Made In America - Bill Bryson [101]
On the few occasions when blacks were treated more seriously, it was almost always with a degree of patronizing ignorance that simply takes one’s breath away. As late as 1949, the author of a nationally syndicated newspaper science column could solemnly inform his young readers that the American Negro was constitutionally incapable of pronouncing r’s in words like ‘cart’ and ‘horse’ because ‘his lips are too thick’. Almost no scholarly attention was devoted to black Americans. The few books that focused on them, like The Negro in Africa and America (1902) and The Negro in American Life (1926), took it as given that blacks were incapable, except in certain exceptional cases, of higher cerebral activity. Often, it was asserted that their distinctive speech habits were an inevitable consequence both of their impaired mental powers and of their physiology, as in this passage from The Negro in American Life discussing the Gullah dialect:
Slovenly and careless of speech, these Gullahs seized upon the peasant English used by some of the early settlers ... wrapped their clumsy tongues about it as well as they could, and, enriched with certain expressive African words, it issued through their flat noses and thick lips as ... speech.55
And this, I urge you to bear in mind, was a scholarly work. Even the most eminent of linguistic scholars found it impossible to credit blacks with even the most modest capacity for linguistic innovation. In The English Language in America George Philip Krapp contended: ‘American words brought into the language through the negroes have been insignificant in number ... A few words like juba, a kind of dance, banjo, hoodoo, voodoo, pickaninny, exhaust the list of words of non-English origin.‘56 Of Gullah – now widely regarded as the richest, most expressive and most ethnically pure of all the Afro-American dialects in America – Krapp contended that ‘very little of it, perhaps none, is derived from sources other than English’.
Almost every term of black speech was claimed to have its roots in English. Jazz, Krapp insisted, was an old English dialectal word. Another scholar went so far as to pronounce that moke, once a common word for a black person, came from the Icelandic möckvi, ’darkness’.57 That even an eight-year-old child could see a certain implausibility in the idea of black Americans picking up and employing a term that had originated on a chilly island two thousand miles away didn’t matter. What was important was that the credit had to go to some source other than the blacks themselves.
Not until a black academic named Lorenzo Dow Turner and a Swede named Gunnar Myrdal began studying black speech in the 1940s was it accorded serious, scholarly investigation. Turner and Myrdal quickly established that certain syntactical features of Gullah, a dialect still spoken by some 250,000 people on the Sea Islands off South Carolina and among neighbouring coastal communities, are clearly traceable to the languages of West Africa, and appear also in other New World patois as far apart as Brazil and Haiti, which clearly precludes British dialectal origins. Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949) suggested that as many as 6,000 Gullah words showed signs of concordance with West African terms.58
Turner and Myrdal showed, among much else, that the Wolof hipikat, denoting a person who is attuned to his environment, literally ‘has his eyes open’, is the most plausible source for hepcat and hip and their many variants.59 Other words almost certainly of ultimate African origin are chigger, gumbo, banjo (at first also spelled banjou or bangy), jitter, cola, yam, zombie, juke, goober, tote, okra and boogie-woogie, though