My current work-in-progress
is about a Mississippi riverboat disaster, and part of it is set in Louisiana.
The year is 1850, and slavery is still going strong. One of the supporting
characters is a twelve-year-old slave, and that creates a dialogue problem.
I want Caleb’s dialogue
to sound authentic, but I also want it to be readable and respectful. By
respectful I mean that I’m trying to avoid stereotypes and also that I don’t
want to give the impression that Caleb is less intelligent than my white
protagonist, Lizzie. So how can I write dialogue that accomplishes all three
goals?
Resources on writing
dialects suggest choosing a few common characteristics identified with the
dialect and that differ from what many people call “standard English.” Some
sources suggest using them in the initial dialogue and then reverting to occasional
references to remind readers that the character is speaking in dialect. Others
suggest consistent use throughout. That sounds good in theory, but it is much
harder in practice.
Obviously, the first step
is to study the actual dialect. My primary resource for slave dialect is the slave
narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project during the Great
Depression (available at the Library of
Congress website (https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/about-this-collection/).
I have read a number of them looking for common characteristics that I can
incorporate into Caleb’s speech.
The most dominant
characteristic—used extensively in each narrative—has the speakers replacing “th”
with “d,” as in “dese” instead of “these.” Unfortunately, I’m concerned that
doing that may violate all three of my goals, making the dialogue hard to read,
stereotypical, and unintelligent sounding. Take, for example, this sentence
where Caleb tells Lizzie about the poisonous snakes in the bayou: “Dey only bite
when you step on dem or dey are mad.” So even though that’s the most dominant
characteristic, I may ignore it and concentrate on dropped “a”s at the
beginning of words (“bout” for “about”),” dropped “g”s in words ending with “ng”
(“talkin” for “talking”), and a few idioms such as “ain’t” and “chilluns”
(children).
I’m only halfway through
the second draft, so I still have time to figure it out.
But it’s hard.
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