When trying to understand African American English, where it came from, and why we still hear it today, it has a very long history attached to it. An understanding that even some African American writers could not grasp in the early twentieth century. Zora Neale Hurston was one of those writers. It took Hurston years to understand how to write her characters and to portray them in a way more than one audience could appreciate them. In the story “Sweat,” Hurston writes about a washerwoman named Delia who works extremely hard all week long to make sure her customers are satisfied and can keep food on the table and a roof over her head. Her husband Sykes is not a nice man at all and is always verbally and physically abusing Delia while running around town with other women. Karma strikes when Sykes brings home a rattlesnake to scare Delia, but his plan backfires, and he falls victim to his own prank.
“Sweat” is a beautifully written story, but only appealed to a white audience when it was published in 1926. There are two major themes throughout the story that are deemed stereotypical in the story. In the story, the main character, Delia, is married to Sykes, the villain, or antagonist. Barbara Ryan says it’s “too close to stereotypical conceptions of ball men as violent and/or lazy.” Men of the time would be very involved in the heavy lifting of the large laundry bags as well as doing other big jobs such as chopping wood or water-hauling. Sykes is the complete opposite throughout and is continually berating Delia. He does not like the idea of her washing clothes for white folks. The other misconception is the portrayal of Delia. Most laundry women of the time would be big in stature and much more muscular than Delia. Sykes is openly running around town with another woman that is much bigger than Delia. While they are fighting about the white folks' clothes being in the house, Sykes exclaims, “Gawd! How Ah hates skinny wimmen!”
African American Vernacular was something significant for Hurston to grasp deepening on the region of the country she was writing for. African American English differed from region to region, and capturing the right dialect was very important. Knowing that Hurston went on various exhibitions to learn her characters better, learning the language was also very important. The online Encyclopedia explains this very well. “African-American varieties of English vary considerably, tending to reflect the social background and personal aspirations of individual speakers as well as the social circumstances in which different dialects thrive.”
Zora Neale Hurston had a way with language, and one thing that really stuck out in “Sweat” is her use of code-switching from African American English to Mainstream English. Michelle Devereaux and Rebecca wheeler point out that, “Hurston does a masterful job of changing her language to elect to set.” Hurston uses mainstream English for the narrative and switches to AAE for the dialogue throughout the story. It gives the readers an idea of how the words are pronounced, and it is clear to see the significant differences between the two dialects.
Zora Neale Hurston had a way with language, and one thing that really stuck out in “Sweat” is her use of code-switching from African American English to Mainstream English. Michelle Devereaux and Rebecca wheeler point out that, “Hurston does a masterful job of changing her language to elect to set.” Hurston uses mainstream English for the narrative and switches to AAE for the dialogue throughout the story. It gives the readers an idea of how the words are pronounced, and it is clear to see the significant differences between the two dialects.
Just as Hurston was trying to find her a way to reach as many people as she could, continually evolving with each story that she wrote, African American English was also growing and changing with the times. The dialect that Hurston’s stories were written in is vastly different from what we hear today and very different from just after WWII. There is a similarity in Hurston’s journey, changing and molding to fit the time she was writing in, just as African American English continuously evolving. Patricia Cukor-Avila states that “While contemporary AAVE clearly shares many features with earlier AAVE, it seems clear that it is being transformed by new developments as well.”
Along with trying to write stories to fit into more than one audience, Hurston also had to keep in mind the different from the African American dialects. The way African Americans spoke in Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida was different from those that spoke the dialect in Texas and more western states. On Hurston's journey to writing the perfect story, she would travel to different parts of the South, such as Louisiana and Florida, to watch, listen, and learn how individual people from different places lived and went about their daily lives. If Hurston had ventured into Texas, she would have found an African American dialect much different than what she was used to hearing. David Sutcliffe argues that African English breaks down into more of a Creole, “…little of the deeper basilectal AAE straying over the border into creole actually registers…”
There are so many factors that go into writing a story like this and flooring, along with the different aspects of African American English and the vernacular. Understanding how to write and for a large group of audiences falls into a much broader category than one might think. Hurston had her work cut out for her when it came to capturing her characters in a way that would not only please the scholarly audiences but grab the attention of the people she was writing about.
