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Representations of speech in the WPA slave narratives of Florida and the writings of Zora Neale Hurston
Western Folklore, Summer 2000 by Garner, Lori Ann
2 See, for instance, Fine 1983, Preston 1982, and Preston 1983.
3 Both "useter" and "useta" are likely intended to indicate the pronunciation
[tG ]. Hurston's relationship to Brown was a complex one, Brown being simultaneously Hurston's superior and rival. The sense of competition felt by Hurston is indicated in her letters (Bordelon 1999:19). In a review of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Brown's praise of Hurston's "creation of folk speech" is tempered by his concern that her depiction of Eatonville does not deal with the harshest realities of life for black communities (Brown [1937] 1993: 20-21).
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4 It is highly doubtful that the dialogue written here by Hurston records the exact speech during her conversations. Possible invention in her descriptions is debated among folklorists, but an in-depth analysis of Hurston's own fieldwork practices are beyond the scope of this study. What is most relevant here is that Hurston placed a high value on conveying elements of context in her re-tellings of stories where the editors of the WPA slave narratives generally did not.
5 Rachel Austin from Jacksonville, Florida, was black and is identified at the heading of some of her interviews as "secretary" though she seems to have had an active role in field work collections (McDonogh 1993: 154).
6 See, for example, John Wideman's (1985) analysis of Charles Chesnutt's use of literary dialect in the late nineteenth century. Wideman draws heavily on the language in the WPA narratives to "look for points of confirmation, influence and synthesis between the oral and literate roots of Afro-American fiction" (61). He underestimates the complexity of the WPA narratives in their representation of direct speech in assuming that the transcriptions of the WPA interviews "are the voices of ex-slaves" (61).
Bordelon's edition will not be used for purposes of direct comparison in this paper because the readings have been edited "to correct trivial errors in spelling and punctuation and to standardize dialect" (1999:xiii).
8 For a response to this thread of criticism, see Jones's discussion of dialect employed in "The Gilded Six-Bits." Working from the premise that standards and norms of literary writing have been established by authors outside the African-American tradition, Jones notes that Hurston breaks new ground in allowing lexical and syntactical features into not only her dialogue, but also her narrative. Rather than perpetuating literary conventions that suppress black voices, Hurston "fulfills the possibility of what dialect might do when moved beyond the literary conventions and allowed more of the image and flexibility of authentic folk creation" (1993: 152).
9 Richardson, a black field-worker from Jacksonville, Florida, worked with the unit
from 1936-37 as the primary author of The Florida Negro Project (McDonogh 1992:162-163).
10 Frost was white and worked with the Tampa unit. The "Mama Duck" stories that he collected were prepared for use in public schools in 1937 (McDonogh 159).
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