The Adventure of English

by Melvyn Bragg

  The cowboys then took over the entertainment business and spread their words, their lives, their history and their fantasies around a dumbstruck world. It began in a circus tent and it was dreamed up and booted into life by a real cowboy, William F. Cody, turned great showman, Buffalo Bill.

  Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a rip-roaring success across America and Europe for thirty years. It staged dramatic fights with real Native Americans attacking a stagecoach long after Native American resistance had finally been crushed. Live buffaloes were still pursued around the ring by the Native Americans and Buffalo Bill on his white horse long after almost all the buffalo had been massacred and the last native had been herded on to a dismal reservation. It was nonsense and it was a smash hit. Queen Victoria attended a performance in London, the first British monarch publicly to acknowledge America since the Revolution. Custer’s Last Stand at Little Big Horn was the climax.

  Soon there were singing cowboys, sharp-shooting cowboys, lassoing cowboys and trick-riding cowboys. Painters, writers, newspaper columnists, all piled into this gold mine. And when the cinema came, the cowboys rode into celluloid, deep into the twentieth century and into the minds and hearts of millions and millions of children who, like myself, galloped down our streets after these films, sat astride imaginary horses, shot imaginary guns at imaginary Native Americans, trying to look like and sound like our cowboy heroes, swept into the everyday epic of the American plains.

  It was golden. It was a British dream as well as an American. It spoke to us, and in our own language, or was it their language now? And it had no problems a decent man with a sure hold on the truth and his Colt 45 could not resolve.

  But back on the Mississippi another expression came in: “sold down the river.” It derives from the way unruly slaves from the plantations would be sold on to owners further downriver where conditions were supposed to be worse. The slaves had their language too.

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  Sold Down the River

  If you can imagine a language having a life of its own, exploring new territories as individuals have explored new territories, taking punishment and being blocked, damaged and imprisoned as individuals have been and are; that language after a certain take-off stage becomes a living entity, like water, a spring, a stream, a river; then the reach of English has been oceanic. It had already, by this stage in its history, the middle of the eighteenth century, gone from a splinter dialect of a subdivision of a branch of an Indo-European tongue to the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, the language that sailed in the mouths and minds of zealous and dedicated men and women to plant itself in a new world. Yet of all its many triumphs and cunningly rich compromises, there is little, I think, that so singularly characterises its resources as its encounter with the African languages through the slave trade.

  That English united and absorbed so many scores of African tongues and so quickly, that it was itself sufficiently pliable and yielding to receive back the raft of words, phrases and insights brought from cultures so very different, is awesome. For English was able to perform an act of symbiosis with tribal tongues from a wholly different language group, even to survive being taken on by an alien grammatical system. This began to gather strength in the eighteenth century and went on to create a new English, black English, which fed back into the mainstream, especially in the twentieth century.

  The terrible fate and journey of African slaves has been told many times and needs to be: the hundreds of miles they were force-marched across Africa by the African slavers; the inhuman packaging on the ships for the Middle Passage which the western European seaboard nations forced on them to take them as cheaply as possible to the New World; the sales, the deaths, injustices, branding, sale, exploitation, flogging, dehumanisation; the trade was ended by the country, England, which had come to it last, had been, probably, the most prolific in its commerce, but at least left first after 1807 when the British Parliament abolished the slave trade and the British navy spent decades enforcing that ruling.

  Black English, against what must have seemed all the odds, had emerged in triumph by the twentieth century, and with breathtaking irony, it became the key vocabulary in many of the arts of pleasure. English today the world over is laced with words and expressions which came from those to whom for centuries words alone “were certain good.”

  The English which came to the eastern seaboard with the Mayflower and its progeny was an English determined to settle as the language of the land, proud to be English, ample in the great globe of the language, soon enough challenging London and proclaiming New England the chief guarantor of true English. The less regulated citizens who went west and further west, the Scots and Irish in their assault on the wild frontier, borrowed words from all over the place: from the Native Americans, the wildernesses, other European nations and above all the necessity to put into words the astonishing new sites and sights in nature itself. They invented new words and brought an Elizabethan trawl to the table. Now in the south, there entered peoples on whose influence on the language nobody would have bet a penny, but they dug into this alien tongue with their own inheritance, and the combined language delivered — a common tongue for them and an uncommon fresh word-hoard for English. I suppose I think that if English could do this and have this done to it, if it could become the instrument even of those it sought to suppress and come out of the encounter so much in credit, then it can be called a language fit for world service.

  Between a half and two-thirds of the black slaves who were transported to America arrived in Charleston in South Carolina — Sullivan’s Island has been called the Ellis Island of black America. Ellis Island is proudly and significantly made iconic by the Statue of Liberty and the movingly inscribed promise of a new life for the tired, the poor and the huddled masses of the world. There is no statue, no great memorial, no magnificent declaration of hope and welcome on Sullivan’s Island where tired, poor and huddled masses also came. There is a plaque, put up in 1998.

