Negro Character Research Articles

The Emergency of Trinidad

Lunacy and servility: they remain the ingredients of the Negro character. I wonder why this isn't written about, why the Negro writers continue to be sentimental about themselves.-V.S. Naipaul, in a letter to Diana Athillnobel laureate sir vidiadhar surajprasad naipaul is identified here as a primary agent in the unwitting and paradoxical reproduction of a necrosanct1 and disruptive Afro-Caribbean figure, a 'sacred man (homo sacer), to use Giorgio Agamben's widely utilised term.2 Through his anti-black formulas of exclusion, repulsion and negation, he has traced a black subject who stands anterior to the originative formulation of sovereign power in the colonising West and now marks the limit of late colonial3 sovereign power in Trinidad. colonially mimetic travelogues, histories, novels and journalistic excursions instantiate Trinidad's current colonial governmental sensibilities; it is in accordance with this same racial discourse that Trinidad understands its 'black' filicidal crime, structures an internal colony, and finds itself in a chronic emergency and normative state of exception.The distasteful and ironic course of ultimately sacrilising4 work has been recognised at every milestone in the emergence of Afro-Trinidadian and Afro-Caribbean intellectual and literary independence. George Lamming pointed out how the superciliousness of contemptuous postures has continued the colonial practice of hiding Afro-West Indian subjects from their history as well as from a future.5 Kamau Braithwaite kindly asked Naipaul to turn from his disdainful examination of the Negro to the plight of Indo-Trinidadians.6 Derek Walcott identified the scrofula at work in writing. Scrofula is the diseasing colonial process that produced the nasty little which require that we avert our eyes in order not to see Naipaul's repulsion toward Negroes. Walcott poignantly asked, How long would his sneers against blacks be tolerated if they were being made against Jews?7 In 2002, Caribbean Quarterly had the prescience to include the discerning and critical editorial by journalist John Maxwell, War Is at My Black Skin. Maxwell recognised in anti-Negro, anti-African insults and in his express malice the agenda of a second-hand soul: Naipaul. . . has made it his mission to explain to the Anglo Saxon world the painful deficiencies of the lesser breeds, so granting absolution to those who may have felt guilt about mistreating the masses of humanity without laws.8Having overcome, as many did not, the seduction of self-recognition in depreciation termed sad-facts, sad-truth, bitter-pill and plain truth, Selwyn Cudjoe initiated the more sustained critiques of anti-black aggression and tacitly recognised the Negro subject being discharged and discharging itself in the debasing discourse by which it was being constituted.9 Distinct among hallucinatory operations is the palliative that island blacks dangerous only to themselves.10 Naipaul, Cudjoe wrote in Resistance and Caribbean Literature, produces grotesque, caricatured representations of blacks as skeleton[s] upon which to hang his antiquated notions.11 Cudjoe recognised that any totem, transom or crucifix adorned or created in this way is already, in the most anterior sense of the term, sacred.Naipaul makes a formula or idiom of his anti-Afro-Caribbean racism and deploys it against the resistive identities and practices in other emergent/former colonies.12 Lamming, Walcott and Braithwaite are then joined in common cause by the likes of Edward Said, who recognised Naipaul as a witness for the Orientalist anti-Islamic prosecution. Homi Bhabha linked his onetime mentor to the intellectual chain of colonial writers that include Kipling, Forester and Orwell, writers who were repeating rather than re-presenting, marginalising rather than accounting for, the monumentality of a history. …

Representing Punishments for Dirt-Eating and Intoxication in Richard Bridgens’s West India Scenery, with Illustrations of Negro Character (1836)

