Black Theatre: Ritual Performance In The African Diaspora

Members and Lames: Language in the Plays of August Wilson

William W. Cook Members and Lames: Language in the Plays of August Wilson To be lame means to be outside of the central group and its culture; it is a negative characterization. . . . What all lames have in common is that they lack the knowledge which is necessary to run any kind of a game in the vernacular culture. —William Labov, Language in the Inner City lame: n. adj. (1950s–1990s) to be unaware of street culture. —Clarence Major, Juba to Jive The recent Oakland Schools case on black English (1996) and its precedent in Wayne County, Michigan (1979), have drawn public attention to a long-contested issue in African American letters. What is at stake is the nature and status of that particular version of American English spoken by some members of the African American community , and the function of that language in public discourse, particularly in those arts that purport to be part of an African American aesthetic. James Weldon Johnson, writing in 1921, commented on his view of the limitation of that special form of American speech: “Negro dialect is . . . an instrument with but two full stops, humor and pathos. So that even when he confines himself to purely racial themes, the Aframerican poet realizes that there are phases of Negro life in the United States which cannot be treated in the dialect either adequately or artistically” (Johnson: 880). He pointed favorably to the writers of the Irish Renaissance as models for a new poetry, one not tied to the plantation tradition, which he saw inextricably embedded in “Negro” dialect. Johnson also inveighed against the “eye dialect” (the use of aberrant spelling to indicate black speech sounds), which he charged was borrowed from the local colorists of the turn of the century and the plantation school of poets: What the colored poet in the United States needs to do is something like what Synge did for the Irish; he needs to find a form that will express the racial spirit by symbols from within rather than by symbols from without, such as the mere mutilation of English spelling and pronunciation. He needs a form that is freer and larger than dialect. . . . Negro dialect is at present a medium that is not capable of giving expression to the varied conditions of Negro life in America, and much less is it capable of giving the fullest interpretation of Negro character and psychology. (Johnson: 881) Johnson’s criticism must be seen in the context of his own career. Dialect poems like “Sence You Went Away” (1900) are traditional products of the dialect school and, as such, stand in contrast to God’s Trombones (1927), with its abandonment of “eye dialect ” for a focus on the rhythms and cadences of black speech, an emphasis on what Johnson would call “symbols from within.” Johnson sees Paul Laurence Dunbar as a gifted poet victimized by the craze for dialect poetry. Dunbar said on more than one occasion that he was forced to write dialect poetry because it was the only language the public would listen to from a “Negro ” writer. Dunbar is more eloquent on the subject in the 1903 poem “The Poet” than he is in any prose statement. He sang of life, serenely sweet, With now and then, a deeper note; From some high peak, nigh yet remote, He voiced the world’s absorbing beat. He sang of love when earth was young, And Love, itself, was in his lays. But ah, the world, it turned to praise A jingle in a broken tongue. (Dunbar: 191) I cite Johnson and Dunbar early in this discussion because August Wilson began as a poet and both Dunbar and Johnson played major roles in the development of twentieth -century black theatre, but we can trace the argument over black English in art through the New Negro Renaissance, through the black arts movement, and into our own day. The principal poets of the black arts movement, Leroi Jones (later Imamu Amiri Baraka), Sonia Sanchez, and Don Lee (later Haki Madhubuti) among them, opted for a language closer to northern urban black speech than to the rural southern dialect of the earlier plantation school. They were nevertheless clear in their insistence that the new black poetry could not be written in standard English. Geneva Smitherman, in her groundbreaking study Talkin and Testifyin (1977), argues that for the black arts artists, “an individual’s language is intricately bound up with his or her sense of identity and...