The Use of Negro Dialect by Harriet Beecher Stowe

WHEN Uncle Tom's Cabin was written in 1851-52, Harriet Beecher Stowe possessed a certain amount of first-hand information concerning the negro race. As a child, she had heard in prayers and sermons many references to the slave, but not until the Beecher family reached Cincinnati in 1832 did she see negroes in any considerable number. In 1833 came her memorable visit to a plantation in Kentucky and her first contact with southern slaves on their own soil. By 1836 Dr. Beecher's Seminary near Cincinnati became a center of abolitionist activity; and Harriet presumably saw much of negro life. In 1839, for example, the family aided a Kentucky negress to escape from her former master-an episode from which, it will be remembered, Mrs. Stowe later elaborated the escape of Eliza. Thus, when the novelist left Ohio in 1850, she had been afforded considerable opportunity for casual observation of the negro and his master, but not for elaborate or detailed study. Turning to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the reader observes at once that the speech of Mrs. Stowe's slaves closely resembles that of her lower-class whites, particularly her Ohio River folk. The basis of the dialects of whites and blacks alike is laid in the following violations of standard speech: agreement of subjects and predicates is ignored (I hates, they gets); pronouns are corrupted (un, yer, yourn); double negatives appear; initial syllables are dropped ('cause, 'pears); final consonants are sometimes clipped and -ng changed to -n (durs', schreechin'); words are shortened internally (al'ays, gen'l, mis'able, shif'less); and a long series of barbarisms is introduced (as arter, afeard, consarned, critters, gal, hant, jest, kinder, sartin, shet, tate, warn't). Thus the foundation of the speech of all of Mrs. Stowe's characters is the dialect, not exactly of the New Englanders of fiction as is suggested by Krapp (The English Language in America, I, 262), but the common body of folk-speech which underlies American dialects in all sections of the country. The chief weakness in Mrs. Stowe's recording of these peculiarities in the speech of both races is her persistent inconsistency: verbs agree with their nouns on one page and disagree on the next; present participles end in -in in one paragraph and in -ing in another; jest becomes just, yer becomes you, and the like. 322

Art · Linguistics · Literature · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Multilingual Education and Policy · Names, Identity, and Discrimination Research · History · Philosophy

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