  Near Charleston there can still be heard a local dialect, called Gullah, which is believed to be close to the English spoken by the African forced immigrants soon after they were put to work, generally on the plantations. It is thought that “Gullah” probably derives from Angola. The Africans came via the West Indies or directly from West Africa where there were several hundred local languages, including Hausa, Wolof, Bulu, Bamoun, Temne, Asante and Twi. The policy on board ship was to break up groups of speakers of any one language; the idea being that if the slaves could not talk to each other in large numbers they would find it difficult to organise effective resistance. Captain William Smith, in 1744, in his book A New Voyage to Guinea, wrote that “by having some of every sort on board, there will be more likelihood of their succeeding in a plot, than of finishing the Tower of Babel.”

  In order to communicate with each other, the slaves had to find a common language. There were two on offer, neither one their own. The first was what could be termed a Mediterranean lingua franca, used by multinational, multilingual naval crews, called Sabir. It dates back to the Crusades, may be French- or Spanish-based and is thought to be the source of West Indian pidgin and English words like “pickaninny” (pequeno, Portuguese, small) and “savvy” (most likely from Spanish).

  The second language available was English, and a pidgin form of English developed with remarkable speed often on board ship itself, which is hard to credit given the coffined and confined nature of the unspeakable accommodation on the Middle Passage. But as Robert McCrum pointed out, “most Africans would know at least three languages.” It would not be unusual for them to know six. “They are,” he claimed, “among the most accomplished linguists in the world.” And that cramped state yielded a new dialect, a pidgin form of English which developed further when they came on shore. (“Pidgin” is a word derived from the Chinese pronunciation of the English word “business.” “Pidgin” is a language with no native speakers, one constructed for communication between people with no common langua
ge.)

  25. Contact between the Pilgrim Fathers and the Native Americans led to only a few Native American words entering the English language — but the settlers coined many new words for the unexpected new sights around them.

  26. The New England Primer, an elementary textbook, sold over three million copies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  27. Noah Webster at work on his dictionary of 1828, believed that “the people of one quarter of the world will be able to converse together like the children of one family.”

  28. On July 4, 1776, the Declaration of Independence, a masterpiece of English prose, was signed. In 1780 John Adams, the second U.S. President, wrote: “English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world.”

  29. Frontiersman Davy Crockett, “King of the Wild Frontier,” became a Congressman and was one of the first exponents of “Tall Talk” — using new words like “skedaddle,” “hunky-dory” and “splendiferous.”

  30. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show spread the language and image of the cowboy around the world.

  31. The “gold rush” brought even more people to the West, with a new vocabulary of “prospecting,” “panning” and “staking a claim”; Levi Strauss made hard-wearing clothes for them, so Levis and jeans were born.

  32. Four generations of a South Carolina slave family, photographed in the 1880s. Even today near Charleston can be heard a dialect called Gullah, believed to be close to the English spoken by slaves from Africa.

  34. Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885, is powerfully laced with black English.

  33. Brer Rabbit by Joel Chandler Harris, described by Mark Twain as the only master of the “Negro dialect” the country has produced.

  35. In 1652 the first coffee houses opened in England and came to be known as “penny universities.”

  36. Jonathan Swift wrote that a stable, consistently spelled and pronounced English language would “very much contribute to the glory of Her Majesties reign” — but it didn’t catch on.

  37. Samuel Johnson: the original idea of his great work, published in 1755, was to make “a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed . . . by which its purity will be preserved.”

  38. Robert Burns’ first collection, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, 1786: his language became a powerful touchstone for national identity.

  The pidgin developed into creole, which is a language with its own grammar, structures and vocabulary, and out of that came Gullah. The original Gullah is still spoken by about two hundred fifty thousand people, preserved in the amber of history as clearly as the Cornish dialect among eight hundred oyster and crab fishermen on the island of Tangier further north. The vocabulary of Gullah is primarily English, very often derived from dialect words — the words most likely to be spoken by the English sailors; West Country especially. However, studies suggest that somewhere between about three thousand and six thousand words are derived directly from African languages, “gula” for “pig,” for example, “cush” for “bread,” “nansi” for “spider,” “bucksa” for “white man.” It has some highly idiomatic expressions: for instance, “beat on ayun” — mechanic, literally “beat-on-iron”; “troot ma-aut” — a truthful person, literally “truth mouth”; “sho ded” — cemetery, literally “sure dead”; “krak teet” — to speak, literally “crack teeth”; “tebl tappe” — preacher, literally “table tapper”; “daydeen” — dawn; “det rain” — downpour; “pinto” — coffin.

