Percival Everett imagines an antebellum version of black code-switching. Frances E.W. Harper did it first.
Reading Percival Everett’s James means you have to talk about language. Everett writes his characters speaking in , but only when white people are around. Amongst themselves they switch to standard, sometimes highly academic, English. The novel then asks its readers to imagine that its black characters have two fully distinct versions of English that they switch between, keeping their comfortability with a standard English as a secret amongst themselves.
In James, code-switching is speculatively imagined as a technique stretching back to the antebellum era. Everett follows in a tradition of blending historical and speculative fiction prominent in recent novels reimagining narratives of self-liberation from slavery, like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer.
James and his community of enslaved men and women carefully teach their children dialect as a survival strategy. The rules are simple:
- “Don’t make eye contact.”
- “Never speak first.”
- “Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave.”
The final result is translating from saying “Would you like for me to get some sand?” when a white mistress has started a grease fire to “Oh, Lawd, missums ma’am, you wan fo me to get some sand?”.
Everett’s choice to have his black characters speak in dialect that echoes when around white characters underscores that these enslaved people are consciously making themselves the butt of the joke in order to appear nonthreatening. It’s an interesting technique that puts the mastery of language squarely in the hands of the enslaved.
It might seem incredible that an entire enslaved community could so guard against language slips as to seamlessly keep up the facade of their dialect for the white population. In James, Huck is repeatedly suspicious whenever James slips out of dialect into standard English, as if he’s never heard a black person speaking that way before. But there is literary precedent for code-switching under slavery.
The first chapter of ’s novel is called “Mystery of Market Speech and Prayer-Meeting.” The mystery of the market speech is that enslaved men going to and from town are speaking to each other in code. Published in 1892 in Philadelphia, Iola Leroy chronicles the days of the Civil War and its early aftermath from the perspective of Southern blacks, both the enslaved and the marginally free.
Harper’s novel opens with a man calling out, “Good mornin’, Bob; how’s the butter dis mornin’?” On the next page, someone asks about fish, and within a few sentences, eggs. Harper writes:
“There seemed to be an unusual interest manifested by these men in the state of the produce market, and a unanimous report of its good condition. Surely there was nothing in the primeness of the butter or the freshness of the eggs to change careless looking faces into such expressions of gratification, or to light dull eyes with such gladness. What did it mean?”
The answer is that these men are speaking in code, or as Harper calls it, a “phraseology to convey in the most unsuspected manner news to each other from the battle-field.” While the Civil War is turning in the Union’s favor, these men know that freedom is coming and they are eagerly tracking the movements of the Union army under the guise of asking about produce. Their code represents “an undercurrent of thought which escaped the cognizance of their masters.”
The code of butter, fish, and eggs in Iola LeRoy is not the same as James’ imagining of an entire dialect spoken as a facade, but it shows an early trace of the idea that people forcibly enslaved found private ways to speak to each other, outside the understanding of their enslavers.
As a student of literature, I don’t yet know if there is historical evidence of this kind of code-switching, but even tracing the idea back to African American literature of the 19th century feels valuable. It demonstrates that black intellectuals have been conceiving of language as a tool to carve out agency under slavery — regardless of status as free or enslaved, educated or illiterate — for over a hundred years, and likely longer.
Frances E.W. Harper, born and raised in a community of well-to-do free blacks in Baltimore, was active on the abolitionist circuit, lived through the Civil War, and afterwards traveled south to work as a teacher among the newly freed black population. When she wrote Iola LeRoy, she wrote as someone with her own particular ideas of racial uplift and reform — and her novel is often sentimental and moralizing, but she also wrote as a black woman with firsthand knowledge of the ways black people of the south thought and spoke immediately after the Civil War. For this reason alone, Harper’s work is a link in the chain that shows black writers have been telling their own version of the story since this country began.
So, Percival Everett may have imagined an antebellum tradition of code-switching in James, but Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola LeRoy shows that a woman writing over a century earlier was already imagining (or possibly recording?) the use of code among the enslaved as a way of choosing what to say to the world and what knowledge to keep for themselves.
