Grand Am

Cartoons and the verb to be

0:00From Booksmart Studios, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language. I'm John McWhorter, and you know something I really enjoy for some reason? The famous Studios cartoons. That's famous with a capital F. It is the cartoons that we grew up seeing called Harvey Tunes on TV. And so, you know, Casper and Herman and Catnip and little Audrey and those characters, and frankly, all of them kind of sucked, but I'm really into animation history. And the cartoons were

0:31wonderful artistically. They had interesting voice work, and the music was good. So there's this new Blu-ray disc of a grab bag selection of some of those cartoons. And when I think of those cartoons, believe it or not, it gets me thinking about things like the verb to be in Black English. Follow me. This is the opening theme song to the cartoons of this era in the studio's history that weren't Casper. Casper had his own terrible song. But then, with all the other characters, they would open with this jack-in-a-box jumping out. And the animation of the jack-in-a-box is

1:04wonderful. And this theme, I've loved it since childhood. I adore it now. Sometimes I play it twice when I'm watching one of the cartoons. Listen. I think that's so good.

1:41But in any case, it actually gives a transition into something, and you'll understand that about seven beats from now, depending on how I put this over. But there's something else that I learned this summer that's just fun. And that is about AM. Black English and AM. I did a show on AM a way back where I was discussing the fact that there's what we think of as a minstrel tradition of showing black people not knowing that you have to use AM with I, but then ARE with you, we, and they, and you,

2:13and then IS with he, she, and it. Instead, everything is just AM. You AM my friend. We AM your friends. They AM the teachers, etc. And you see this in, you know, all of the wrong old plays. You see it in the wrong old books, and you see it in comic strips, and you hear it in cartoons. And so, for example, the latest example I'm aware of, and of course, it would be the novel tunes. Of course, it would be these tacky, although wonderful cartoons. It's Buzzy the Crow. It's 1954. So,

2:45we're talking about the Eisenhower era. You know, we're talking about Brown versus the Board of Education. And here, it was called Famous Studios, Paramount Famous Studios. They have this character, Buzzy the Crow, who is this black American crow who's a ripoff of the crows in Disney's Dumbo. And he's done in this, quote-unquote, black voice by the same guy who actually was doing Brutus in their cartoons then. Had he been renamed Bluto yet? I don't remember, but Jackson Beck. And here is something Buzzy the Crow says when his nemesis is a cat who smokes a lot.

3:18If the smoking habit you must beat, then eat a salad with fresh crow meat. Uh-uh. That cat am a tobacco smoking fiend. That's all I have to know.

3:35That cat am a smoking fiend.

Slaves and historical interviews

3:38Okay, am. That was a stereotype. Now, it used to be thought that no black person ever used am in this way. It certainly seemed like it. Zora Neale Hurston even said that no black person has ever been known who said am it, etc. And so you think that this is just something that minstrel people made up. But you know, if you're sniffing around and you're not looking for that, but you keep running up against it, it's like this static that after a while you can't ignore, like a stray eyelash in your eye. You start noticing that that am pops up in depictions of black people so often. You start

4:14thinking that really, maybe black people did use it. And so I don't want to repeat too much things that I gave you in that older episode. But just by quick way of review, thousands of slaves were recorded. Their interviews were taken down. Ex-slaves in the 1930s under the Works Progress Administration. It's a fascinating document, first of all, because these are people who were talking about what slavery was like. But the thing is, you've got about 2,300 of these interviews, and they are replete with people using am. And it's just thousands and thousands of examples.

4:49Now, academics on the subject had reason to think that maybe those ams were inserted by the people who transcribed these interviews because they thought that's how black people really sounded. And there were submissives from the central organization to make these interviews sound flavorful. Okay. Although you couldn't help wondering, with that many ams, we're talking about thousands and thousands of tokens. Really? People saying his name am George Pace. Or brothers and sisters, style and brightness and what we need today. Just one thing after another. But maybe, just maybe,

5:21those people were putting it on.