Notre article se concentre sur l’étude de deux gravures de l’ouvrage West India Scenery dans lequel l’auteur, Richard Bridgens, a représenté des esclaves—dont certains récemment affranchis—qui sont punis pour avoir mangé de la terre et s’être intoxiqués. Bridgens désigne la consommation de terre comme une dépendance et une maladie en même temps, sans se donner la peine d’expliquer pourquoi les esclaves buvaient au point de s’intoxiquer, ni pourquoi l’ivresse était considérée comme punissable dans le contexte de la traite transatlantique des esclaves. Nous défendons l’idée que tant l’intoxication que la consommation de terre étaient des actes de résistance de la part d’esclaves qui ne contrôlaient leur propre corps que de façon limitée. Au dix-neuvième siècle, Bridgens n’est pas le seul propriétaire d’esclaves à assimiler ces attitudes rebelles à des maladies et des dépendances. Notre hypothèse est que les Américains et les Européens ont utilisé cette stratégie représentationnelle pour trouver une explication au fait de manger de la terre ainsi qu’aux tentatives d’échapper à l’esclavage : les concepts de maladie et de dépendance leur permettaient de renvoyer ces attitudes de résistance du côté de l’irrationnel plutôt que de les reconnaître comme des signes de connaissance et de contrôle de leur propre corps par les esclaves. La mise en exergue des lacunes, inconsistances, doutes et aveux d’ignorance qui caractérisent le texte de Bridgens ouvre la perspective et pousse les chercheurs à questionner ce que ses choix esthétiques révèlent sur sa vision biaisée de l’esclavage. La lecture critique des images et du texte met aussi en évidence les problèmes surgissant lorsque les représentations de l’esclavage sont appréhendées comme des récits historiques exacts. La question qui subsiste est alors celle-ci : si les faits textuellement rapportés par Bridgens dans West India Scenery sont incorrects ou inexacts, quels éléments de sa représentation visuelle devraient-ils être considérés comme incorrects ou inexacts ?

Khru Liam’s Nang Neramid

Published for the one and only time in 1916, the little-known Thai novel Nang Neramid [Divine Nymphs] is the recently rediscovered work of Khru Liam (pseudonym Nai Samran). Author of Siam's first example of a full-length novel, Khwam Mai Phayabat [The Non-Vendetta], Khru Liam's fiction bears a close relationship to translated Victorian works popular among Thai readers of the time, such as Marie Corelli's Vendetta and Sir Henry Rider Haggard's She. This article explores the Siamese adoption and adaptation of Western literary sources to produce a Thai novel in close imitation of the Western form. Nang Neramid, penned shortly after the reprinting of Khru Liam's own translation of She (under the title Sao song phan pi), is an adventure story set in Egypt featuring English, Egyptian, Ethiopian, Negro and Arab characters. Masquerading as the translation of a Western novel, Nang Neramid's tale of adventure, intrigue, magic, warfare, romance, occult and the erotic is revealed only in its closing pages to be without English prototype. It follows explorations by a young English scholar, James Billford, of ancient ruins and caves that harbour the well preserved mummies of young women, brought to life by the interventions of a grand wizard. The nymphs become sexually irresistible to any male who touches them, and the novel includes descriptions of the erotic trysts that ensue. Khru Liam combines his portrayal of male sexual drives and female responsiveness in this novel with a study of Buddhist religious concepts and the occult, examining how sexuality can be conditioned by the objective and the subjective self.

Mental Hygiene and Socio‐Environmental Factors

Mental Hygiene and Socio‐Environmental Factors

"And Yet They Paused" and "A Bill to Be Passed": Newly Recovered Lynching Dramas by Georgia Douglas Johnson

