Cracking the code - : An ottawa linguist travels the world to track down the

surprising roots of black english:[Final Edition 3]

Tod Mohamed.  The Ottawa Citizen Ottawa, Ont.:May 23, 1999.  p. C3 

Shana Poplack found her first time-machine in the early 1980s, rolling off tongues
at the end of a washed-out dirt road in the Dominican Republic. At first she didn't
think she would discover anything at the end of the makeshift highway that had
been reduced to thick mud during the rainy season, but her Dominican
colleagues had told her tales about blacks who lived in isolation on a ham- fisted
peninsula, cut off from the mainland by bad roads and other less tangible barriers.
Still, her colleagues had never actually seen them. She went anyway.
And there they were, scores of people, perhaps hundreds, perhaps more, living
on a chunk of land called Samana, their homes scattered along the seashore and
through the hills, some little more than shacks set against the dense tropical
forest. In places, fresh- picked coffee beans lay in piles drying in the sun.
It was at a religious service held in a modest A-frame African Methodist
Episcopalian church that Ms. Poplack, a linguist from the University of Ottawa,
knew she had stumbled upon something extraordinary. The service was in
English, in a country known for being almost exclusively Spanish-speaking. Ms.
Poplack, a native New Yorker, could tell it was spoken with a distinctive and
somehow familiar dialect. As the congregation of about 50 faithful joined in
prayers and hymns and "Fishers of Men" echoed above the pews, she realized
she had found an enclave of Black English, what some call Ebonics. Those who
still spoke it in this remote corner of Hispaniola told her their ancestors weren't
from these parts. They called themselves Americanos.
After more than 150 years on this island, their language was slowly slipping
away. The youngest generations preferred Spanish.
"All them die away `ya' ... and the young one never take practise," one local told
her, speaking in the dialect.
"... the ones who come behind, they don't practise theirself to that."
Ms. Poplack immediately set up a study, and recorded the oldest inhabitants of
Samana, some of them more than 100 years old, telling stories of their lives.
Fragments of those conversations now pepper her research papers, sentences
like this:
"He go and pick it. Yeah, he what picks the coffee," and "The old people likes to
quarrel."
The elderly speakers, many of whom are now dead, spoke a dialect closest to that
of the first blacks in Samana, who came from the United States in 1824. They had
sailed from northern ports like Philadelphia, though which states they hailed from
is still disputed. Their puzzling speech, Ms. Poplack now believes, is part of the
linguistic missing link, a key to the origins of Black English.
"We speak the same English," another local told her. "But you see, the English
people talks with grammar."
Everything about Black English is a mystery: where it comes from, why it survives,
what, if anything, it signifies about those who speak it.
What is known is that in the Western Hemisphere, millions of Black Americans
"He go and pick it. Yeah, he what picks the coffee," and "The old people likes to
quarrel."
The elderly speakers, many of whom are now dead, spoke a dialect closest to that
of the first blacks in Samana, who came from the United States in 1824. They had
sailed from northern ports like Philadelphia, though which states they hailed from
is still disputed. Their puzzling speech, Ms. Poplack now believes, is part of the
linguistic missing link, a key to the origins of Black English.
"We speak the same English," another local told her. "But you see, the English
people talks with grammar."
Everything about Black English is a mystery: where it comes from, why it survives,
what, if anything, it signifies about those who speak it.
What is known is that in the Western Hemisphere, millions of Black Americans
who are the descendants of slaves speak a dialect so radically different from
mainstream English it is often treated as a separate language. Some call it
Ebonics -- a term that combines ebony and phonics. Others call it slang, and it is
brutally stigmatized. Even Rev. Jesse Jackson has called it "garbage."
Unlocking the mystery of its origins is one of the holy grails of socio-linguistics.
The literature is cluttered with theories, some at times imbued with racial
prejudice.
Ms. Poplack believes she has found the first "scientific, incontrovertible proof" that
the roots of Black English lay in a time and place many researchers have long
since discounted: Britain in the age of Shakespeare, perhaps even earlier. She
and her colleagues based in Ottawa and England now believe that many of the
same linguistics features so deeply embedded in Black English originated in
Britain centuries ago. Those grammatical "features" have since fallen away from
the so-called "Standard English" that is taught today in schools.
Fragments of that old grammar -- some perhaps dating to Old English that
predated the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 -- can also be heard in isolated
hamlets from the south of England to Scotland's northern reaches.
The proof, to be published this summer in a collection of papers called The
English History of African American English, could transform the way Black
English is perceived and the way blacks see - - and hear -- themselves.
It is a project that has taken Ms. Poplack and her research team through the
Dominican Republic, Britain and Nova Scotia. In these places, Black English is
preserved in isolated black settlements, the legacy of those who fled slavery in
the United States more than two centuries ago.
"The fact that we can approach this material today, go out there ... and find a
window on the past, it's like a dream," said Ms. Poplack.
In 1991, fully a decade after Ms. Poplack stumbled upon the Samana enclave, her
researchers appeared in two small black enclaves in Nova Scotia with digital
recording equipment. Here, they believed, they would find another route to the
past.
