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INTRODUCTION.
This volume of poems from the pen of a mind endowed of God with rich fancy, which has been fertilized by liberal culture, patient industry, and that tact which makes most of opportunities, is presented to the public as an illustration of of the dialect or patois of a part of the Negro race whose ancestry was nearer Africa than the class represented in age and opportunity by the writer of them.
These poems are tradition and history in dialect or patois. These poems show the power, continuity and tenacity of race under circumstances the most adverse and the most untoward, as to its preservation of type and language, the outgrowth of a condition the race was powerless to relieve itself from, but which unconsciously stamped itself upon the people of thousands of miles of territory of a race foreign to the Negro race.
Much that is best in the American Negro is traditional. All that is worst is historical, and not of his writing.
In these poems the author has faithfully preserved the dialect and something of the folk-lore of the Negro American. The writer was born and reared in his loved Virginia. He came upon the scene just as the clouds and mists were rolling away. This nearness to slavery, this environment throughout his useful life as student and educator, makes these poems the more to be admired as a “counterfeit presentment,” not alone of how the southern Negro talked in days of slavery but of how the southern whites talked, of how all the people, in the rural parts of the South talk now.
A peculiarly noticeable and interesting fact as to the physical strength of the Negro race type, all may see in the colored people, though the stream of Negro blood be so shallow as to be discernable only in the octoroon; yet the Negro is stamped indelibly in this class, in features, in hair or in some prominent race peculiarity. So also is the strength of impression made upon the English language of America, as marked and as distinctive in the dialect of all the people of the South Atlantic and the South and Southwestern States, without distinction of race.
There is no purpose to do Africa and our ancestry the injustice of implying that the language of the plantation is an African language, or, an African provincialism, any more than to say that the plantation patois is English.
The great majority of Negroes brought from Africa into the colonies and later into the States of the United States, were, judged by appearances, features of an inferior type from most of the races of that region, in the main, were Congo Africans, and brought with them their maternal language, the Congo, between which and the language of Europe there exists the greatest dissimilarity. Those not natives to the Congo region, were from interior and coast tribes. Now all the original immigrants were, by the system of traffic peculiar to American slavery, scattered throughout the colonies and the States.
The effect of this separation upon their language was plainly shown in their adherence to the accentuation of it, to the peculiarity of pronunciation of English words, a peculiarity inseparable from the bent of their mother tongue, their African languages.
These peculiarities of speech were transmitted from father to son in an unbroken line of centuries.
Yet so strong have been the cords and chains of language, where the race has been most numerous, that the
One illustration will serve to make plain the fact now dwelt upon. There appears to be no race of Europeans, the English excepted, who pronounce the Greek thata, as the ancient Greeks did. There is no African who has reached his majority in Africa whom I have heard of, who can pronounce as did the Greeks and Anglo-Saxons, thata, th.
In this matter of pronunciation there is between Africans in Africa, and French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and North Europe peoples this similarity, an inability to make the sound th as in English. These races for th, say d. Hence the patois of the plantation is dat, dis and dem, for that, this and them. What Frenchman, born and reared in France, can say, theatre, as the Greeks of old or Anglo-Saxon of today, or the Arab would pronounce it? So difficult is this sound to make that, in teaching Arabic, the that, d, of Arabic, has by grammarians been changed to dal in the Arabic grammar used in Africa.
The Anglo-Saxon Americans who were born and reared, and who lived among the blacks from infancy to old age heard the jargon or patois of the Negro in his frantic effort to overcome the hereditary limitations of his own language, more frequently than the purity of England's English spoken, and unconsciously, the provincialisms in speech of the blacks have been stamped upon the English of the South whether Southerns (whites) would have it so—or otherwise, and the infection is upon their speech.
Herein is an anomaly, the power and influence of an inferior people over the speech of a superior race.
The word inferior is here to be taken as adventitious, and not as natural. The Negro race in America to-day, is
The crudities of speech portrayed in these poems, in some—will provoke laughter, in some contempt, and not infrequently—offend the sensitiveness of some; and yet they serve to remind us of the misfortunes of our ancestry, and the cruelties of an alien people. But the progress made and being made by us in learning—convinces us that this patois is not natural to the American blacks, but simply marks the transition of African illiteracy to an alien tongue. A hundred years hence when illiteracy among Negroes of America shall be less pronounced than it is among the masses of the whites—now, this patois will prove interesting and amusing to our posterity—whose command of English and European languages will not be inferior to that of the American scholarly class of to-day.
This part of Negro tradition and history so well preserved in verse by the muse's spirit breathed into these poems, serves to convince us that if this work is to be best done, most faithfully retained to us, the source and means must be Negro and not Caucasian.
Phyllis Wheatly of a century ago, Paul Dunbar and Daniel Webster Davis of to-day, are poets whose race identity may not be questioned, and are race representations in literature, showing the world that the muses like the gods of past ages delight to disport themselves among the gentle Ethiopians.
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