My recent discovery Georgia Douglas Johnson's lost ends a scholarly quest of many years and confirms Johnson's status as the leading playwright of the genre. The typescripts, dating from the 1930s and found among the NAACP papers at the Library of Congress on June 11, 1999, make possible a more thorough study of the six one-acts comprising the body of work Johnson specifically referred to as her lynching or plays on lynching.(1) Since Johnson was the most prolific playwright of drama, such a study can provide a clearer understanding of her contributions to this uniquely American dramatic genre, as well as the conditions of its production and reception. Plays representing the history of in the United States are only beginning to be understood as a distinctly American dramatic genre, a type of theatre that began to appear at least as early as 1905 and continues to evolve on the contemporary stage.(2) As the first anthology to address how the horrors of have been represented in American theatre, Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, edited by Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens (Indiana UP, 1998), reveals the historical continuity of the genre and speaks to its prior neglect in theatre history and dramatic criticism. The fact that Johnson is known primarily as one of the leading poets of the Harlem Renaissance but has, until recently, remained invisible as the leading playwright of an unrecognized dramatic genre speaks loudly to the genre's status and critical reception, as well as to the precarious position Johnson occupied as a black woman writer in the 1920s and '30s. In her recent review of Strange Fruit, Eileen Cherry's comment that dramas may not present the picture that America wants to see of itself provides insight into why the genre has been neglected in the recorded history of American theatre (224-25). This note describes the conditions surrounding the production of And Yet They Paused and A Bill to be Passed, provides brief synopses of the plays, and locates the texts in relation to Johnson's more familiar and accessible dramas: Sunday Morning in the South, Safe, and Blue-Eyed Black Boy. I am indebted to the work of scholars such as James V. Hatch, Ted Shine, Winona L. Fletcher, Margaret Wilkerson, Sandra Richards, Kathy Perkins, Bernard L. Peterson, Nellie McKay, Gloria T. Hall, Cheryl Wall, Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, and Claudia Tate, whose writing on Johnson brought the importance of her work to my attention. According to correspondence in the NAACP files, in June of 1936 Johnson sent Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, several of her on the subject of lynching, but White returned the in January of 1937 on the grounds that they ended in defeat and gave one the feeling that the situation was hopeless despite all the courage which was used by the Negro characters.(3) Johnson graciously replied that she understood the point that White was making but added, Yet, it is true that[,] in life, things do not end usually ideally[;] however, it is a point that I shall keep in mind if I write others or perhaps rewrite these.(4) Today Johnson's words are prophetic, since we know that, despite the NAACP's considerable and sustained efforts, the United States Congress never enacted any federal anti-lynching legislation. In her letter to White, Johnson mentioned that her were under consideration for publication by Samuel French, but since her more recent Catalogue of Writings does not list these dramas among her published plays, it seems clear that French rejected them. Winona Fletcher's valuable 1985 article in Theatre Annual documents Johnson's submisson of her dramas to the Federal Theatre Project between 1935 and 1939, as well as the result that none were accepted for production in any of the producing units of the FTP. These historical records provide a glimpse into the struggle Johnson faced in seeing her dramas published or produced in her lifetime, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when the brutality of was not an uncommon occurrence in society. …

A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown

Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown. Ed. Mark A. Sanders. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996. xxii + 314 pp. $15.95 paper. the Foreword to this collection of essays, Mark Sanders offers basic introduction to the life and work of Sterling Brown, from his insistence on claiming part in rather than Harlem Renaissance to his part in the 1938-40 Gunnar Myrdal study of the in America. Brown's consuming interest in music and dialect, Sanders writes, was directed toward correcting the middle-class exclusivity of the Movement and introducing a new and vital self-awareness into the study of life and literature. Sanders ends his Foreword to this collection by naming Sterling Brown raconteur taken with the near-limitless possibilities language offers, an apt appraisal of the man who is now being called the Dean of Poets. title essay, A Son's Return, proves Sanders's point well. It is the text of speech delivered at Williams College in 1973 when Brown was teaching at Howard. his rambling to the audience at Williams, he likens himself to both Euro- and African-American writers and offer no quarter even to scholars whom he respects or to Williams, the college where he earned his undergraduate degree: I am the best liar at Howard University, in the Mark Twain tradition. I can outlie Ralph Bunche, who was great liar ... J. Saunders Redding stated that one quality of folklore was that they had no dirty stories except in the dirty dozens. And I want to know what fraternity houses J. Saunders Redding did not go into. the same speech, Brown speaks of the racial segregation during his time at Williams, but he laughs--in the best of the Mark Twain tradition. Although he credits the college with teaching him how to read and to write, at least someone in the audience must have wondered whether this controversial critic and poet was praising or blaming his school. Later in the same speech, he contends: standards are not white. My standards are not black. My standards are human. Throughout these essays, Brown insists that art should be judged on its quality, not its genesis in one or another race or culture, but that the culture from which each artist springs must be acknowledged as the wellhead of creativity. Brown lived--and wrote--by what he believed. essays following A Son's Return are grouped by general topic: African Americans and Politics; American Literature; African Music and Folk Culture; and Reviews. Many of the major essays are included: Negro Character as Seen by White Authors (1933); The Race Problem as Reflected in (1939); Count Us In (1945); The New in Literature (1925-1955) (1955). four essays on music and folk culture are knowledgeable, balanced, seminal works on the value of folk art and the dangers of ideological partisanship. his discussion of the origin of spirituals, Brown warns again that we must consider any cultural product as it stands and not as we would have it for political purposes: Extremists have set up the controversy as between Africanism, or complete originality, and white camp-meeting derivation, or complete unoriginality. This oversimplication does injustice to the careful scholarship of some of the men on both sides. Throughout the essays, he returns to the same theme: We all take from and give to culture; we are all, then, equal in fact if not yet in public recognition or political power. This collection of essays would make an excellent companion volume for an undergraduate course in twentieth-century literature. Brown read widely; he spoke plainly; and he knew great literature, whatever its source. Many of the works he thought excellent have been nearly forgotten; but he valued them only if they combined integrity and artistry, as he wrote of Evelyn Scott's Wave. …

