The Vernacular Tradition Versifies Trails, Visibly Through Vast Tales

The Vernacular Tradition is something that we witness throughout our first month of African American literature. In either stories or poems, the vernacular is what fuels these authors to keep writing, to build up something that expresses who they truly are. And that is what we're going to look into in this blog.

    Let's start off by looking at the stories we've read in class so far. Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl features Linda Brent who describes her life story as a slave, going through many challenges and obstacles on her way of claiming her freedom. Throughout the text, Brent meets many characters, one particular character that stands out is Dr. Flint, a physician that goes through anything to get what he wants. Brent shows Dr. Flint's character through her personal experiences, giving the reader enough information to determine who Dr. Flint really is without explicitly saying it. There is also another point in the story that shows how male slaves were badly treated, basically tortured by the white slave owners as their method of entertainment whereas female slaves were sexually abused. Brent manages to tell the reader all of this and even more just from showing her personal experience, demonstrating the vernacular tradition in literary works.

    Booker T. Washington shares this same methodology in his work, Up From Slavery. While both Brent and BTW start off by mentioning that they were born as slaves, BTW mentions his experiences after gaining his freedom. Instead of portraying freedom as this happy ending, BTW mentions how even as a child, his step-father forced him and his brother into labor. However, despite needing to work, BTW's passion for a better education never stopped him as he explains how his disappointment led to determination, leading up to his shenanigans to make it to school on time. This builds up to the vernacular tradition of using his own voice and personal experiences instead of using a more formal language despite his background.

    Experiences aren't the only way to express the vernacular tradition. The way the author writes dialogue can keep their language/dialect alive. For example, in Charles Chestnutt's The Wife of His Youth, the reader gets introduced to Liza Jane, a character from a slave background who spent most of her life trying to find a man named Sam after the war. While we see Mr. Ryder and other characters at the ball speak normally or in a formal matter, Liza Jane speaks with a dialect that is hard to read without phonetically sounding it out. Needing to be able to speak it out loud feels like an immersive experience for the reader, almost as if they were Mr. Ryder themselves. This form of writing is very unique and not often seen in many scholar works today, so literary forms like these help keep that vernacular language alive. 

The Harlem Renaissance features many famous poets such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, and these poets manage to portray the vernacular tradition through poetry. They can express their past experiences and turn them into lyrics of a poem, or use the vernacular language to speak to the reader, almost as if the poet was ranting to them from the poem. The literature from different backgrounds of African American authors create this environment that current scholars are unable to match, making African American literature so important.