13/02/2025
“What a brilliant novel gets right — and deliberately wrong — about Black English”
By John McWhorter
“Friends had been telling me I needed to read “James,” the best-selling novel by Percival Everett that revisits “Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of the character Jim. They said I would be intrigued by Everett’s ideas about language as a strategy of resistance. After hearing that from roughly the sixth person, in the spirit of Black History Month I decided to go ahead.
My friends were right. Everett pulls off a masterly linguistic confection, in which enslaved people use Black English only as a wary affectation. Among themselves, they speak standard English, but they switch into Black English in the company of white people, who prefer to hear “incorrect” English because it allows them to feel superior. Near the book’s end, Jim ceases to indulge the custom. “Why are you talking like that?” Judge Thatcher repeatedly growls in bafflement.
Everett isn’t offering a cynical take on the origin of today’s Black English. Instead, the Black characters’ speech is the dialect the way it was commonly depicted in 19th and early 20th century culture. This is the speech of minstrel shows and characters like Topsy and Uncle Tom in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” It seems ungainly and even false today, partly because it was a distortion of the way the dialect was actually spoken at that time. In his 1873 novel “What Can She Do?,” Edward Payson Roe — one of those best-selling, three-named novelists of the era who are utterly unknown today — has the old Black servant Hannibal using “I’se” as a pronoun throughout: “I’se hope you’ll forgive me,” “I’se isn’t.” History offers no evidence that actual Black people have ever used “I’se” in this way.
Having the Black characters speak standard English with one another makes them more readily human to us. I doubt I am alone in guiltily finding it hard to really “feel” Twain’s Jim or the less educated Black characters in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” because even without outright distortions like Roe’s, their speech seems so unfamiliar. When Harriet Beecher Stowe had Tom saying things like “And your ‘gettin’ religion,’ as you call it, arter all, is too p’isin mean for any crittur” (p’isin is “poison”), she meant it as a respectful depiction of real speech. But Black English has changed so much since then that 170-plus years later, we have to strain to quite hear a person underneath it all. For the same reason, it can take practice to hear Zora Neale Hurston’s characters as round, in the literary sense, despite the author’s accurate rendition of the older rural Black English she was raised in.
“James” is going to have a long life. I can’t wait for the film — I’m imagining, perhaps, Daveed Diggs slipping in and out of dialects depending on whether Huck (Timothée Chalamet?) is around. Yet I worry somewhat that with its influence, “James” may encourage a longstanding myth: that Black English was created as a kind of secret code to keep whites from understanding what we were saying. In “James” the whites can understand the Black English, but the situation is still a variation on the idea of the dialect as a grim ploy, rather than as something that emerged organically.
Black English originated when slaves were exposed to nonstandard English dialects spoken by plantation owners and white indentured servants from Britain and Ireland. Most of what distinguishes Black from standard English traces to these dialects — a fact that may seem strange, given how little Americans today encounter those dialects. Gullah Creole of the Sea Islands was also a small part of the mix. And people who were captured into slavery learned English as a second language, in many cases when they were adults, a brutal introduction that caused the more uselessly arbitrary features of the language to get shaved away: “Why you didn’t tell me?” instead of “Why didn’t you tell me?”
A great many of the world’s nonstandard speech varieties arose on their own, without any deliberate choice, and unconnected to any concern with any outsider’s comprehension. This has included Creole languages in oppressed colonial outposts, such as Jamaican Patois and Papiamentu in the Netherlands Antilles. Afrikaans, in South Africa, is the result of a process similar to the one that gave rise to Black English: Dutch, the language of an expansionist empire, got a handy sorting out as speakers of other languages undid its needless wrinkles such as the habit of assigning gender to objects for no reason. In Brazil, there are people descended from enslaved Africans who speak rural varieties of Portuguese that could be termed Black Portuguese.
The idea that Black English was concocted as a kind of deliberate survival strategy is satisfying on many levels — i.e. it makes for a great novel — but there is no actual evidence of it happening.
Even some of the oddest-seeming features from the dubious depictions of 19th-century Black English were rooted in linguistic reality. Take that quote from a few paragraphs back where Stowe’s Tom says “arter.” Twain’s Jim does as well, saying “I raise’ up de sheet en I says, all right, boss, you’s de chap I’s arter.” It may sound contrived, but this was an import from Britain. Think of the off rhyme in “Jack and Jill” who went to “fetch a pail of water / Jack fell down and broke his crown and Jill came tumbling after.” Surely that isn’t the best whoever composed it could do! In many colloquial British dialects, “water” and “after” rhymed.
Made-up dialects, on the other hand, follow no discernible pattern. George Herriman, who I mentioned last month, for some reason gave the title character of the comic strip “Krazy Kat” a weird lingo mixing Yiddish pronunciation (“cat” is “ket”), grammatical eccentricities (Krazy calls the mouse “Ignatz Mice”) and lots of plain weirdness (“villain” is “willin” and “vagabond” is “wagabone”).
You can see the difference: Black English is of readily reconstructable origin, its grammatical features are typical of dialects born in similar circumstances, and it contains no more or less weirdness than any human speech.
“James” has justly been celebrated, having won the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Though I’m mostly a nonfiction sort, I ended up all but living in the book for three days. His literary innovation — his clever and perfectly executed depiction of Black English — is an enormous part of that. But there is a difference worth pointing out, just to make sure, between his creative genius and the true history of America’s most interesting English dialect.”
A Columbia University linguist explores how race and language shape our politics and culture.
