Traditions of Eloquence in Afro-American Communities

Abstract

…In the south there was the daily impact upon the white man of the effect of the Negro, concerning whom nothing is so certain as his remarkable tendency to seize on lovely words, to roll them in his throat, to heap them in redundant profusion one upon another until meaning vanishes, until there is nothing left but the sweet, canorous drunkenness, nothing but the play of primitive rhythm upon the secret springs of emotion.W. J. Cash, The Mind of the SouthBoth in Africa and in America the Negro seems to find a decided pleasure in altiloquent speech. Perhaps this bombast is partly due to the fact that the long and unusual word has a sort of awe-inspiring almost fetishistic significance to the uneducated person, and with the Negro, at least, it indicated a desire to approximate the white man in outward signs of learning. As it is, the Negro is constantly being lost in a labyrinth of jaw-breaking words full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of Southern Negroes