Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon;

Author:Brian Dillon;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2020-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

“If that is the word I want”: Baldwin is making a slight show here of being careful with his language, coolly implying a distinction between Mailer’s (and a larger white culture’s) slack use of “hip” to appropriate the perceived liberties of African-American art or life, and the stricter sense the word maintained among black people themselves. To be hip and black at mid-century meant, for sure, to inhabit the sort of peripheral milieu—of style and sex, of drugs, art and crime—to which Mailer in his half-invented innocence was attracted. But the “benediction of hip” (as the critic Ian Penman calls it) also implies a type of reserve, remoteness, austerity. Hip is a matter of codes and ciphers, hidden meanings—because the alternative, in the lethal perplex of race in America, is literally to give yourself away. This is what the garrulous Mailer cannot grasp.

“They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic.” In its smooth way, it is the most damning putdown of Mailer in the whole essay. The mostly monosyllabic rhythms of the sentence and its neatly affianced sounds (“real sweet,” “ofay cat” and “frantic”) are Baldwin’s, but they belong also to the jazz musicians he is half quoting. The sentence is an example of what is clumsily called free indirect speech: the author sounding like subject or character. It is straightforwardly comical too: hard not to think literally of Mailer as “a frantic cat.” But something else interests me in the sentence: Baldwin’s use of the word “ofay,” which has a fraught and fascinating history. Superficially, it simply means white: that is, if you are African-American and intending by the word a certain degree of contempt, offence or dismissal. Quite how much hostility it expresses seems to have varied with geography and history, during a century and more of use. “Ofay” did not reach mainstream white America in the way, for example, that “honky” did—though there is some evidence to say that in parts of the United States it was the more violent epithet.

But why “ofay”? If you google the word now you will find some more or less exotic etymologies. It is said to be a Pig Latin version of “foe.” Or, as the Dictionary of American Regional English suggests, to derive from the Ibibio language of Nigeria. (Claims of African origin have also been made for “hip,” which dates in English at least to 1904—these seem to be fanciful.) But another origin suggests itself for “ofay,” and a history that haunts Baldwin’s use of the word, which appears to me both casual and considered. The linguist Gerald Cohen has proposed that the word is a corruption of “au fait,” which was in wide use in the US by the end of the nineteenth century to mean fashionable, knowing, particular. “Au fait” appears to have migrated to mean, among black Americans, a particular sort of white person or white culture: middle-class, condescending, excessively correct. And from there simply to mean white. In the early

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