Sterling Brown and the Dialect of New Deal Optimism

Abstract

In A Note on Method appended to introduction of Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman observes that any effort to reconstruct uncovers both the provisionality of archive and political interests that determine official emplotment of history (10). Hartman's influential account of continuities between antebellum and postbellum racial subjugation draws on decidedly provisional and interested archive: Slave Nar- rative Collection compiled by Federal Writers Project (FWP) during Depression. Beginning in late 1930s, 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, artifice of direct speech in these purportedly word- for-word transcripts belies dubious history of intimidation and mediation. Most of interviews were conducted by southern whites at time when segregation was in full ef- fect, lynchings still numerous, and peonage sustained by terror way of life for millions of African Americans (Woodward 51). Additionally, while some of interviews were captured on tape, most of narratives were drafted by interviewers based on notes and then rewritten by higher officials. Testimonies were regularly doctored, certain portions deleted without indication in typescript, and 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 Slave Narrative Collection, that black voice in these testimonies autho- rizes a usable and palatable national past (10). Hartman's reflections on Slave Narrative Collection echo concerns expressed by Sterling Brown some sixty years earlier, as FWP was beginning to conduct its first interviews. Brown, poet praised by leading figures of New Negro Renaissance such as Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson for vitality and authenticity of his dialect verse, was tapped to head FWP's Office of Negro Affairs in 1936. When working with interviews that would later become Slave Narrative Collection, Brown focused, as one might expect, on representation of black vernacular speech. Many of interviews that reached his office were riddled with exaggerated misspellings and implausible turns of phrase; many relied on orthographic conventions of minstrel performance and dialect tales of plantation tradition. Brown's solution facing problematic construc- tion of black voice in these for word transcriptions was remarkably simple. He sought to standardize orthography of FWP interviews, sending state and local branches page-long list of proper spellings and set of general guidelines. 2 Literary scholars and historians alike have generally understood Brown's recommen- dation of standardized dialect in FWP transcriptions to be in line with his poetry's