One of the places they studied is called Guysborough County, home to several
small black settlements, about a three-hour drive from Halifax along slow, coastal
roads. Houses are spread thin through the rugged county, some so isolated that
street names and numbers are only a recent addition.
The other place is called North Preston, only 35 minutes from Halifax, but still a
world away.
After two centuries, blacks and whites continue to mix awkwardly in Nova Scotia.
It was only three years ago that students at Cole Harbour High School in Halifax
made headlines, again, for beating each other in race-fueled brawls, though
things are rarely so explicit.
Local playwright George Boyd explained it this way.
"As recent as the mid-'60s a black person couldn't sit in a restaurant on Spring
Garden Road (in downtown Halifax). A black person couldn't get a job driving a
taxi," he said. "So it's very much changed. But racism and prejudice have a way of
going underground and being very subtle. And that's what has happened."
After interviewing Mr. Boyd, I turned on a TV to see, quite by accident, Theodore
Tugboat, a children's show filmed in Halifax in which the characters are boats,
many of them named for towns in Nova Scotia. Theodore is a yellow tugboat with
It was only three years ago that students at Cole Harbour High School in Halifax
made headlines, again, for beating each other in race-fueled brawls, though
things are rarely so explicit.
Local playwright George Boyd explained it this way.
"As recent as the mid-'60s a black person couldn't sit in a restaurant on Spring
Garden Road (in downtown Halifax). A black person couldn't get a job driving a
taxi," he said. "So it's very much changed. But racism and prejudice have a way of
going underground and being very subtle. And that's what has happened."
After interviewing Mr. Boyd, I turned on a TV to see, quite by accident, Theodore
Tugboat, a children's show filmed in Halifax in which the characters are boats,
many of them named for towns in Nova Scotia. Theodore is a yellow tugboat with
big, bright eyes who spends his days arduously but happily chugging around the
harbour. In this episode, there was also a boat named Guysborough, a garbage
barge, old and run down, its wood deck stained dark brown, with black, bushy
inverted eyebrows. Guysborough, as Theodore quickly discerned, had a very bad
attitude.
To reach North Preston you drive across Halifax Harbour on a massive
suspension bridge so tall that on cool, humid mornings it disappears in the clouds
like a magic trick, then past the toll- booths to Dartmouth and, finally, several
kilometres off the main highway. There, the road narrows and twists through
rolling hills, past glassy lakes that trip over small dams and fog-drenched pine
groves and the increasingly remote signs of settlement.

It is the same breathtaking but rocky landscape that the first black immigrants to
North Preston trekked across more than two centuries ago, a wave of slaves and
loyalists fleeing the American Revolutionary War.
More black Loyalists arrived during the War of 1812. And fugitive slaves fled north
via the Underground Railroad, which often reached its terminus in these very
woods, until the end of the American Civil War.
The thin country road forks at North Preston, a town of about 3,200, Canada's
largest and oldest black community, that has stood since 1784, defiant and
isolated, in the bush.
You know when you have arrived because there is a portable sign smack
between the fork that reads: "North Preston, Home of the Champ -- Kirk Jo-nson"
the boxer and former Olympian who still trains at a local gym between bouts in the
United States. The letter "h" is missing from Johnson.
Other signs mark your arrival.
The nativity scenes on front lawns have black characters. And the range of homes
is wider than in the nearby white towns, from comfortable, middle-class homes to
rickety domiciles along the roadside. There is a Baptist church house.
And there, perched on a hill, is Nelson Whynder Elementary School, a modern,
five-year-old red-brick building thought to be the only all-black public school in
Canada.
The only school in town, Nelson Whynder is not officially segregated (Nova Scotia
ended official segregation in 1954), says its principal Kenneth Fells."I don't think
they dare write an official policy that way," he said. But circumstances have
conspired otherwise. The neighbouring white communities prefer to bus their
children an extra nine kilometres to other schools.
When four-year-olds arrive for pre-school each morning, the first thing they do is
recite an oath: "We are an African people struggling for national liberation," they
repeat in unison. "We are preparing good leaders and good workers to bring
about positive change for our race. We stress the development of our bodies, our
minds and our souls. Our commitment is to self-determination, self- reliance and
self-respect for our race." Then the youngsters count to six in Swahili.
All the students are taught an "Afric-centred" curriculum -- most of the books in the
library feature black characters, and in history class they learn about famous
black pioneers. The halls are pasted over with hand-coloured portraits of Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr., in honour of his January birthday. Rev. King's clothes are a
psychedelic mix of greens and blues in some drawings, his lips a bright red in
When four-year-olds arrive for pre-school each morning, the first thing they do is
recite an oath: "We are an African people struggling for national liberation," they
repeat in unison. "We are preparing good leaders and good workers to bring
about positive change for our race. We stress the development of our bodies, our
minds and our souls. Our commitment is to self-determination, self- reliance and
self-respect for our race." Then the youngsters count to six in Swahili.
All the students are taught an "Afric-centred" curriculum -- most of the books in the
library feature black characters, and in history class they learn about famous
black pioneers. The halls are pasted over with hand-coloured portraits of Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr., in honour of his January birthday. Rev. King's clothes are a
psychedelic mix of greens and blues in some drawings, his lips a bright red in
others. But his skin is always a shade of brown, sometimes a deep, or midnight
black.
