sounder popular intelligence. The rational and equitable adjustment of race relations, of group to group, waits, and chiefly waits, upon education.

Those among us who stand thus in need of the work of the schools and of the discipline of affairs are, as has been so often said, not the blacks alone. The chief fact in the more recent history of the South has been the ascendency of the "new white man," representing the masses-self-reliant, forceful, unmellowed by long responsibility-which have come to power through the conditions following upon the Civil War. Both his native qualities and his inherited adversities have made him no plastic social unit. But he is able, honest, and fundamentally religious. He will gain, if not a positive magnanimity, at least a modification of his present sensitiveness, by familiarity with power, by his increasing knowledge of the negro as he is, by his own slowly developing sense of social obligation, by the enlarging variety of his interests in a civilization increasingly industrial, by the gradual cessation of political threatenings from the North and the consequent pointlessness of retaliatory demagoguery at the South; and above all-inasmuch as in the larger history of human intercourse the ignorant are the suspicious, and the suspicious the intolerant-by education. And yet by this education I mean no mere smattering of books-whether for him or for the negro-but that awakening and training and liberalizing of our human faculties which the discipline of the school should foster, but to which all labor, and every commercial enterprise or informing competition, and every revealing contact of class with class, and every newspaper, and every political debate, and every journey-far or near-into regions of new custom and of broader human relationships, will resistlessly contribute.

IV.

Recurring, therefore, to the observation that "things at the South seem to be getting worse," I have ventured upon certain corrections which the facts, upon the whole, suggest.

We have seen that the life of the South is too abundant and too varied for its development to be gauged by the mere increase or decrease of racial friction; and that this factor in our situation— to the advantage perhaps of all concerned-holds no such overshadowing significance as it once possessed.

processes of

Its significance is still great; but the increasing intensity of race antipathies seems to be partly due to the fact that the races are now in contact at the period of greatest disadvantage. The abnormal conditions within which they move at present are apparently undergoing slow but decisive modifications. Changes in the historical environment of our relations, and in the redistributions of population, together with the total discipline of all our educative forces upon every rank of every class, may be expected to yield an increasingly intelligent adjustment of group to group. That the deeper distinctions of racetogether with the normal aversions and segregations which are naturally responsive to those distinctions-will pass away, no one can predict. The distinctions between Jew and Gentile-after more than forty centuries of contact-still persist. But the normal and natural separateness of group from group need not involve those abnormal hatreds which embarrass the government and defeat the very meaning of society. Certain it is, however, that society, in its institutional sense, and government-as its accepted expression-are not the creations of peace alone. All that is morbid in our antipathies must pass away. The temper of equity, more precious than many laws, we must labor to preserve. North and South, black and white, we must somehow secure a quality of patience which shall be something better than the gilding of our hesitations;-and yet, as we look backward, as we take up our gains into the retrospect of our losses, let us suppose that the South had ever unanimously followed John Brown, or Garrison, or Sumner, or even the wiser Lincoln; or let us suppose that the negro had ever unanimously followed Toombs, or Alexander Stephens, or even the wiser Lee,-let us suppose, upon either side, that ours had been a history of undiscriminating assent, not a history of moral resistance and of social conflict,-who would approve the issue?

No; this is a democracy. The cost of it is great, but those who are sworn to it are also sworn to the avowal that, at whatever cost, its issue must be manhood: out of more manhood more democracy, and out of more democracy more manhood. Suspicions, jealousies, hatreds are of the devil (which is only a rude way of being polite to our humanity), but quiescence is not in itself the test of social progress.

Montgomery, Alabama, April, 1908.

Gullah: A Negro Patois

BY JOHN BENNETT, ESQUIRE

Of Charleston, South Carolina

PART II.

It is far from the writer's intention dogmatically to assert that these dialectical usages of the negroes of the South Atlantic coast are directly traceable to sources cited; merely to show that among those who were exemplary to the African are to be found the eccentricities ordinarily supposed to characterize his speech alone. That they were inevitably the source of the oddities laid at the door of the negro's ignorance is scarcely to be proved; the possibility is high; the effort legitimate; the coincidence is notable.

Obso

The low country Carolina negro who knows what ipecac, syrup of ipecac, or of ipecachuana is, passes ordinary, in fact is phenomenal: hippo, hippo syrup it is and has been since cockney English mariners fetched it home from the Brazils; it last appeared in that aspirated form in the British pharmacopoeia of 1725: hippocachuana, hippecachuana, hippo for short. lete or obsolescent everywhere else, it still remains the vulgar use of the "true-born Englishman" and of the tide-water South Carolinian: "Ipecac!" said my old colored nurse, tossing her head disdainfully, "Dat wut dese new-fangle' niggah calls 'hippo' sence dey all gone fool!"