Preachers, grammar, and old recordings

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6:40immediately with no seller fees. Give your clothes a second life with Vinted. But then you start noticing other things. And so you're going through a serious novel written by a black abolitionist. And he has a slave character. And in her dramatic scenes, quiet dramatic scenes, she's using Am. She's saying that her child is named Belton Piedmont. His name, Am Belton Piedmont.

7:11This is a serious person. You've got grammarians. They're people who are describing the grammar of Negro English with all seriousness, not ridiculing it at all. These are things that you don't come by naturally. A lot of it is the sort of thing that you only find by accident on the internet. Much harder to find these things until roughly 20 years ago. But you have grammarians saying, and here's how the verb to be works, and they just have the am. And they're not talking about minstrel shows. They're talking about actual black people. Or one that I found after I did the show. There's a white minister

7:44who's talking about a spellbinding black preacher who he heard. He is truly touched by this man's oratory. And he says, I quote, he spoke in the true Negro dialect, but seemed to employ a refined, if you please, a classic species. It rolled from his lips with a sharpness of outline and distinctness of enunciation that seemed to impart to it a polish and a charm, transforming it into a language of beauty. Okay. And so you're expecting the person to sound like Booker T. Washington or Mary McLeod

8:16Bethune. But no, he takes down his version of it. And it is. And I'm going to read exactly what he said. And I hope I, with my Disney announcer voice, won't sound like I'm making fun or something. But this is what he takes down. But brethren, the joy of the believer in Jesus am set forth in a figurative manner in the text. It am compared to water to dem what be dying of thirst. Now, even if the person didn't have a paper quarter, even if that wasn't exactly what the preacher said, would the person, when they respect this preacher's oratory so much, be putting all of those ams in

8:52if the ams weren't part of some kind of reality? And so all of it just starts piling on. And I started thinking, no, wait a minute. And frankly, it's more interesting if Black English was that different back then than it was now. And of course, remember here, we're talking about Southern Black English. This is not people walking around parading on Broadway with parasols up in the North. We're talking about people down in the South, people who are enslaved, people who might as well have been, people who lived in the deep South in mostly Black company. And so I thought maybe there was

9:25an am. One thing against it was, and this was something that you couldn't help but think of, there are these 2,300 interviews. Only a couple dozen of them were actually recorded on records. It was harder to do. And so you've got these, I think it's 25 scratchy records of people actually talking. And you know, on none of them does anybody use the ams. And it used to be thought, well, if you never hear it on the records, then that means that nobody did. But you know, 25 out of 2,300, is that really a fair shake? And the truth is, if you sit through every single

9:59one of those things, and that can be hard, they're scratchy, they're very sad to hear. If you sit through every single one of them, one person actually does use the am. Her name is Irene Williams. She's from Mississippi. She's an ex-slave. And she talks about a nice sunny day, a church day, where somebody says, that sure am a pretty dress what you got on. And so it's like, that sure am a pretty dress what you got on. I would play it for you. But it used to be up online. For some reason, the recordings have been taken down. I dearly hope that it doesn't have

10:31anything to do with some missive from Washington, DC. But they've been taken down. And so I can't play you her. But I ask you, if you trust me from listening to these episodes, I've heard it. I've heard it many times. And she very clearly says that sure am a pretty dress what you got on. And I didn't find it, actually. I frankly have never listened through every single one of those recordings. But I wrote up a paper about this. And one of the people who was refereeing it pointed this out. But the problem with that is it's just one. And she's telling a story. She's doing a kind

11:02of performance. She's not just telling a story. She's almost saying, and here is a depiction of what things were like back then. So maybe she was just kind of playing. Maybe that wasn't the sort of thing that people would actually say. And so it just kind of sat there. But you know, this summer,

White speakers and the origin of am

11:18I came across two very interesting things. White people said it. And that really kind of solves the issue. White people said it. White people over in Britain are still saying it. There are people in the Birmingham area who use am with all of the pronouns. They're even called the yim yams because of the you am thing. That is deep, rural, colloquial British. And so I always wondered, did any of them bring that over here? But there was no evidence. Well, now there is. There was a woman, an American