Nelson Whynder is also bilingual. Not officially, just as it is not officially
segregated, but so-called Standard English is a second language for many of the
young pupils. At home and with their friends they speak Black English. Locally, it's
called 'Scotian, or simply the dialect -- non-speakers sometimes derogatorily refer
to it as Prestonese -- and you can hear it tumbling a mile a minute from the
mouths of excited children.
"Some of the words you might hear are Dere'ee' um be' or Dere'ee bee -- in
English, There he is," said Mr. Fells, a tall man with a boyish face, a shaved head
and light brown skin.
"I'll say to the kids, `Yup, dere'um be, but what is another way to say that? There
he is.'
"You can call it Ebonics, you can call it whatever you want," he says, "... it has
never changed. You still see that coming up, that strong natural language. It's not
bad language, it's what they were speaking 200 years ago."
Not everyone shares Mr. Fells's fondness for Black English. In 1996, when the
Oakland Unified School Board in California decided to recognize Ebonics as a
language and use it in the classroom, there was a fierce, nation-wide reaction.
Poet Maya Angelou announced she was "incensed" by the school board's
decision. So did arch- conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. Even Rev.
Jesse Jackson railed against the plan. "In Oakland some madness has erupted
over making slang a second-language," he told the San Francisco Examiner.
"You don't have to go to school to learn to talk garbage."
"Not here," says Mr. Fells. Not his school, not his kids. "Here they're taught to
speak, period. Whatever that may be, whatever they feel comfortable with,
because that's how they learn."
Things were not always this way. Anne Johnson-McDonald, a North Preston
native who teaches at the school, remembers well the first time, as a young girl,
she set foot in a classroom full of white children.
"Right away, you know you talk different," she said. "You're afraid to open your
mouth. I knew the answer but I wouldn't answer the question because I was afraid
of how mine was going to come out. Was it going to come out the way they would
say it? You were drilled to feel your language was inferior.
"I wonder how may other children were like that and how many other children
ended up being streamed into general class (non- university entrance), because
they just didn't participate?"
Ms. Johnson-Mcdonald has developed an astonishing survival skill: she almost
unconsciously skips into Standard English around whites, a reaction so ingrained
among "indigenous" blacks that white Nova Scotians rarely ever hear the dialect.
Standard English is the language for talking on the telephone, for job interviews,
for work. Some whites deny 'Scotian even exists.
As members of Ms. Poplack's team extracted tens of thousands of words of Nova
Scotian Black English into a massive computer database hoping to find another
window on the past, other colleagues found an actual piece of it. In the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C., they hit the jackpot: recordings of elderly ex-
slaves preserved on vinyl, recordings made in the 1940s. Digital versions of some
of the same passages used in the research can be heard on the Internet at a Web
site called Remembering Slavery (http://www.uncg.edu/~jpbrewer/ remember/
unconsciously skips into Standard English around whites, a reaction so ingrained
among "indigenous" blacks that white Nova Scotians rarely ever hear the dialect.
Standard English is the language for talking on the telephone, for job interviews,
for work. Some whites deny 'Scotian even exists.
As members of Ms. Poplack's team extracted tens of thousands of words of Nova
Scotian Black English into a massive computer database hoping to find another
window on the past, other colleagues found an actual piece of it. In the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C., they hit the jackpot: recordings of elderly ex-
slaves preserved on vinyl, recordings made in the 1940s. Digital versions of some
of the same passages used in the research can be heard on the Internet at a Web
site called Remembering Slavery (http://www.uncg.edu/~jpbrewer/ remember/
voices.html).
In one dramatic recording made in 1941, a 91-year-old woman named Laura
Smalley recounts the beating of a slave:
"(She) Said, she wasn't hurting, no old mistress, she was just, when mistress
started whip her she sot her down. But they taken that old woman -- poor old
woman -- carried her in the peach orchard and whipped her. And you know, just
tied her hand this-a-way, you know, 'round the peach orchard tree. I remember
that just as well look like to me I can't and 'round the tree and whipped her. Well
she couldn' do nothing but just kick her feet, you know, just kick her feet. But the,
they, they had her clothes off down to her waist, you know. They didn' have her
plum naked, but they had her clothes down to her waist. And every now and then
they'd whip her, you know and then snuff the pipe out on her you know just snuff
pipe out on her. You know, the embers in the pipe. I don' know whether you ever
seen a pipe smoking.
Interviewer: Blow them out on her?
Ms. Smalley: Uh huh.
Interviewer: Good Lord have mercy.
Ms. Smalley: Blow them out on her."
Ms. Poplack's team used recordings like this as a baseline, a reference point.
"The first amazing result -- and I'm not using this word word lightly because I think
it's pretty amazing," Ms. Poplack said, "is that the three samples of language that
we collected -- from Samana, Nova Scotia and the Ex-Slave Recording -- people
who had never seen or met each other, never crossed paths, show extraordinary
similarities.
"How would you explain that these speakers from a remote peninsula in the
Dominican Republic entirely surrounded by Hispanics ... how come they speak in
ways so similar to these speakers from Nova Scotia?