The "Remarkable Effect" of "Silly Words": Dialect and Signature in "The Gold-Bug"

JENNIFER DILALLA TONER The "Remarkable Effect" of "Silly Words": Dialect and Signature in "The Gold-Bug" It may safely be put down as a general rule that the more faithful a dialect is to folklore, the more completely it represents the actual speech of a group of people, the less effective it will be from the literary point of view. A genuinely adequate representation of a living dialect could be made only with the help of a phonetic alphabet, and such a record would contain an enormous amount of detail which would merely distract and often puzzle the literary reader. The writer of literary dialect is not concerned with giving an exact picture of the folklore of speech. As an artist he must always keep his eye on the effect, and must select and reject what the scientific observation of his material reveals to him according as it suits or does not suit his purposes. George Philip Krapp, "The Psychology of Dialect Writing" (24) "But do you know that Jupiter's silly words . . . had a remarkable effect on my fancy?" Legrand in "The Gold-Bug" (833) ? the beginning of the nineteenth century, American literary ' representations of black English dialect were becoming "commonplace ," even a "vogue" (Dillard Black English 93; Farrison G89). Yet critics and linguistic historians generally have dismissed these early representations , which include works by Brackenridge, Cooper, Tenney, Poe, Longstreet, and Simms, as weak or patently incorrect. Sylvia Holten , for instance, argues that it was not until the 1880s, with the advent Arizona Quarter!} Volume 49 Number 1, Spring 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 Jennifer DiLaUa Toner of the "insistently realistic" local color movement, that American authors began to display any "serious concern with authenticity" in their dialect-writing (65). Dialect theorists in the 1920s agreed: Ambrose Gonzales suggests in the foreword to his 1922 collection of Gullah dialect stories that in fact "no Northern writer has ever succeeded even indifferently well in putting Negro thought into Negro dialect, " and he argues that readers must turn to "recent" Southern writers—namely, to Joel Chandler Harris—"for intelligent understanding of the Negro character and the recording of his speech" (13). And as late as 1926, Addison Hibbard was writing of the "new seriousness" beginning to govern literary representations of black English, noting that "when Poe wrote his 'Gold-Bug,' it was possible to write almost anything in distorted English and call it Negro dialect" (495). Interestingly, as Hibbard's comment shows, students ofblack English dialect often select as their prime example of representational ineptitude Poe's "The Gold-Bug," the only Poe tale in which a black American character speaks. "Even Poe," Gonzales complains, "put into the mouth of a Charleston Negro such vocables as might have been used by a black sailor on an English ship a hundred years ago, or on the minstrel stage, but were never current on the South Carolina coast" (12—G3). And while J. L. Dillard attempts in some sense to vindicate Poe and his dialect-speaking character, Jupiter, he still notes that "it is a relatively rare edition of 'The Gold-Bug' which does not point out this 'flaw'"— the apparently bungled representation ofJupiter's speech (Black English 94). In this study, I want to invoke Krapp's sense of the "psychology" of literary dialect-writing quoted above as a context within which to read particular instances of Poe's misrepresentation of black English speech. In so doing, I hope to show that one of "The Gold-Bug" 's most significant aesthetic effects derives from Poe's deviation from linguistic—or, more specifically, dialectal—expectation. While dialect theorists have criticized Poe for his careless construction of black English in the tale, literary critics generally have deemed Jupiter and his language worthy ofonly cursory or dismissive comment.1 I want to look closely at what seems to me the most obvious and interesting characteristic of Jupiter's manner of speaking—his habit of sound association and repetition (what Michael Williams calls "homophonic confusion" and Marc Shell refers to as "Goolah" punning). From the first time he enters the narrative verbally by interrupting a conversa- "The Goïd-Bug...

