African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives

5. Ties that Bind: A Comparative Analysis of Zora Neale Hurston’s and Geneva Smitherman’s Work

86 Kimmika L. H. Williams 86 5 Ties that Bind: A Comparative Analysis of Zora Neale Hurston’s and Geneva Smitherman’s Work Kimmika L. H. Williams Introduction THE GENERAL PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY IS TO IDENTIFY THE CENtrality of the work of two early African American women scholars—Zora Neale Hurston and Geneva Smitherman—in the developing study of African American rhetoric (AAR). Widely regarded as pioneers in the African American Vernacular English (AAVE) discourse, both scholars incorporated an ethnographic perspective on the forms, styles, functions, and efficacy of AAR. As cultural and linguistic pioneers, these scholars actively researched the language of Black America at a time when African American speech was not even considered a dialect. The unenlightened thought African American speech was simply Black nonsense, and they made little attempt to acknowledge the effectiveness of its eloquence or the breadth of its rhetorical style. This essay is written in an attempt to critically evaluate and extend the canon by analyzing the early work of these Black women linguistics pioneers. Locating the Analysis Hurston’s and Smitherman’s work provided the foundation for the developing study on AAR. Despite the reality that Hurston’s and Smitherman ’s work initially looked at African American language features nearly forty years apart, both identified the dynamic nature of language strategies in AAR and their functions as persuasive means of communication. By focusing on the similarities and differences between what Hurston called the elements of Negro expression, in the 1920s through 1938, and Ties That Bind 87 the components of Black English made popular in Geneva Smitherman’s findings in 1977, it is my intention to critically delineate those nodes of intersection in each of the scholar’s work by looking at the morphology, syntax, phonetics, lexicon, and discourse practices of AAVE speakers, identifying Hurston’s and Smitherman’s foundational contributions to the ongoing study of AAVE and AAR. While Smitherman’s first work Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (1977/1986) and Zora Neale Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” first published in 1934 and subsequently in The Sanctified Church (1981), did not include enough detailed information about the methodology each employed, the subsequent publication of Hurston’s unfinished texts, Go Gator and Muddy the Water (1999) and Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales from the Gulf States (2001) and Smitherman’s Talkin that Talk: Language, Culture and Education in African America (2000) go a long way to fill that void. Contextualizing the Discourse “Language” is both evidence and the product of culture. A “cultural construct,” all living languages are dynamic and continually undergoing change (Lippi-Green, 1997, p. 8). If language is to remain functional and an effective tool for persuasion, it must be fluid—consistently “reinventing ” itself so that it can continually meet the needs of language speakers. Languages that fail to change become static and are thus doomed to die out (Lippi-Green, 1997, p. 10). The flexibility and fluidity of AAVE, (in the areas of style, “grammaticality,” morphology, and syntax) speak to the ways in which language “functions” in a society and tends to be two of the more consistent elements of AAR that can be traced through language histories (Lippi-Green, 1997: pp. 10–40). Hurston’s and Smitherman’s work remains consistent with at least two of the prevailing theories in AAVE: (1) that the language spoken by African Americans can be classified as a language in of itself, (evolving because of the consequences and the history of enslavement, classified as a dialect because of the position of powerlessness of its speakers); (2) that the ancestors of today’s AAVE speakers were from diverse multilingual ethnic groups (each with a first African language already in tact); (3) that these people were strategically targeted for the exploitation of their labor by culture and region (Holloway, 1991)1 and were forced into contact language situations necessitating the development of a functional process of communication ;2 (4) and most importantly, that the ways in which some African Americans speak and the nature of that expression is still informed 88 Kimmika L. H. Williams by cultural referents that grew out of African linguistic traditions (Turner, 1949; Dillard, 1973; Baraka, 1963; Asante, 1990a, 1990b). Characteristics of African American Expression Living Art—Secular, Sacred, Dramatic “Its not what you say but how you say it.” African American speakers use lexicon and modes of discourse for...