#sivvy

**Over the next five blog posts, Michele will talk about the process, decisions and evolution of the influence the Gullah-Geeche language played in her award-winning novel.**

By Michele Moore

In the first draft, I wrote all dialogue in dialect.  I called the strategy “Commit and Avoid.”  I committed full-force to dialect, in varying levels depending on the character’s education/race/class, and avoided the simple and oft used dropping of g’s to create new spellings.  Everything, if spoken, was always ebryting, making was mek’n, and when possible, I avoided the visual torment of the apostrophe altogether. 

I wrote the first draft in this somewhat modernistic approach—make it new—and it met with universal rejection, generally with a comment about my heavy use of dialect. 

And then there was the version I called, “the translation method” based on my reading of Lewis Nordan’s style in Wolf Whistle:

“First thing I do, see is run through the column”—which he pronounced col-yewm—“and check all their ages, nothing else, not even the name.

For the final version, and the book’s ultimate editor, Pat Conroy, I employed a different strategy: portray dialect in snippets—a single word, a random phrase, an occasional paragraph, particularly when introducing a new character or during an emotional outburst: auditory navigational aids, if you will, bell-buoys placed every so often as channel markers within the Gullah-Geechee/Charleston English spectrum. 

Here’s an example from Chapter 42.  Cassie is speaking to her niece’s husband Manus, a merchant seaman, who has just returned from Murmansk in the Russia Artic.  The fishmonger is passing on their street and can be heard singing out his vendor cry: 

Porgy in the summer-time An e whiting in the Spring Porgy in the summer-time

“You younger than me,” she said to Manus, “run catch that man an buy us some porgy. I ran out of coupons for rice, but I can slice up a tummetuh and some okra.  Once you eat, you know where you at.”

Before the sun sets on the use of dialect in American literature, I aim to serve up a missing piece of humble linguistic pie by showing that European whites acquired many significant language and communication styles from African Americans. Perhaps nowhere else as pervasively as in Charleston, South Carolina.