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L I T E R A R Y D I A L E C T A N D
S O C I A L C H A N G E
J U L E S Z A N G E R
Literary dialect is the attempt to indicate on the printed page, through spellings and mis-spellings, elisions, apostrophes, syntactical shifts, sig- nals, etc., the speech of an ethnic, regional or racial group. The use of literary dialect has been a characteristic of American lit- erature from its beginnings. While it is found in many national literatures,- literary dialect appears with particular frequency and variety in American literature, in part because of the great number of languages spoken by the successive waves of large immigrant groups settling here, in part perhaps because of the rapid rate of social and technological change, which tended to break up American communities once relatively isolated by geographical or social distance. This continual breakdown of the barriers separating such communities produced a constant stream of "vanishing" regional, national and racial types, and a succession of nostalgic attempts to p r e - serve them, complete with their regional speech variations. A major literary function of such dialect has been as a general char- acterizing device. That is, a speech pattern identified by one or another spelling or syntactical pattern or by a signal like "Begorra!" or "Massa" or "Mon Dieu!" as belonging to a group for which there exists a popular stereotype can be substituted for detailed characterizing through narrative action. Thus, "Begorra!" is happy-go-lucky, given to whiskey, fighting and brag; "Massa" is cheerful, trivially dishonest, faithful and childlike; "Mon Dieu!" is meticulous about honor, partial to the ladies, vivacious and so on. Further, dialect is employed to indicate the relationship of a character to the fictional community in which the narrative places him. Degrees of social relationship can be revealed by the use of conventional signals which refer the reader to existing social attitudes or simply by the distance between the normal speech and the dialect speech, the distance being expressed by the density of orthographic cues. In both uses of dialect, its effective literary function is dependent upon the existence of certain social conventions and stereotypes. Conse- quently, one might expect that as such conventions and stereotypes change, there will be a corresponding alteration of the literary dialect. The representation of Negro dialect appears to illustrate best the conventional nature of literary dialect and its responsiveness to social
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change. One reason for this is that Negroes have appeared in American lit- erature as an easily identified dialect speaking group for a considerably longer time than any other such group, and, from their first appearance, have been continuously represented, unlike those other dialect speaking groups which in the normal American pattern assimilate and disappear over the course of a few generations. Further, the Negro has long been associ- ated, either centrally or peripherally, with a series of themes and subjects which have been extremely popular in American literature. At first, of course, the Negro was an important figure in that extensive body of popular romantic fiction, both p r o - and anti-slavery, concerned with plantation life and then with the Civil War, and later he was to become important to the local colorists and the socially militant realists. In addition, Negroes have undergone perhaps the most radical altera- tions in social fortune of any of the dialect speaking groups. While the rise of the Irish, the Germans and the Jews in American society has been extreme in relationship to their beginnings, those groups rather quickly achieved a relative social stability which the Negro group has yet to achieve. Finally, the Negro has been almost continuously at the center of heated social controversy, so that popular attitudes toward the Negro have been sharply divided and extreme in their expressions. If literary dialect is a conventional response to the relationship between the fictional character and situation and certain social attitudes and stereotypes, an examination of the effect of social change on the conventions governing the presentation of Negro literary dialect should most clearly reveal this relationship. In the second quarter of the nineteenth century, there occurred in the United States a significant change in the mode of indicating Negro speech on the printed page. Prior to this time, the speech of Negroes was indicated by a conventional dialect called "Guinée"; it was replaced by a dialect called "Plantation. " Both are misnomers. The "Guinée" dialect was a literary convention dating back at least to the sixteenth century, but given its broadest impact and greatest momentum by Daniel Defoe's use of it to indicate the speech of Friday in Robinson Crusoe. Friday, of course, was no Negro but a Carib Indian; however, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one frequently discovers a persist- ent confusion of the races in fiction and drama. This confusion is best exemplified in George Coleman, J r. ' s Inkle and Yarico (1787) where Yarico, the heroine, is described at one point as an Indian princess and at another as a blackamoor, where her servant Wowski is described as black yet called an Indian maid and where the hero is pursued through the South American wilderness by black savages. Daniel Defoe himself was to use precisely the same dialect he had employed to indicate Indian speech in Robinson Crusoe to indicate Negro speech in his Colonel Jack.