"One of our first conclusions was that they shared a language before they broke
up," before they split off from slave communities in the United States.
Shana Poplack has curly, blond
hair, and although she won't reveal her age, her face seems young. Her skin is
pale, so pale that it does at first make one wonder how she became one of the
world's leading experts in Black English.
Perhaps as a linguist should, she chooses her words very carefully, often taking
long pauses before she answers questions about herself and her work.
"I always loved languages," she said. A native of Queens, New York, she
attended City University in the late 1960s and studied romance languages. After a
while it wasn't enough.
"I wanted to do something with languages besides reading them. And I lived in
places where I could see that the way you spoke your language had a big effect.
English spoken in New York is very stigmatized."
So she became a linguist instead, studying at the University of Pennsylvania
under William Labov, considered to be the father of modern socio-linguistics.
Since then, she has become a leading researcher in her own right. She has also
found herself at the centre of several hotly contested debates both in and out of
academic circles.
Since coming to the University of Ottawa in the early 1980s, her research into the
much-scorned habit of switching between French and English language in the
same conversation (commonly referred to as Franglais, though Ms. Poplack
"I wanted to do something with languages besides reading them. And I lived in
places where I could see that the way you spoke your language had a big effect.
English spoken in New York is very stigmatized."
So she became a linguist instead, studying at the University of Pennsylvania
under William Labov, considered to be the father of modern socio-linguistics.
Since then, she has become a leading researcher in her own right. She has also
found herself at the centre of several hotly contested debates both in and out of
academic circles.
Since coming to the University of Ottawa in the early 1980s, her research into the
much-scorned habit of switching between French and English language in the
same conversation (commonly referred to as Franglais, though Ms. Poplack
bristles at the term, preferring "Code- switching") has, for example, caused an
uproar in the media. She overturned the popular notion that Ottawa-Hull French is
being sullied by constant contact with English, concluding instead that "code-
switching" poses no threat to the grammar of French and even bolsters the French
language by providing it with what she calls "additional conversational resources"
-- conclusions that have sparked an angry response in letters to the French-
language newspaper Le Droit and on assorted Web sites.
Even after years of research, explaining exactly why people react so strongly to
dialect is difficult. "It's something which is universal. Peoples' relationship to
language is very, very deep- rooted," said Ms. Poplack. "It's visceral."
In the academic world, her work on Black English has placed her squarely at
odds with other leading researchers in the field. "Linguists love to argue,"
explained Mr. Labov. "(And) Poplack is not afraid of an argument. She is one of
the very top socio- linguists in the world. I've just been reading the book. I feel that
their findings are definitive. The conclusions are very difficult for any reasonable
person to dispute."
Last November, when Ms. Poplack was inducted into the Royal Society, the
institution reserved for Canada's top academics, her citation declared her
research "controversial but ultimately sound."
As a rule, Ms. Poplack's studies are massive statistical projects, using a method
called variation analysis to uncover the hidden grammar of a language.
"It's almost like an X-ray," explained Mr. Labov who pioneered the technique, "that
shows the internal structure of an object."
In the case of Black English, the objects for X-ray are hundreds of thousands of
words of transcribed conversation in a massive database at the University of
Ottawa. It is called a mega corpus and is stored on computer hard drives and in
printouts that fill filing cabinet upon filing cabinet. Ms. Poplack and her team have
scoured the data, sentence by sentence, picking out nearly a dozen "linguistic
features" characteristic of Black English -- things like double negatives, or the
term "ain't."
With the help of computer programs that detect patterns not discernible to the
human ear, they have figured out the rules that govern when those features are
used, and when they aren't -- the variation -- in a bid to map the grammar of the
language.
One important linguistic feature of Black English, for example, is the way "s" is
added to a noun to make it plural. A black Nova Scotian speaker said this
sentence, frequently dropping the "s" from the word trunk:"That man had two
trunks. Two trunk full of all kind of gold and silver and everything. Two trunk, big
trunks. Full of gold and silver."
Using this sentence and many like it, Ms. Poplack and her team established a
complex set of rules that dictate when Black English speakers will drop the "s"
and when they will not. Those rules, they later discovered, are essentially the
same for the Samana, Nova Scotia and the Ex-Slave Recordings.
The same process has been repeated with nearly a dozen other linguistic
features -- things such as verb tense, question formation, and subject-verb
agreement. Every time, after poring over thousands of sentence examples, the
results have come back the same. Like strands of grammatical DNA, they
concluded, there is a genetic relationship between Nova Scotia, Samana, and Ex-
Slave Recordings. Then, the researchers found similar DNA in a place where few
trunks. Full of gold and silver."
Using this sentence and many like it, Ms. Poplack and her team established a
complex set of rules that dictate when Black English speakers will drop the "s"
and when they will not. Those rules, they later discovered, are essentially the
same for the Samana, Nova Scotia and the Ex-Slave Recordings.
The same process has been repeated with nearly a dozen other linguistic
features -- things such as verb tense, question formation, and subject-verb
agreement. Every time, after poring over thousands of sentence examples, the
results have come back the same. Like strands of grammatical DNA, they
concluded, there is a genetic relationship between Nova Scotia, Samana, and Ex-
Slave Recordings. Then, the researchers found similar DNA in a place where few
had thought to look closely: Britain.
