I was listening to Deac, a very, very black man, while we were working the transfer on the brick plant.
“Deac” was a preacher. That’s why we called him Deacon. We gave his tiny church a bell.
Deac weighed about 120. But that huge iron transfer with a load of wet bricks was something my brother and I both could not move. Deacon could. He could move he whole thing and talk at the same time.
He was talking about “niggahs.” He kept correcting himself by saying “colored people.”
The reason Deacon said “niggahs” was because it was easier for him, for me, for my brother, for everybody in the Deep South. Both “Negro” and “nigger” have hard “r’s” and for a Southern a hard “r” does not come naturally.
Which is why a Southerner who was trying to be as polite as possible without bowing to Yankee pressure would say “Nigrah.” Any Southerner who said Knee-Grow was being obviously unnatural in an attempt to get Yankee approval. Every Southerner could tell that.
Hard consonants and hard vowels simply did not fit in with our speech pattern.
I was endlessly grateful to Stokeley Carmichel, founder of the Black Panthers, when he pointed out that black people have a problem with that ridiculous word KneeGrow, too, and from that moment on it would be “black.”
The civil righters were interested in humiliating Southerners. How blacks spoke bothered them and their paid Negro Leaders not in the least.
For a Southerner, the word “nigger” is not as totally absurd as the word KneeGrow, but the hard “r” is not natural to us.
Of course, the word negro is a Spanish word which means black. It is pronounced nay-gro, with the rolled r. English is the only language which does not roll its r. Nay-gro would be very easy for a Southerner to say is he could roll the r.
The word naygro was the only term known for blacks when the first black people arrived in Jamestown in 1619. John Smith wrote in his diary, “Twenty niggurs arrived today.” So apparently that was the way he pronounced it.
The first twenty blacks to arrive in Jamestown were not slaves. They were indentured. Slavery was legalized in Massachusetts before it was legalized in Virginia. Those twenty blacks arrived in America over a year before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
The first Virginia Legislature, the Virginia House of Burgesses, was also elected in Jamestown in 1619.
America was founded at Plymouth Rock, you know.
Recent Comments