This How Folks Talked

If I published a novel (dare I write when I publish a novel?) perhaps I too will print the text in point fourteen font.  I’m making my way through Claude McKay’s best seller, Home to Harlem and I’m grateful for the large font.  Yes, we can be candid.  I’m near sighted.  Without contacts I have no need for any assistance like so many do when I read.  Rather I am helpless reading the sign on the highway and just about anything else that is more than two or three meters in front of me. But when I have my contacts in, reading some wise-guy publisher’s cost-saving epiphany to print the text in point 8 font, I must either hold the text at arms-length or pop the not-so-inexpensive contacts out. 

This edition of McKay’s classic is printed in large, old-folks font that suits me fine.  The mental game that everyone plays when they read anything, marking one’s progression through a text happens surely at a much quicker clip, with elephantine font than it does with Lilliputian text.  I cruised through the early passage home and the meeting with Felice, all the way up until he has the remarkable time as a Pullman porter where he meets Ray, the Haitian intellectual, and the stand-in for McKay himself.

Today, once the 5:00AM call and the 7:00AM call were all called, I lay down in the single bed in this room I’ve taken for an office and read the rest of the text.  The vernacular is an evolution from the rendering that Harriott Beecher Stowe or Charles Chestnut captured.  But, to my modern ears it still seemed awkward.  Was this how folks talked or was this an approximation? Indeed, it is only when people spar verbally or cut one another verbally that the vernacular feels unimpeachably familiar. 

But what do I know?  Perhaps this rendering is spot-on.  One way to consider is to listen to the voice of that time.  And the voices of 1920s singers and showmen who spoke to audiences in a fashion preserved is much more fluid and less encumbered by phrases like “chappie” and “great balls of fire.”  I suspect that there was some core aspect of Harlem diction then that is not wildly unlike the Harlem parlance of today and that in my mind, Jake and Felice might have been speaking somewhat differently. 

Thursday, 07/09/20