"We have been going back in time and tracing some of the structures that are so
characteristic of Black English today, like `I ain't got none' or `ain't nobody seen
that yet'," said Ms. Poplack, "and we're locating these structures, these very same
structures, used in the same ways, in the older varieties of English."
Consecrated Ground was hailed as the "theatrical event of the season" when it
premiered in Halifax last January. Like all the plays by local playwright George
Boyd, it is written in 'Scotian and is one of the few opportunities a non-speaker
has to hear it.
But audiences flocked to it for its portrayal of an episode in Nova Scotian history
that had gone strangely undramatized: the destruction of Africville, the black town
that stood just north of Halifax for more than a century before it was razed in the
late 1960s by order of the city.
The destruction of Africville still casts a long shadow on black- white relations
here.
Thirty years on, a class-action suit against the city by former residents of the town
is still pending. In January, audiences came to see the town brought back to life.
The day I arrived in Halifax I drove past where Africville once stood. It is now
Seaview Park, several grassy acres with swing sets and a stunning view of
Bedford Basin, where in the evening you can see twinkling suburban lights
across the water. It's considered one of the best views in Nova Scotia.
There were also the tell-tale signs of squatters living in a secluded corner of the
park, in a ramshackle trailer plopped down in long grass. Beside it stood a chain-
link fence with the word "Africville" lashed across it in red-paper letters a
metre high, a makeshift dog house, concrete blocks spray-painted with graffiti,
and a wooden cross nearly two metres high with the word Africville carved into
the crossbar with a knife. On the far side of another, taller, chain-link fence a
tattered Maple Leaf flapped in the wind next to the rotting hull of a boat called The
Island Breeze.
The trailer had sat here, occupied only sporadically, for more than two years. That
first time I went by it looked deserted and I drove off without knocking on the door.
Later that same day, I saw George Boyd's Consecrated Ground. I was a little
embarrassed that I cried, but then so did everyone around me.

As the the play unfolds, there is a white man lurking in Africville. He is skinny and
devilishly polite, goes by the name of Clancy, and when he appears at the door, a
fat cheque inevitably slithers from his briefcase, an offer to buy the property. No
one quite knows why.
Scenes are full of provocative characters, laughter and scathing rebukes. Ruby, a
surly prostitute, falls prey to random beating by boys from the city ("broom the
coons," they called it). Aunt Sarah, the elderly, barren matriarch, never hesitates
to speak exactly what's on her mind. Willem and Clarice, a black couple, have just
had their first child, a boy they have named Tully.
By the 1960s, when the story is set, Africville was a grinding slum. A garbage
dump, then an abattoir, were built next to it with the blessing of the city, and putrid
smells, the roar of bulldozers, and rats filled the town. The water table beneath
Africville became contaminated so a sign was posted at the local well: "Please
boil this water before drinking and cooking."
That same decade the City of Halifax decided to raze the town and relocate its
Scenes are full of provocative characters, laughter and scathing rebukes. Ruby, a
surly prostitute, falls prey to random beating by boys from the city ("broom the
coons," they called it). Aunt Sarah, the elderly, barren matriarch, never hesitates
to speak exactly what's on her mind. Willem and Clarice, a black couple, have just
had their first child, a boy they have named Tully.
By the 1960s, when the story is set, Africville was a grinding slum. A garbage
dump, then an abattoir, were built next to it with the blessing of the city, and putrid
smells, the roar of bulldozers, and rats filled the town. The water table beneath
Africville became contaminated so a sign was posted at the local well: "Please
boil this water before drinking and cooking."
That same decade the City of Halifax decided to raze the town and relocate its
400 residents. The reasons are still debated: some say the rickety homes were
too expensive to service with power and water. Others say the plan was a '60s
attempt at desegregation and some believe it was simple racism -- the city
needed land to build a new bridge across the harbour and Africville was getting in
the way.
One day, Clancy appears mysteriously, in an overcoat and fedora, toting his
briefcase, and begins chatting up strangers. He runs into Aunt Sarah at the well:
Clancy: "I was thinkin' how do they sleep with all those tractors raging and going-
on like that?"
Aunt Sarah: "You know that dump just a recent fixture to Africville and I, for one,
hates it. All that noise drive the rats into our houses."
Clancy: "Shame."
Sarah: "Wasn't no dump here afor. Just a recent fixture I tells us. They need a
dump, so why not put it right here next to where the coloured peoples lives? That
make sense to you, sonny?"
Clancy: "Ah, I think, ah they -- "
Sarah: "Me neither! It got to be seen that the white man then, don't think the
coloured is human, right?"
Clancy has better luck with Willem, the young father who is desperate to escape
Africville's poverty, the dirt floors, the rats as big as cats. But Willem's wife Clarice,
a proud woman dripping cornrows, flatly refuses.
One day, while Willem is working casual labour on the pier and Clarice is
pumping water at the well, the rats sneak into their home under the cover of a
thunderstorm. They find the baby boy, Tully, who has been left unattended for just
an instant. It's all they need.
