collins, ed.,Problems of African History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968), pp. 70–71. See also Gladwyn Murray Childs,Umbundu Kinship and Character (London, 1949), p. 190.

  6. Mullin,Flight and Rebellion, p. 46.

  7. See, e.g., C.C. Jones,Religious Instruction, p. 17; Dillard,Black English, passim; and P.H. Wood,Black Majority.

  8. Thus, in Dutch Surinam the lingua franca was a pidgin English, which widened the cultural distance between the Dutch-speaking planters and the African slaves. See Boxer;Dutch Seaborne Empire, p. 241.

  9. Clement Easton,A History of the Old South (New York, 1949), pp. 6, 7–8. For recent expositions of the traditional point of view, with criticisms of the work of Stewart, Dillard,et al., see Juanita V. Williamson and Virginia M. Burke, eds.,A Various Language: Perspectives on American Dialects (New York, 1971), esp. the articles by Kurath, Brooks, Farrison, Davis, and Williamson.

  10. See Lyell,Second Visit, II, 20, 23; Kemble,Journal, p. 211; Andrews,South Since the War, pp. 131, 227–230, 351; Dennett,South as It Is, p. 121; P.H. Wood, Black Majority.

  11. J.L. Dillard has pointed out the similarities between southern black English and that of the Jamaican maroons; see “The History of Black English in Nova Scotia - A First Step,” unpubl. See also Rubin,Plantation Country, p. 89. Stewart has pointed out that although blacks and whites both use “ain'” in place of “is not," blacks also use it in a way that whites rarely if ever do - to negate verbs in the past tense. Whites need not do it for the obvious reason, that unlike blacks, they use the usual English past tense. But a black might say, “Dey not like dat” to mean “They did not like that,” rather than (as a white would) “They are not like that.”

  12. George W. Cable, “Creole Slave Songs,” in Katz, ed.,Social Implications of Early Negro Music, p. 47; Nichols,Many Thousand Gone, p. 70.

  13. White Virginians actually took pride in their use of African words during the eighteenth century. See Schoepf,Travels in the Confederation, II, 62.

  14. Rawick, ed.,S. C. Narr, III (3), 27–28 (Marie Jenkins). The volumes of narratives contain innumerable such items. See also Higginson,Army Life, p. 206; Botume,First Days Amongst the Contrabands, pp. 67, 222.

  15. The following remarks by William J. Entwistle in his essay, “The Portuguese and Brazilian Language,” Ch. 3 in H.V. Livermore, ed.,Portugal and Brazil: An Introduction (Oxford, 1953), p. 35, may be considered: “They [certain words of Brazilian Portuguese] are from a Bantu dialect (Kimbundo) or from Yoruba (Nago), but they are not really numerous outside of Negro verse. The Portuguese settler gave orders to his Negro slaves in Portuguese, but to make them intelligible it was necessary to strip them of grammatical superfluities. The result is a dialect with a quite un-Portuguese grammatical structure, without thes of the plural nouns or distinction of person in the verbs, other than the first person and the rest.”

  16. In the account of ex-slave James Hayes of Texas we find an illustration. His mistress was grieving for her dead husband. One day, however, she finally laughed, as a result of the following exchange. A slave said, “I got no 'lasses.” The mistress rebuked him: “Saymolasses." The slave replied, “Why say molasses [= mo‘ ’lasses, that is, more molasses] when I'se got no 'lasses? “Rawick], ed., Texas Narr., IV (2), 127.

  17. William A. Stewart, “On the Uses of Negro Dialect in the Teaching of Reading,” unpubl.

  18. See David Dwyer,An Introduction to West African Pidgin English (East Lansing, Mich., 1967), p. 98.

  19. Redpath,Roving Editor, p. 32. Generally, see Grace Sims Holt, “Inversion' in Black Communication,” in Kochman, ed.,Rappin' and Stylin' Out, pp. 152-159.

  20. Lester,To Be a Slave, p. 84.

  21. Higginson,Army Life, p. 28; Botume,First Days Amongst the Contrabands, p. 74.

  22. Olmsted,Seaboard, p. 29.

  23. Rawick, ed.,S. C. Narr., II (1), 210; also Powdermaker,After Freedom, p. 47; Botume,First Days Amongst the Contrabands, p. 177; Swint, ed.,Dear Ones at Home, p. 189.

  24. Quoted in J.M. McPherson,The Negro's Civil War, p. 43.

  25. See the suggestive discussion in Memmi,Dominated Man, p. 75, in which he describes what he calls “colonial bilingualism”; also see H.M. Lynd,On Shame and the Search for Identity, p. 171.

  26. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, p. 44.

  27. Yetman, ed.,Life Under the “Peculiar Institution,” pp. 16–17.

  28. Rawick, ed.,Ala. Narr., VI (1), 377.

  29. Heyward,Seed from Madagascar, pp. 188–189; Pearson, ed.,Letters from Port Royal, p. 25; for the Southwest, see Smedes,Southern Planter, p. 19 n., and J. B. Sellers,Slavery in Alabama, p. 74.

  30. Stirling,Letters from the Slave States, pp. 51, 56, 245. Stirling praised the “good English” of the slaves in Kentucky and Tennessee as being superior to that of the whites; see p. 56. See alsoJournal of Charlotte Forten, p. 160.

  31. “The Negroes interviewed frequently speak fairly correctly at first but when they begin to talk of old times lapse into dialect.” Interviewer's note in Rawick, ed.,N. C. Narr., XV (2), 340.

  32. Gramsci,Modern Prince, pp. 58-60.

  33. Mbiti,African Religions and Philosophy, p. 101.

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  1. Eugene D. Genovese
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Professor Genovese is chairman of the history department at the University of Rochester and author ofThe Political Economy of Slavery, The World the Slaveholders Made,and In Red and Black.

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Genovese, E.D. The language of class and nation. Urban Rev 8, 39–47 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02172454

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