Sterling Brown and the Dialect of New Deal Optimism

In "A Note on Method" appended to the introduction of Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman observes that any effort to reconstruct the past uncovers both "the provisionality of the archive" and the political interests that determine the official emplotment of history (10). Hartman's influential account of the continuities between antebellum and postbellum racial subjugation draws on a decidedly provisional and interested archive: the Slave Narrative Collection compiled by the Federal Writers Project (FWP) during the Depression. Beginning in the late 1930s, the FWP carried out thousands of interviews with ex-slaves, transcriptions of which remain an indispensable yet problematic resource for scholars. As historians have long pointed out, the artifice of direct speech in these purportedly word-for-word transcripts belies a dubious history of intimidation and mediation. Most of the interviews were conducted by southern whites at a time when segregation was in full effect, lynchings still numerous, and peonage sustained by terror a way of life for millions of African Americans (Woodward 51). Additionally, while some of the interviews were captured on tape, most of the narratives were drafted by interviewers based on notes and then rewritten by higher officials. Testimonies were regularly "doctored," certain portions deleted without indication in the typescript, and the informant's language altered from draft to draft.¹ It is with caveats such as these in mind that Hartman notes, even as she draws on the Slave Narrative Collection, that the black voice in these testimonies authorizes "a usable and palatable national past" (10).

Hartman's reflections on the Slave Narrative Collection echo concerns expressed by Sterling Brown some sixty years earlier, as the FWP was beginning to conduct its first interviews. Brown, a poet praised by leading figures of the New Negro Renaissance such as Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson for the vitality and authenticity of his dialect verse, was tapped to head the FWP's Office of Negro Affairs in 1936. When working with the interviews that would later become the Slave Narrative Collection, Brown focused, as one might expect, on the representation of black vernacular speech. Many of the interviews that reached his office were riddled with exaggerated misspellings and implausible turns of phrase; many relied on the orthographic conventions of minstrel performance and the dialect tales of the plantation tradition. Brown's solution facing the problematic construction of the black voice in these "word for word" transcriptions was remarkably simple. He sought to standardize the orthography of the FWP interviews, sending state and local branches a page-long list of proper spellings and a set of general guidelines.²

Literary scholars and historians alike have generally understood Brown's recommendation of standardized dialect in the FWP transcriptions to be in line with his poetry's investment in folk authenticity. The poet who, as one early critic contended, "rescued dialect from the wastebins of minstrelsy and the overzealous mimicry of the Dunbar school," is imagined to have done what he could to rescue dialect from the FWP as well (Gabbin 4). From this perspective, Brown's suggested spellings and guidelines appear to take aim at the most common errors in white representations of black speech: his was a modest attempt to identify and expurgate the worst offenses. A broader assessment of Brown's work at the FWP, however, suggests that his efforts to standardize the dialect used in the Slave Narrative Collection were not necessarily in the service of shaping a more authentic black voice. Indeed, as I will show, Brown's recommendation actually worked to denaturalize the African American voice whose authenticity underwrites the Collection's nationalist politics by foregrounding the artifice of direct speech itself.

Brown's editorial work with the FWP serves as a touchstone for this essay's reexamination of the role of the black voice in the New Deal national imaginary. If scholars such as Hartman caution that the black voice constructed by the Slave Narrative Collection authorizes a "palatable national past," I argue that these transcripts also appropriate black vernacular speech for a liberal agenda of cultural renewal. The black voice, in other words, not only sanctions...