  Many African-based Gullah words now appear in Standard English. “Banana” comes from the Wolof language spoken in Senegal; “voodoo” is traceable to the word for “spirit” in Yoruba. Others may include the names of animals: the zebra, the gorilla, the chimpanzee; mixed terms such as “samba,” “mambo” and “banjo,” and the food and plant names “goober,” meaning peanut, “yam” and “gumbo,” meaning okra. African compound words were translated, giving English terms like “bad mouth”; “nitty gritty,” it has been claimed, originated as a term for the grit that accumulated in the bilges of slave ships.

  Gullah and African American English share some grammatical features that differ from Standard English. We might hear adjective duplication for emphasis: “clean clean,” not “very clean”; or verb serialisation (“I hear tell say he knows”) and “don” used for the past tense (“I don killed ’em” for “I killed ’em”). Or the use of “be.” “He talkin” means “he is talking” now. “He be talking” means he habitually talks. “We been see” means “we have seen,” “We been see” (with the stress) means something that took place some time ago.

  Grammatical changes — dropping “is,” using “don’t” where English said “does not” — were held up as evidence by some white speakers that the “blacks” could not get the hang of “their” language. In fact what was happening was remarkably similar to what happened when the Saxons and the Danes met head-on across the line of the Danelaw in ninth-century England and changed English grammar for ever. Anything, though, that was thought to “prove” the inferiority of slaves was seized on by the owners, who naturally considered that they owned the language just as much as they owned the slaves. It took some time for scholars to realise and then acknowledge that black speech was not inept white speech but a tributary language of its own which could and did in time enlarge the whole language.

  In the same prejudiced manner, the influence of black speech on southern whites was denied for many years despite widely recorded evidence that white children often picked up their language from black nurses and nannies — again we go back, this time to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when it was observed and often feared that French-born children would pick up English from their Saxon nurses and nannies. In 1849, Sir Charles Lyell (who had noted that Sanskrit was a four-thousand-year-old source of so many languages, including English) visited the U.S. and, having noted how black and white children were educated together, wrote: “Unfortunately, the whites, in return, often learn from the Negroes to speak broken English, and in spite of losing much time in unlearning ungrammatical phrases, well-educated persons retain some of them all their lives.” It is a consistent theme — children learning and often loving the native language of dialect, and being forced to rid themselves of it when they made their way “up” in a society which depended on the natives being “down.”

  It has been argued that the boundaries of southern white dialect are the same as the boundaries of the Confederacy, where slavery was an institution. This was taken to indicate that southern white dialect must be that most heavily influenced by black speech. If true, this gives a fine twist to the racism and the racist language in the slave-owning south. In Georgia, still in 2003, there are words that can be traced back to over twenty African languages.

  But generally black speech did not really begin to influence white speech until the great nineteenth-century migrations to northern industrial cities like Chicago. The English language has never been a great respecter of boundaries any more than it takes a great deal of long-term notice of any other attempt to control it. And it was principally through songs and music at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, as we will describe later, that black culture brought black English into the main arena.

  But preparing the way for that came the stories. We know of black poets such as George Moses Horton early in the eighteenth century, but the first real mark made in story-telling were the Uncle Remus stories with their great hero, Brer Rabbit. Uncle Remus, to make life a little difficult, was a white man, “undersized, red-haired and somewhat freckled,” called Joel Chandler Harris. However, according to Mark Twain, in writing about the “Negro dialect,” Harris was “the only master the country has produced.” (There was also a Charles C. Jones, Jr., whose stories were similar but whose fame has not endured.) Harris himself wrote of “the really poetic imagination of the Negro”; he spoke of “the quaint and homely humor which was his most promine
nt characteristic.” It seems to me to matter very little that Harris was white. What matters is that he was a collector of stories in the “ling” (his word) on the plantations of the south Atlantic states. Who knows if Homer was Greek? The stories he told tell us about that people.

  Harris’ stories, judging from the appreciation of generations of African Americans for the Uncle Remus stories, stand for what was being celebrated. The fascinating aspect is that out of the brutality and horror and profound inhumanity came stories full of wit, of humour, of cunning, of light invention, many descended directly from the stories of animal tricksters who featured in African folklore. It is a supreme example of mankind through language rising above crippling circumstances. The greatest of these animal tricksters, and one who above all preserved his freedom whatever the odds, was the immortal Brer Rabbit, and another enrichment of English came among us. The basis of the language seems to be from English dialects; there is the effect on spelling of African grammar and the phonetic written speech of those whose natural speech came from a different root: “for” spoken from a different language group as “fuh”; “them” as “dem,” very like dialects in England even today. This is Charles C. Jones, Jr.’s version of one of the Brer Rabbit stories: