Word On the Street by John Mcwhorter

Author:John Mcwhorter [JOHN MCWHORTER]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-02-15T05:00:00+00:00

Particularly inaccurate was the old Hollywood depiction of blacks speaking in this fashion not only to other blacks but also to whites, when in fact Black English is primarily an in-group speech style. African Americans by no means leave Black English at the door the minute they enter into conversation with a white person, but deeper, more consistent use of it is generally reserved for use with other blacks.

Hattie McDaniel, best known to us today for her portrait of Mammy in Gone With the Wind, was equally prominent later in her lifetime for portraying the maid Beulah on a radio sitcom (older readers will recall her catchphrases “Somebody bawl fo’ Beulah?” and “Love dat man!”). McDaniel had it written into her contract for Beulah that she not be required to speak in dialect and indeed did not on the show, except for sound patterns we can see even in the catchphrases. Yet McDaniel herself was quite comfortable in Black English; she had even spent her early career in vaudeville singing blues and “hollers” couched in classic Southern black dialect. What McDaniel used her clout to escape was having to utter entire paragraphs of socially implausible sentences like, “I’se yo bestes’ frien, Massa Tommy, an’ when you goes off to de university don’ you never forget who done take care of you and who it is can make de bes’ peach cobbler dis side of de Mississippi” in the role of a suburban maid in a middle-class family. Indeed one cringes to listen to McDaniel, and Hollywood’s other black maid-on-call, Louise Beavers (Imitation of Life), having to lope through scenes like this.

Thus a complete grammar of Black English would by no means represent the sum total of African-American speech, the way a Greek grammar is the sum total of most Greeks’ speech. Black English is a repertoire of features and systematic structures that African Americans use generally in tandem with standard English, use more with each other than with whites, and use to differing degrees depending on level of education and identity with the African-American community.

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