Out of the short stories, I personally spent the most time on “Dave’s Neckliss” – the dialect is much more pronounced than any narratives of enslaved people we’ve read so far, so it was challenging for me to follow. I had to really slow down and approached the text almost as if I was reading a new language.
The process led me to think about the conditions in which these dialects are form – from forced migration of earlier generations of Africans to America, and how they were socially and culturally isolated, being denied basic educational rights as simple as reading and writing American English, thus propelling African-Americans to over time develop a sort of creole language, the blending between American English and native African languages that fostered communication among themselves and with white people and slaveowners.
There are several implications of this dialect, one being it is a dialect formed from racial oppression, and yet there is also a sense of power and identity in its resilience. Countless orations of tales, stories, songs were created through the dialect, and now a fraction of those can be experienced through Chesnutt’s attempt at transcribing this vernacular onto the page. However, a thought lingers on regarding narratives written first-hand by enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass and how the dialect isn’t very pronounced in their writings as much, likely because they didn’t have the social standings and the privilege of someone like Chesnutt to experiment more freely with language to their audience. They had to conform to a more “perfect” American English to represent themselves in the fight against slavery. It feels… paradoxical.
I think the reason authors like Frederick Douglass did not use dialect in their writing is because they had a different purpose in writing. Frederick Douglass is trying to educate people on the conditions of slavery, so he wants his writing to be as clear and easy to understand as possible. However, Chestnut is writing a work of fiction, so he doesn’t have to make his story easy to understand for everyone. In addition, the use of dialect in a work of fiction might make it more interesting, as it’s a unique element that will help it stand out from other stories.
There are many different theories out there about how African American English developed, and may of them include the notion of a pidgin made out of the blending of African languages during the middle passage combining with the dominant english once they were forced to come to America, which led to a creole with the grammar and structure of english but lexical and phonetic influences from the African languages pidgin. There is much disagreement, however, over whether or not slaves, who were isolated on their respective plantations and dominated by their white overseers, would have had any chance to interact enough to form their own pidgin that would eventually form into a creole. Is African American english, then, just a “more incorrect” version of the southern english that the whites spoke around them? We know that that’s not true, and yet the notions of it being incorrect and stigmatized persist to this day in our perceptions of AAE in rap music, pop culture, and daily life.