I was “reared” to speak a standard English and spoke differently than my paternal grandmother. She longed for Arkansas and never got over leaving that state for California in the early 1920s. But grandmother’s accent helped me in college when I had to pretend to be a southerner for my final reading in a literary speech course my sophomore year at USC. I choose to read from the recently published, To Kill a Mockingbird.
I spoke Scout’s words when she’s in front of the Macomb jail where Atticus is sitting on the porch to guard Tom Robinson, and a rough group of men arrive. I practiced a long time to give a reading in a voice unlike my own, with a lot more action in my mouth to say,
“HE-Y, Mr. Cunningham, how’s your entailment getting’ along?” A long reading that night, for which I received a grade of A and the professor’s request that I agree to do this reading from Harper Lee’s novel, which she would tape in her office.
Then in 1979, living in Montgomery, Alabama, my five-year-old daughter played with Charlotte May, who lived across the street. A week hadn’t passed before Michelle was saying, rat for right, gonna & gotta, and had waved good-bye to ING. Something else stayed in my mind from that year. A meeting I attended one Saturday afternoon of a Montgomery PEN chapter. The president was a handsome black man, a professor, whose English was not accented in the least. But later in the parking lot outside the library, I heard him in conversation with a black man who was changing a flat tire. The professor’s voice was entirely different, as if two speakers of English existed inside him.
I thought of this recently when I watched American Fiction, the movie made from Erasure, Percival Everett’s last novel before James. In it, a fictional character, a literature professor, can write and speak in “code,” and easily assumes the character of a black gangster and writes a novel the New York publishing world will want. This writer’s fine fiction can’t find a market, so he decides to write merde, to use the French; and of course it sells and even wins a literary prize!
I won’t say anything more this week about Everett’s recent novel. The first meeting of the RCC-RILL book club is Thursday. Twelve of us will discuss Huckleberry Finn and James. One of the book club members researched something I had wondered about. What percentage of slaves could read? Apparently, only two percent. Yet James is one of them and Mark Twain’s Jim isn’t.
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