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Negro's mentality. "In expressing his child-like mind, they used brief phrases, repeated tones, a narrow range, and simple rhythmic patterns, thus approaching the idiom of nursery rhymes. " Both Melville and Bret Harte were to employ this dialect ironically, playing its conventional implications of savagery and simplicity against the actual natures of the characters who spoke it. Friday, the savage plucked from the burning by the Christian European Crusoe, was to prefigure almost two centuries of similar literary savages, and his speech was to become the conventional literary dialect employed to indicate this role. When the Negro slave began to appear as a character in fiction written in America, this conventional speech pattern required little adaptation. All that was necessary was the addition of a few signal words such as "buckra" and "pickaninny, " and the sentence structure, the sound substitutions and additions, the peculiarities of verb and pronoun all could be retained. Above all, the cultural, social and racial values implicit in the dialect were p e r - fectly appropriate to the presentation of the Negro slave. The "childlike" implications of the dialect, of course, were particularly appropriate to the way in which the white man construed his relation to the slave. This dialect came to be known as "Guinée, " since the Guinea coast was the debarkation point for most of the African slaves transported to America. The mass of slaves, however, came from a great variety of tribes speaking different languages, and, within those language groups, different dialects; the slave coffles brought slaves from as far as a thousand miles from the Guinea coast. Consequently, for most of the slaves there was no common language until they learned the pidgin taught them by their enslavers. The "Guinée" dialect was the conventional mode of indicating Negro speech in literature until approximately 1840, when it was replaced by a new literary convention, the "plantation" dialect. This dialect still remains what we normally think of today as "Negro" speech. The new convention differs in a number of significant ways from the older "Guinée" form. First of all, it drops the added "ee" sound that was "Guinée's" outstanding char- acteristic. Further, its verb is usually conjugated and alters to indicate tense, and its use of pronouns is considerably more correct than in "Guinée. " The sentence structure and especially the vocabulary are much more complex and various than in the older form. Certain of the older characteristics are retained, however, the most obvious being the sound substitutions of "b" for "v" and of "d" or "f ' for "th." In spite of this, the general effect of "plantation" dialect is considerably more adult and more sophisticated than that of "Guinée. " One has only to compare a song like: Me be one poor slave, brought into Barbado, Ven one pickaninny, such de cruel trado, Now me vetch and carry, no go here and dere, Dey no let me rest, dey for black man no care.... with one written only a very few years later:
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Oh, I'm a roarer on de fiddle, And down in old Virginny, They say I play de skyentific Like Massa Paganini. Weel about and turn about Anf^ do jis so, Ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.... to recognize this difference. There are, however, certain characteristics of "plantation" dialect which mitigate sharply against its relative sophistication and maturity. Of foremost importance in this regard is the fact that "plantation, " unlike "Guinée, " is a determinedly comic dialect. That is, it attempts to achieve humorous effects through certain of its associated characteristics. Two distinct related characteristics which are particularly associated with "plantation" dialect (and were not with "Guinée") were the use of malaprop- isms and mispronunciations, and the use of a highly elevated and inappro- priate vocabulary. Both of these speech characteristics were from the very first appear- ances of "plantation" dialect linked with the speakers of that dialect to such an extent that they can be thought of as actual extensions of it. Understood dramatically, these comic devices — malapropisms, inappropriate diction, mispronunciations — produce the image of the arriviste and the social climber. They are expressions of social and cultural pretentiousness intended to be laughed at by the reader who normally belongs to the group to which the Negro aspires. They are, of course, not confined to the presen- tation of Negro speech: one can discover precisely the same devices employed to mock the aspiring English country squire, Irishman, Italian or Jew. Every society has always had its "outs" wanting to get "in." That these devices seem particularly exaggerated and crude when they appear in the conventional "plantation" dialect ascribed to Negroes may perhaps be accounted for by the fact that the audience for whom the dialect is intended is a mass audience: the "ins" of the audience can laugh only at those sole- cisms of the "outs" which they are able to recognize as solecisms. Understood this way, it becomes clear that the shift from "Guinée" to "plantation" dialect represents an extraordinary change in the image of the Negro — where the older one projects him as a child, the new dialect func- tions to humanize him, to socialize him. It finds a formal and traditional role for him to play in society — though it is on the lowest rank. It is, as I have suggested, an ambivalent role. The new dialect is more mature and sophisticated and at the same time less dignified, more contemptible. It is suggestive that while "Guinée" dialect was frequently employed to achieve pathetic effects in the anti-slavery songs of the late eighteenth century, "plantation" dialect was, for roughly the first two decades of its use, an
