Charles Chesnutt tried in his work to present a realistic picture of the South at the turn of the twentieth century and was exasperated by the huge market for the literature of Uncle Remus–style folksiness. One language for the master, another for the slave, George Washington Cable said. Dunbar could not drink away the self-doubt he had because white critics preferred his poems in dialect to those in what was once called standard English. The only character who speaks in dialect in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Civil War novel, The Fanatics (1901), is the “negro” bell ringer in the Ohio town that hates black people almost as much as it does the rebels. It contains the problem of having to overcome the assumption that racial distinctions will be demeaning for black people. Mark Twain may have listened to how the black people around him spoke, and the case has been made passionately that he gave his black characters credit for thinking at a time when dialect was used mostly to confirm the inferiority of black people, but even if not racist, dialect is still racialized speech. James Weldon Johnson was critical of dialect because it had only two stops: pathos and humor. Bill Traylor: Red House with Figures, 1939
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