11:51woman named Anne Royal. She was a Southerner. And she made it her business to travel throughout what was then the country. And thank the Lord, she actually had a language ear. She was interested in differences in the way people spoke in the early 1800s around the country. And she did up the South quite well. And at one point, she's describing two white lawyers in Virginia. And she fondly recounts one of them as saying, I are ready for trial. And then the other one says, am you, sir? And so I don't

12:24know why they talk like Yosemite Sam, but I are ready for trial. And then am you, sir? So am you? Well, there you go. Now, Anne Royal had no idea that some obsessive linguist, you know, practically 200 years later was going to be nosing around and reading anything she said. She's just depicting what she heard. And she heard that. Now, you might think, because you have to, you really have to be careful with this. Maybe she kind of thought she was hearing it, but didn't or was dressing it up a

12:54little bit for her readers. Although she really does seem interested in giving us the language as it actually was. But maybe she has a sense that that's how deep Southerners talk, although she was from the South herself. But then something else came over my transom. There is a newsreel. You've got to listen to these newsreels from 1929 in particular, because if anyone in them is ancient, you're listening to somebody who grew up in the America of Andrew Jackson. And they've got this woman who is just old as God. It's 1929. And her name is Rebecca Latimer Felton. She is white.

13:33She is a Southerner. And she is born in 1835 under President Andrew Jackson. And she's sitting there looking at the camera and she says a bunch of things. And one thing that's interesting is that she's so old that she doesn't have a Southern accent. The Southern accent that we know didn't exist yet. And if anything, you'd think she kind of comes from some small town in New England. She doesn't seem meaningfully Southern at all. But you're listening to her saying things and you kind of have to squint because the truth is she was a truly virulent racist. She was in favor of the lynching

14:12of black men. I am not identifying with her in any way. She was truly awful, although also a first wave feminist. And so she's, you know, on the side of the angels there. But we're talking about somebody. She's of another time. But my question was, how, how do you talk? And at one point she actually says, I boys am pleased to see you. Although I don't have to imitate her because you can listen to her right here. Hello, folks. Are you feeling good this morning? Hope you do.

14:43I'm trying to get on my feet again. Feel pretty good. Thankful it's as well as it is. Oh, boys, I'm pleased to see you. I don't know where you come from, but I give you all the welcome I've got to offer you. So frankly, that's it. I mean, I'm sorry, but mic drop. There were people in the South who were saying am, and we've got these two white ones where it's pretty clear. And that means that where the ex-slave did it, she wasn't just kind of making it up for fun.

15:13That's something that people actually said. It's really, it's a pretty easy story. Southern black English and Southern white English had, as it were, an extremely miscegenated relationship. And so what one did, one often did. You can oversimplify it and say that black people were listening to how whites spoke. And the whites did not talk like Henry Higgins. They were speaking various, at first, dialects of Britain, colloquial and rural dialects of Britain. And after a while, colloquial American. And we're talking about serious colloquial American that

15:47had nothing to do with the standard, especially if we're talking about rural Southern antique white English. And so a lot of the things that now we think of as black start as white Southern. And then it also goes the other way around. But it's, the story is clearly right there. There were white people who used am in that way. That's supposedly so stupid when black people use it, but nobody said that about the white people using it. Then it's just quaint. They use it. Black people grow up hearing white people using it that way. They start using it. Then people from the North pick up

16:19on the black people using it, and it becomes minstrelies and stupid, and you don't know how to conjugate a verb. But no, it was just a different kind of English. There are all sorts of things that happen to verbs to be all around the world in any dialect of any language, including it falling out altogether, as was the case in Russian. And so that's the am. And you can tell that I have a sense of release about this. I've been chasing that for over 10 years. And now, thanks to the wonders of obsession and the internet, I now have the proof. And by the way, I invite

16:51my listeners to if you come across any evidence of black or white people using am in that way, please let me know. Did you have a relative? Is there some book you read where you get the feeling that it seemed like it was pretty real? Are you a fan of old radio, even to the point beyond me where you listen to news shows where somebody might have been interviewed, especially earlier old radio or the like? If you know anything, let me know because we've got to push this all the way home. But in

17:24any case, my main point has not been to solicit examples from people who, like me, have other things to do, but to share with you my stuff from the summer. And I'll be back soon to share with you some other things.