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sums, both live and roasted; to corncake and hoecake; and most especially, to sweethearts left behind in Tennessee, South Carolina or Ole Wirginny. Though these types may be regarded to some degree as distinct, an examination of the roles they play as revealed in their songs makes clear that they possess two significant characteristics in common: the Negro caricatured by the minstrel, whether Broadway Dandy or ragged field hand, is in the great majority of cases a Negro in the city, and, where the city is identified, most frequently a Northern city. The Dandy is successfully urbanized and imitates the white swells of his city with an aplomb that Brummel might envy. The plantation character, on the other hand, is lost and unhappy in the city, and from his situation was to come that whole line of minstrel songs on the theme of homesickness for the old plantation, a tradition of which Old Folks at Home and Dixie are perhaps the best known examples. Daniel Emmett, writing reminiscently about his most famous song, said, "I will merely say that [Dixie] is nothing but a plain simple mel- ody, with plantation words, the purport of which is that a negro in the north feels himself out of place and, thinking of his old home in the south, is made to exclaim, in the words of the song: 'I wish I was in Dixie's Land! ' " This minstrel TtNegroTf^ is not only urban, but, as significantly, he is a freedman. Neither in the songs nor the sketches does he normally figure in a slavery situation. He is by occupation, when it is identified, a barber like Old Dan Tucker himself: Here's my razor in good order, Magnum bonum, jis hab bo't er. Sheep-shell oats, Tucker shell de corn, I'll shabe you as soon as de water get warm. or a boot black, like Jim Brown, in a topical verse: I went on to Washington, de capital ob de nation, I ax massa Jackson, will you gib me situation? Says he, Jim Brown, I give you one, but what can you do? I can nullify de boot, and put de veto on de shoe.... or a waiter, as in Root, Hog, or Die: I'm chief cook and bottle washer, captain ob de waiters; I stand upon my head When I peel de Apple dumplins.... or a wagon driver, as in Jim Along Josie. The minstrel "Negro," then, marks the appearance of the Negro free- man in America's popular literature. Unlike the "Guinée" speaking charac- ter, who was a plantation slave or house servant, and frequently a pathetic figure, the minstrel "Negro" is free, urban and comic. Further we dis- cover that the minstrel figure is conventionally defined in his songs and sketches as attempting to become a part of the dominant free society; the Dandy with his resplendent clothes and elegant manners marking the height of his achievement — though the most he accomplishes is a cruel caricature
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— just as the displaced "field hand" recalling "good old times" and longing to be carried back to Virginia marks his failure. As either Dandy or Field Hand, however, he is foremost a foolish, childish, clownish, irresponsible figure and his creators seldom relinquish this conception of him in order to achieve pathetic or realistic effects. Curiously, the scholarship on the historical development of the min- strel show — even while it unconsciously documents and illustrates most copiously both the conventional and stylized rather than realistic nature of the caricature, and the urban and Northern rather than Southern and planta- tion setting in which the caricature performs — has tended to disregard its own carefully assembled evidence in favor of an interpretation which equates the degree of caricature with the degree of "realism, " as in Hans Nathan's typical judgment that when "The ragged Southern plantation type of Negro was frequently relegated to the second part of the show, while the more for- mal, Northern type, the dandy, was introduced into the first part... it was mainly the last part which retained a pronounced and genuine Negro atmosphere." Of major influence in helping to shape the image of the Negro embod- ied in the minstrel character were two important historical factors. One was the appearance during the first quarter of the century in many cities, especially in the North and in the border states, of great numbers of free Negroes. The other was the efforts of the American Colonization Society to solve the problem of what to do with those Negroes. Negroes began to come into the cities in great numbers at the end of the eighteenth century and continued to migrate into the urban slums. The North during this time, strongly influenced by Revolutionary sentiment and imbued with natural rights philosophy, was sharply aware of the incompati- bility of slavery and the struggle for independence. Consequently, the period was marked by the highest rate of manumission in the history of American slavery. In 1800, about 37, 000 Negro slaves remained in bondage in the North. By 1830, only 3, 568 Negro slaves were left. Great numbers of these Negro freemen migrated to the cities where they constituted a kind of sub-proletariat, limited to laboring in service and menial occupations, the women working as laundresses and cooks, the men as laborers, waiters, barbers, porters, coachmen and bootblacks. The lives led by these free Negroes in the cities were frequently poverty- stricken, squalid and miserable, and there seemed little hope to ameliorate their condition as their numbers grew. In 1816 the need to find some solu- tion to the problem of what was to become of the free Negro population led a group of delegates from several states to organize the American Coloni- zation Society. They agreed to take steps to colonize Negroes, on a volun- tary basis, in Africa, or any place Congress might designate. The Society attempted to win public support for its position through a campaign con- ducted in a series of tracts, public addresses and its own newspaper, The