The sounds of the rats squeaking as they chew at the wailing infant curdle the
blood. So does the scream that Clarice lets loose when she finds Tully's tiny,
dying body. As bolts of lightening split the sky, audiences, white and black both,
are moved to tears. Some even shout "amen"at the stage as Clarice vents her
grief.
Consecrated Ground would never have been written if George Boyd had listened
to his university professors. "That was a rough road for me," he said of his college
days, when he scripted his first plays in Black English. "I took a course in creative
writing and I'd turn in black dialect, and the white professors used to say `This is
unacceptable. Nobody talks like that.'
"Well you know, my people talk like this," said Mr. Boyd, then slips, for an instant,
into the dialect. "`Tell me who youse is so I know who youse be's.' That's how we
write, that's what we say. We don't use `Wherefore art thou?' "
Mr. Boyd grew up in North End Halifax, the third youngest of nine children. His
father was a foreman at Pier Nine, next to Africville.
The imaginary rats that scurry through his play were a real part of his father's life,
making their way between the slaughterhouse, the town and the pier.
"My dad used to come home and say `We can't keep a cat in the shed. The rats
are so big down there they scare the cats away!' He used to make us laugh with
that, but it was true ... the rats were just monsters."
Mr. Boyd was barely a teenager when the city started to demolish Africville. The
tension it caused in the black community in Halifax was palpable, although adults
wouldn't talk about it in front of him because he was too young.
"You'd overhear these whispers," he said. "But I could see ... the sense of
Mr. Boyd grew up in North End Halifax, the third youngest of nine children. His
father was a foreman at Pier Nine, next to Africville.
The imaginary rats that scurry through his play were a real part of his father's life,
making their way between the slaughterhouse, the town and the pier.
"My dad used to come home and say `We can't keep a cat in the shed. The rats
are so big down there they scare the cats away!' He used to make us laugh with
that, but it was true ... the rats were just monsters."
Mr. Boyd was barely a teenager when the city started to demolish Africville. The
tension it caused in the black community in Halifax was palpable, although adults
wouldn't talk about it in front of him because he was too young.
"You'd overhear these whispers," he said. "But I could see ... the sense of
frustration on their faces and profound anger.
"I knew then I would write the true story about this," he said. "I have wanted to
write this play since I can remember."
Mr. Boyd has a long, expressive face, familiar to many as the long-time co-host on
CBC Morning News, a job he left several years ago to pursue writing.
He is tall and skinny and his clothes, a cotton turtleneck and trousers, flap on his
frame with room to spare. Sitting cross- legged on a chair, his limbs and joints
poke out like the branches of a tree. At times he rocks boyishly and waves his
hands for emphasis.
He is, perhaps, the archetypal example of English-Black English bilingualism,
having honed one dialect as a black playwright, the other for broadcast. "At the
CBC you know, we say `shed-jew-ul.' But if I was at a black party (it's), you know,
`Hey baby, what's happen'in?' "
But unlike his on-air persona, he is not detached. Happy or annoyed, bored or
enthralled, he lets you know with the tone of his voice and easy laugh and the up-
and-down movement of his furrowed brow.
With the buzz surrounding his play, interviews galore in local papers and the
national media, it has been difficult to get him to sit down. Finally tucked into a
corner of a trendy Halifax bar, his choice, a round of draft beer, helps the
conversation begin to flow.
"I used to write pretty good stuff in university, not professional stuff," he says, "but it
used to get Fs. Because, you know why?" Then he mimics a high, nasally -- and
presumably white voice, " `What does that mean?' the professor would write on
the paper. `Tell me who youse is so I know who youse be's? -- what does that
mean?'
"These people were telling me this language is so guttural, so primitive, there
could not possibly be any poetry in it. Professors used to tell me that. I waged that
war until I made a breakthrough with one of my plays and then people started
respecting me, to be able to write language. Until then it was just constantly
fighting and fighting and fighting," he says, still showing bitterness.
Not that the fight is over. What does he imagine goes through the minds of most
Nova Scotians when they hear 'Scotian?
"Ignorant black people. Don't know any better," he says. He keeps one eye on me
as he sips his golden brown draft.
Two dominant theories try to explain the origins of Black English.
One is that it was not originally English at all. Rather it was a Creole, a linguistic
hybrid that blossomed because of a "catastrophic shock" that occurred when
slaves speaking different African languages were thrown together on slave ships
and plantations. Unable to communicate in their own tongues, a new language
evolved, an English-based Creole, just as French-based Creoles sprang up in
Louisiana and Haiti.
As the theory goes, the slave lingua franca is becoming less like an English-
Creole and more Standard English.
Ms. Poplack accepts that African languages must have somehow affected Black
English, but she rejects the Creole theory.
"We've gone and traced these things," she said. They have looked at Igbo -- a
language spoken in Nigeria -- and Nigerian pidgin, as well as a number of other
English-based Creoles in detail. In virtually ever single case, says Ms. Poplack,
African and Creole grammar is different from that in her Black English corpus.
and plantations. Unable to communicate in their own tongues, a new language
evolved, an English-based Creole, just as French-based Creoles sprang up in
Louisiana and Haiti.
As the theory goes, the slave lingua franca is becoming less like an English-
Creole and more Standard English.