We Macgreegor says, "Something to taste your gab." Maum Sally, when gently reproached for dipping into the sugar, says: "Sho! Miss Suso; yo' ent grutch me sumphm fo' tas'e me mout'?". "Me yent t'ief um, me yiz des' tuk um fuh tas'e me mout!" is the familiar expression applied by the colored folk to those edibles considered to be legitimate pickings of kitchen or pantry by butlers and cooks. "Tosey," as a diminutive for toad, is here found in use as a humorous nickname for man or woman, as it is in Warwickshire; one vaxes his moustache with a butt of a vax can. dle, makes winegar, or plants wines about his cabin-door, as Sam Weller might have done; asparagus, that is to say, sparrow

*White and black.

grass, is cried in Charleston streets, "Grass! fresh grass!", as it is in the streets of London; did not Shakspere call lovers lubbers in Two Gentlemen of Verona? The Gullah negroes, at the Fisherman's Landing, cry to each other, "Oh, no; Coz!", as Shakspere used coz in “Macbeth." A shote to them is a young hog, as it was to Withal's Dictionary, in 1608; the fisherman drops killick on a whiting drop, as did the English emigrant let fall his extemporized anchor of stone, a killock, in our neighbors, the Bermoothes, in 1650. In Hartford Connecticut, 1776, dead was written dayed; the Gullah negro speaks it daid, today. A Warwickshire peasant will say hongry or 'ongry for hungry; Maum Judy looked up: "I dat hongry," she said, "I could admonish er hawg!"

This same nasalized sound of ong for ung is found in the pronunciation of monkey, in the old dance-catch:

"Who da' duh mongkey de mongkey?

Who da duh mongkey?"

The cocoa-nut is called mongkey-nut, perhaps from the resemblance of the hairy nut to a brown monkey's head; and hence small cakes of grated cocoanut are cried through the market as "mong key" or "mongkey-meat!"

Brevities, the direct result of economy of time and effort, are natural to all living languages, living language always being more or less in a state of flux. In Gullah, intellectual indolence, or laziness, physical and mental, which shows itself in the shortening of words, the elision of syllables, and modification of every difficult enunciation, results in phrases so disguised that it is difficult at times to recognize them, or, at sight, to comprehend the process of their derivation, so great has been the sound-change and so complete the disintegration.* Such compressed formulas, by which utterance of many particles is avoided, are enty, senkah and shum de-dey. The same liked: i. e., the same as, (this is the same like that), has by elisions, almost incredible, possible, perhaps, only in facile Gullah, and by an obscure nasalization of m, become senkaht... the same like that, de same like-a dat, same

*With these people the process of "phonetic decay" appears to have gone as far, perhaps, as is possible.-W. F. Allen.

†Un-nasalized variants sic-a and sake-a are noted, at St. Helena's Island, Georgia; senkah is Georgetown idiom. See previous note on "sic-a-r'um."

lik'a, sa(n)ka, senka; the closing syllable, a, eh, or ah, being merely the neutral vowel, or throat-murmur. Shum de-dey is a universal, used perhaps most frequently of all formules, and of infinite capacity, meaning indifferently, see it, him, them, or whatever-you-please, there; or I see, do you see, can you see, don't you see, it, him, her, them, those or that, yonder, much depending on voice inflection and accent. This is sheer laziness of articulation; the result of the least effort by which the human voice can say see them is shum; the only sign of energy in this formula is the primitive reduplication for emphasis, de-dey. It would be difficult to compress into a formula more significance without loss of signification than is condensed in this two-word dialogue: "Shum?"

"Shum!"

By a similar economy to throw away becomes truhwy;* to throw them away, trumwy: . . . t'row'em away, t'ro'm'w'y, trumwy; . . . "Fo' Go'd's sake! who truhwy de pot-hook? How we fuh cook dinnah?" More than, i. e., more nor, becomes mo'na, mona . . and by way of further economy along the line of the least effort, truhwy is made to do duty for spill: . . . "Who fuh truhwy de milk? Enty yo' no sense mona fuh truhwy de milk 'pon topper de ofeu?" If, however, the sense is to throw away with hasty violence, in disgust, or in anger, or in disdain, the energized phrase takes the new sense in dash hit away: "Eh! eh! Er'n yo' don' lak de tas'e er yo' bittle, dash um 'way an' be done!" "Me use' fuh drunk; but me dash um 'way; me sobah now." Dash in this way has lost a deep signification, and in another sense is oddly replaced by mash, in a peculiar idiom: Lest he dash his foot against a stone in Gullah idiom is Les' 'e fut mash on a rock! Mash includes not only the sense of to crush, to beat, or to strike upon, but also the sense of to bear one's weight upon: Jane reported that her brother's sprained ankle was so

*Variant form reported from St Helena's Island: churray.

+Oven: this change of the u-sound in oven and ugly to the long o, and of the y to f, as in ofen, have not been established as a general usage, but local; ogly, with o as in song, sometimes as harsh a form as ockly, are also found. Middle English off for of, instead of ov or uv, is found both among speakers of Gullah, and in cultivated society: as "I bought dat off Tom;" "Me hab pay off Mass' Sam, Sa'day;" "Gentlemen, I advised him off our purpose, which he heartily commended."