Negro Character As Seen by White Authors

There are three types of Negroes, says Roark Bradford, in his sprightly manner: nigger, the 'colored person,' and the Negro-upper case N. In his foreword to 01' Man Adam an' His Chillun, the source from which Marc Connelly drew the Green Pastures, and a book causing the author to be considered, in some circles, a valid interpreter of the Negro, Roark Bradford defines the Negro's character and potentialities. Negro, he says, is the race leader, not too militant, concerned more with economic independence than with civil equality. person, frequently of mixed blood, loathes the blacks and despises the whites . ... Generally he inherits the weaknesses of both races and seldom inherits the strength of either. He has the black man's emotions and the white man's inhibitions.' Together with the white trash it is the colored persons who perpetuate racial hatreds and incite race riots and lynchings. The nigger interests Mr. Bradford more than the rest. He is indolent, entirely irresponsible, shiftless, the bugaboo of Anglo-Saxon ideals, a poor fighter and a poor hater, primitively emotional and uproariously funny. Such are the original contributions of Mr. Bradford, who states modestly that, in spite of the Negro's penchant to lying:

Negro Characters in the Fiction of Doris Betts

Negro Characters in the Fiction of Doris Betts

Black Masks: Negro Characters in Modern Southern Fiction.

Black Masks: Negro Characters in Modern Southern Fiction.

Faulkner's Pantaloon: The Negro Anomaly at the Heart of Go Down, Moses

THE SENSE OF HOW NEGROES and how they have so long endured, wrote James Baldwin in i95i, was hidden from white Americans. barriers, he felt, were formidable; foremost was nature of the [white] American psychology. For whites to accept the qualities of Negro life, that psychology must undergo metamorphosis so profound as to be literally unthinkable.' statement summed up years of Negro frustration at the fumbling efforts of white writers to portray Negro character. It remains significant expression of widely shared attitude; and yet, obviously, some sense of how Negroes live indispensable for the white artist. For if the Negro not, as Richard Wright has asserted, America's metaphor,2 he obviously one very important metaphor; and our classic writers have generally acknowledged this by attacking the issue. No white writer of stature has committed himself to this problem more strongly than Faulkner; The Negro, Robert Penn Warren concludes, is the central figure in Faulkner's work. Warren, like other Southerners of moderate and liberal persuasion, 'has found much to satisfy him in Faulkner's efforts. Because of his open-eyed rendering of Negroes, Warren contends, Faulkner was able to accomplish a more difficult thing than Joyce's Dedalus: To forge the conscience of his [white Southern] race, he stayed in his native spot and, in his soul, in images of vice and of virtue, reenacted the history of that race.' Few writers receive such praise. But Faulkner's formidable efforts have left Negroes far from satisfied. Precisely because he greatest artist the South has produced,

Book Reviews : Black Masks: Negro Characters in Modern Southern Fiction. By Nancy M. Tischler. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1969

Book Reviews : Black Masks: Negro Characters in Modern Southern Fiction. By Nancy M. Tischler. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, 1969

The Negro Character in Northern Magazine Fiction of the 1860's

IN 1862 Louisa May Alcott enlisted for a short tour of duty as an Army nurse in Washington; her experiences are recounted in Hospital Sketches (1863) and used as the basis for Camp and Fireside Stories (1869). As a self-declared red-hot abolitionist, she felt the appropriate antipathy for the rebel, the requisite sentimental admiration for the Northern soldier, but a frank confusion in the face of the black man, who was, after all, neither a respectable adjunct to Boston's abolitionist societies nor a realization of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom. Miss

Do Blacks Hate Themselves?