Ms. Poplack accepts that African languages must have somehow affected Black
English, but she rejects the Creole theory.
"We've gone and traced these things," she said. They have looked at Igbo -- a
language spoken in Nigeria -- and Nigerian pidgin, as well as a number of other
English-based Creoles in detail. In virtually ever single case, says Ms. Poplack,
African and Creole grammar is different from that in her Black English corpus.
The other prevailing theory is that slaves learned to speak English from the white
"masters" around them. Only they didn't do a good job of acquiring it. So, to this
day, "incorrect" and "wrong" grammar persist within black communities.
Ms. Poplack offers a third theory.
She believes that the slaves did learn English from British settlers and slave
traders. She believes they learned it accurately.
Only the British dialects transplanted here centuries ago were themselves early
forms of Standard English."It wasn't the Queen's English" says Ms. Poplack.
Features of those old dialects, transplanted from Scotland and Ireland as well as
England, have survived in the Western Hemisphere in relatively isolated black
communities. There are many theories about why that isolation persists, including
geography, community solidarity and simply, racial segregation.
While those early linguistic features have, by and large, disappeared from
Standard English, they have not completely disappeared from hamlets in the
British countryside. In isolated pockets the same features found in Black English
remain, preserved. One such place is Tiverton, in Devonshire, less than 100 km
from the English port of Bristol, which was once a major base for slave traders.
Peasants in the surrounding countryside, including places like Tiverton, likely
figured among the would-be masters of the time, crewed slave ships and even
worked alongside black slaves as indentured labour in the British colonies.
Hundreds of ships cleared the port in the 17th and 18th century for the African
coast, where they picked up tens of thousands of slaves and transported them to
the Americas and other slave markets, carrying their dialect with them.
In Tiverton, researchers have collected sentences remarkably similar to Black
English, sentences like this:
"I forgets about it." (Samana)
"I forgets now how long I stayed there." (Devonshire)
Or this:
"They learns them to fling bad words ... they fling bad words on the father and the
mother and everything." (Samana)
"People goes organic now though don't 'em?" (Devonshire)
A co-researcher of Ms. Poplack's, a Canadian named Sali Tagliamonte, is looking
at a town on the north coast of Scotland called Buckie.
"The detailed nature of these parallels," Ms. Poplack wrote in a research paper,
"together with the ample socio-historical documentation, suggests both
descended from a common British source."
While we were talking in the bar, I asked George Boyd what he made of research
on Black English.
"It's interesting in some ways," he said. "But it's an intellectual exercise ... All it is to
me is just notation in some book. It doesn't determine my identity."
At Nova Scotia's Black Cultural Centre, a sleek, modern building just outside
Halifax, there is hope that the research will be more than just notation. The
centre's director, Henry Bishop, plans to begin publicizing the findings, though
just how is still up in the air.
"The key to all this is bridging the gap between academics and community," he
said. "I think (the research) will add credibility, hopefully defuse some of these
conceptions of people not being intelligent. Those are things ... like some of these
expressions like `Prestonese' ... that some people tag others with and maim them
in the process."
"It's interesting in some ways," he said. "But it's an intellectual exercise ... All it is to
me is just notation in some book. It doesn't determine my identity."
At Nova Scotia's Black Cultural Centre, a sleek, modern building just outside
Halifax, there is hope that the research will be more than just notation. The
centre's director, Henry Bishop, plans to begin publicizing the findings, though
just how is still up in the air.
"The key to all this is bridging the gap between academics and community," he
said. "I think (the research) will add credibility, hopefully defuse some of these
conceptions of people not being intelligent. Those are things ... like some of these
expressions like `Prestonese' ... that some people tag others with and maim them
in the process."
Ms. Poplack, who travelled to Nova Scotia last summer to explain her findings,
plans to go back again. She acknowledges that using research to undo prejudice
and misunderstanding will be difficult.
"Unfortunately, it's probably true that it won't change people's lives ... " she said.
"But it provides an objective basis for people's understanding of the language,
and hopefully that will change people's attitudes."
The day after I arrived in Halifax, George Boyd and I drove to Seaview Park. To
our surprise, almost every sign of the squatters had been removed. The trailer
was gone, the chain-link fence dismantled, the dog shack had disappeared. All
that remained was the wooden cross. The ground had been picked clean.
George Boyd was incensed.
"It's because of all the media attention. They don't want to give the black
community any ammunition whatsoever," he said. "That's Halifax for you. I don't
believe these f---ing bastards. This is what we're fighting against, this bullshit
racism ... make sure you put this in your story."
Later that day I discovered what had happened to the squat. The morning after I
arrived city workers came and took away the trailer, the dog shack, the fence, and
put them in storage. They wouldn't say where. It was all done before our
photographer had a chance to shoot the sight. I asked a city official why, after two
years, they decided to move in.
The reason was that the trailer had no water hook-up, no electricity, and no
sanitation, explained John O'Brien, director of communications for the City of
Halifax. "There were concerns about that," he said, adding "There could be
vandalism. The property is much more secure with us."

I asked if removing the trailer had anything to do with the media attention
suddenly being shown the park because of Mr. Boyd's play. Mr. O'Brien said it
was coincidence.
"We don't want to be a police state," he said. "How long do you wait? How long
does it go? Some people might have sympathy but the majority say its not
acceptable. We're sorry it was ever there in the first place."
I returned to Seaview Park a third and final time before leaving Halifax and found
something in the long grass I had missed before. It was the statue of a black boy,
about half a metre high, sitting alone on a concrete slab, just metres from where
the squat had once been. His hands were folded neatly on his painted blue pants,
held up by painted suspenders. His head, topped with a red fez-like hat, had
been almost completely severed by someone, but it clung on tenaciously to wires
running through the plaster. The gaping crack left his face tilted up, looking
skywards, frozen in an expression of serenity. After taking a few pictures, I
considered taking him with me, then decided against it, and left him sitting in the
long grass.
Anne Johnson-McDonald is a little tired. It's Friday afternoon, and she's just been
jitterbugging. "I told my class if they were good all day I'd teach them to jitterbug,"
she explains. "So I was jitterbugging and everything."
Just inside the door of her attractive split-level house there's a three panel
painting of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Up a few stairs
into her living room, there is a portrait of Jesus Christ -- a black Jesus with an
been almost completely severed by someone, but it clung on tenaciously to wires
running through the plaster. The gaping crack left his face tilted up, looking
skywards, frozen in an expression of serenity. After taking a few pictures, I
considered taking him with me, then decided against it, and left him sitting in the
long grass.
Anne Johnson-McDonald is a little tired. It's Friday afternoon, and she's just been
jitterbugging. "I told my class if they were good all day I'd teach them to jitterbug,"
she explains. "So I was jitterbugging and everything."
Just inside the door of her attractive split-level house there's a three panel
painting of Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Up a few stairs
into her living room, there is a portrait of Jesus Christ -- a black Jesus with an
expression of suffering on his face and long, thick hair. It was a present from a
friend in Toronto.
"Everybody knows Jesus wasn't white," she says. "But I don't know if he had
dreadlocks."
Anne Johnson-McDonald's family tree traces all the way back to the beginnings of
North Preston. Along one line she is just the sixth generation since slavery. Her
children, two boys and girl, are the seventh. "Things are changing," she tells me.
"The young people now are saying `we are somebody.'
"North Preston has a lawyer now. We make it a big thing when somebody
graduates from something like that. When he graduated, all the kids in town knew.
The family had a big dinner in a hall with speakers coming down from Montreal
and everything."
Anne tells me a big part of North Preston's identity is rooted in the belief that they
are the descendants of the Maroons, a fierce group of black Jamaican rebels who
fought the British for generations, freeing slaves in raids before melting back into
the jungle, until they were eventually captured and exiled to Nova Scotia. Most
historians agree that most, if not all, the Maroons left Nova Scotia by around 1800,
a few years after they arrived, departing for Sierra Leone because they disliked
the cold, rocky and inhospitable countryside. Even Ms. Poplack believes the
Maroons were in Nova Scotia too briefly to alter the dialect.
But those theories mean little here.
"You read a lot of things," says Anne. "We know for a fact they all didn't leave
because some of us have Maroon blood. And a lot of the characteristics of our
people are similar. We know.
"Here are a people who could fight the British for years, hiding in the woods and
the jungle cockpit. If they want to stay back here in these woods they ain't going to
have no problem, you know what I mean."
In the early 1990s Anne helped Ms. Poplack set up her research project here.
When I talked to her in January, she had just had her first look at the research.
"It's exciting," she said. "This whole idea of language has affected us. We're so
brainwashed looking at ourselves as being inferior ... we still have the slave
mentality, still have in the back of our minds that we're inferior.
"The only problem I have, is that somebody had to justify the way we talk."
Anne also conducts one of the choirs at the North Preston Baptist Church, where
every pew is crammed full on Sundays, even a few weeks after Christmas.
On a mild January Sunday morning it was full once again, with young couples
and children and, it seemed, a great number of elderly women dressed in their
Sunday best with hats of every description. Their younger neighbours came by to
say hello and kiss their soft skin.
On stage Anne shifted from foot to foot while she directed the teenaged choir,
swaying her head with an approving smile. Her kids were clearly on form.
A four piece with drums, saxophone, guitar and bass accompanied them, the
musicians' toes tapping in time as they sat on wooden chairs to one side of the
stage.
After about an hour and half it ended, the hymns and the spirituals and the
sermon and prayers, and people said goodbye and headed out to the parking lot.
As they piled into their cars and began pulling away I noticed one in particular. It
made its way slowly, an elegantly dressed man at the wheel. On its front licence
plate the word: "Maroon."
say hello and kiss their soft skin.
On stage Anne shifted from foot to foot while she directed the teenaged choir,
swaying her head with an approving smile. Her kids were clearly on form.
A four piece with drums, saxophone, guitar and bass accompanied them, the
musicians' toes tapping in time as they sat on wooden chairs to one side of the
stage.
After about an hour and half it ended, the hymns and the spirituals and the
sermon and prayers, and people said goodbye and headed out to the parking lot.
As they piled into their cars and began pulling away I noticed one in particular. It
made its way slowly, an elegantly dressed man at the wheel. On its front licence
plate the word: "Maroon."