The social science literature on Negro psychology contains a rather striking paradox. On the one hand, social scientists, the author of this book included, have assumed that racial prejudice and discrimination by whites have resulted in self-hatred among Negroes. On the other hand, there is little empirical evidence, comparing blacks with whites, indicating that blacks do hate themselves more than whites. One set of comparative evidence, suicide rates, suggests that currently held assumptions concerning Negro self-hatred are incorrect. The black suicide rate is lower than the white suicide rate. Herbert Hendin begins this study of black suicide by noting one exception to the nationat statistics. Among black males between the ages of 20 and 35 in New York City the suicide rate is twice that among white males of the same age. Further, he notes that there has been an increase in the black suicide rate between 1950 and 1960. At least some of this increase can be accounted for by the official redefinition of suicides. Since 1958 victims of falls from buildings have been classified as suicidal. "Between 50 and 60 per cent of the black suicides in New York each year are by jumping." There is, as Hendin notes, the problem that some of these were either pushed or fell by acident. It remains that the rate is higher among this age group, and it is this fact which Hendin hopes to understand and to explain. The major theoretical point underlying this volume is that suicide does not have the same meaning nor the same antecedents in different societies or subcultures. Suicide, Hendin argues, is a culturally defined psychological phenomenon. Thus, suicide cannot be understood or explained by using broad cross-cultural factors such as social integration, group solidarity and the like. His book is an attempt to document the unique meaning and cause of suicide among blacks in America. In order to describe the indigenous black meaning of suicide, Hendin interviewed 25 Negroes who attempted suicide. "Usually 7 or 8 visits were sufficient, although in one, 15 visits were necessary." There is some question as to the adequacy of this "sample" of patients. Most obviously the people interviewed had only attempted suicide--none were successful. While attempting and completing suicide are related phenomena, there is some question as to whether or not they are causally identical. Beyond this, as we have already noted, between 50 and 60 per cent of the black suicides in New York are the result of iumping from buildings. Of the patients included in the study only four of the 25 jumped. Three of these four were females. Thus, even if one is willing to equate victims from building falls with suicides, and therefore grant the higher rate among black males in New York City, it is clear that this group of patients is not typical of New York black suicide victims. The conclusion of the study contains no surprise, especially to one who noticed in the preface that Hendin had studied under Abram Kardiner (Coauthor with Lionel Ovesey of The Mark of Oppression). Hendin, closely following his mentor, writes: The American Negro's life history, character, and motivation for suicide are inseparably linked to the experience of being black in our culture.

Black Masks: Negro Characters in Modern Southern Fiction

Black Masks: Negro Characters in Modern Southern Fiction

Melville and the Negro: From Typee to "Benito Cereno"

Jf NASMUCH AS MELVILLE PUBLISHED most of his best work in the years between the Mexican and Civil Wars-the years during which the interconnected problems of westward expansion and slavery reached crisis stage-it might seem, as Sidney Kaplan thinks, surprising that from Typee in I846 to the Battle-Pieces of i866 there is scarcely an important item in the Melville canon that does not contain Negro characters or touch in some way the question of bondage and revolt.' Yet the frequency and importance of the Negro's role in Melville's work is, in fact, surprising in view of the absence of black men from the work of his contemporaries. Though Negroes figure prominently in such abolitionist efforts as Uncle Tom's Cabin, they seldom appear in the nonpropagandistic writings of Melville's literary peers. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whittier, for example, may have spoken and editorialized against the evils of slavery and the wickedness of Daniel Webster and Judge Shaw, but Negroes as individuals have no place in their poetry. Negroes do, of course, figure in Whitman's work, but Leaves of Grass was published four years after Moby-Dick, and Whitman was not widely known until still later. Mention of Negroes and slavery is also conspicuously absent from the stories and novels of Melville's close friend and correspondent Nathaniel Hawthorne (though he discusses the slavery issue in his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, whose administration was pro-slavery). Furthermore, Melville's correspondence makes no reference to the slavery issue. Even the letters to his father-in-law and confidant, Judge Lemuel Shaw, contain no mention of either Negroes or slavery, though Shaw was at the time embroiled in the fugitive slave cases

The development of the negro character in american comedy before the civil war

The development of the negro character in american comedy before the civil war

An Rh antibody specific for V and R's.

THE serum of an Rh negative White woman, Mrs. V. S., contains an antibody which reacts only with the cells of people who have either of two predominantly Negro characters—V and R′s (Table 1). The place of these antigens in the Rh system was previously unknown and a relationship between them unsuspected.

The Problem of Negro Character and Dramatic Incident

The Problem of Negro Character and Dramatic Incident

Gullah in the Stories and Novels of William Gilmore Simms

LLlAM GILMORE SIMMS was the Srst important American writer to VV use the Gullah Negro as a character in a short story. In 1833, almost one hundred years before Ambrose E. Gonzales published his Gullah stories in The Black Border,l Simms's 'A Scene of the Revolution,' a short story in which a Negro character speaks the Gullah dialect of the Carolina Negr'oes, was published in The Book of My Lady.2 As a character, the Negro Tom is almost a complete nonentity; yet he has a slight literary importance: he was probably the Srst Negro character to speak accurate Gullah in an American short story. Simms wrote four other stories in which Negroes are employed as characters and at least nine novels.3 In considering the dialect used in Simms's stories and novels, one must remember that it is the language of 'a special group-type of Negroes, limited historically and geographically to the sea-islands and the narrow tidewater strip bordering the coast counties of South Carolina and Georgia and a small section of north-east Florida.'4 Perhaps an even more important consideration is that this particular dialect 'constitutes a patois