cigarfactorynovel-blog - Tumblr blog

[cigarfactorynovel-blog]

Blame it on the bean (Part 5)

**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.

The beans are maps.  The words are history.  Our history.

[cigarfactorynovel-blog]

Blame it on the bean (Part 4)

**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

The presence of West African influenced speech is central to The Cigar Factory novel. 

Now getting back to the sivvy bean.  I came upon the term in Turner’s book, sibi, is Gullah for lima bean. Seb is Wolof for bean. Given the common substitution of the b sound for v, I knew I had found my missing link and that the origin of this sivvy bean (sometimes spelled sivy or civvy) was the Gullah sibi.  Here was a white woman in her eighties in 2009, sitting in her kitchen using an African word for lima bean, and getting totally frustrated trying to come up with a word her younger cousin from Atlanta might be able to recognize. 

If an African word could survive into the digital age in my family, what did the white working class speech sound like nearly 100 years ago?  How much closer to the Sea Island Gullah language was the speech of the African Americans living in the city of Charleston 100 years ago?  How many more African words were in usage back then?  And finally, what did the well-educated upper class speech of those raised by a Gullah speaking Dah, sound like?  One of my interviewees spoke of having to “un-learn” Gullah when he arrived at a revered private school, and how he struggled initially to grasp the rules of “Standard English.”  Where are these stories? 

Language is such a marker of class; I suspect shame explains the silence.  My father remembers a time when people outside of Charleston made fun of the way he talked, and being called a Geechee, was meant as a slur.  

“The words are purposes. The words are maps,” writes the poet Adrienne Rich.

The politics of language and its depiction are very much at play in The Cigar Factory. 

But how to portray the language on the page given the well-known difficulties with dialect, which bear repeating here: 1) Condescension, especially if relying on grammatical “mistakes” (rather than syntax or invention of/respelling of words).  2) Alienating and slowing the reader.  3) Temptation to simply drop g’s or substitute a d for th in words such as the or them.   4) Making it look queer on the page with an overly busy typographical presentation due to all the cumbersome apostrophes required. 

The portrayal of the dialogue evolved over many drafts. 

[cigarfactorynovel-blog]

Blame it on the bean (Part 3)

**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

Sometimes it was only a trace or one or two features Turner described, consistency and intensity varied greatly.  If two relatives were together on the recording talking about childhood memories, the features were more pronounced which is consistent with what linguists call “code-switching,” referring to how we change our speech depending on our audience. A person gathered with relatives, will speak differently from when he or she is delivering a presentation at work.  

Turner, the first professionally trained African American linguist, noted that the English th sound does not exist in Gullah, nor in many West African languages. Coincidentally, it does not exist in French or German, either. In pronouncing English words containing this sound, both the Gullah speaker and the West African, substitute the d sound for th. For example, they is pronounced dey, them as dem, with as wit.  Also, v is often pronounced with the b sound.   Gone may be used for all tenses of go. Repetition and double negatives are common. Auxillary verbs are often absent.  Groups of words may describe a characteristic of a thing or person.  Tone can convey tense or a special meaning, and tone does not go up at the end of a question as in English. 

However, tone does go up at the end of a statement.  

Until the great migration of the 1920’s, the majority of Charleston’s population consisted of persons of African descent. European immigrants arriving in the Lowcountry prior to this time would have acquired English based on the language they heard spoken around them, be that their Dah (nanny) or neighbors, vendors, or co-workers along the wharves.  Housing in Charleston was never segregated by law.

[cigarfactorynovel-blog]

Blame it on the bean (Part 2)

**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

Fiction lives in the language and details of imagery.  I wanted to re-create the working-class world of Charleston in the twenties and thirties: what foods they ate for special meals and everyday meals; what they did for fun; where and how they fished throughout the year; what they did at the cigar factory or what they thought of the women who worked there. I recorded the interviews with my elderly white and mostly working class relatives and other friends of the family.   I listened to the recordings over and over, most often in the morning before beginning to write because I loved the sound and rhythm of their voices.  I did not know, at the time, how much those recordings were going to affect the story I wanted to tell. 

As I wrote, I couldn’t stop myself from trying to capture the music of the language. I struggled against the urge throughout the first draft.  Many respected friends and colleagues warned me against the use of dialect, insisting that my otherwise interesting story would never get published.  And then, well into the second draft, came the epiphany of the sivvy bean. During an interview I recorded with a cousin on Sullivan’s Island about the foods she ate growing up, she referred to sivvy beans more than once. I asked, “What’s a sivvy bean?” She can’t answer right away. For some reason, I don’t let it go, and I am heard prodding her. “What’s a sivvy bean?  Is it like a pinto bean or more like a green bean?” She gets frustrated and stammers and finally comes out with, “It’s a…it’s a…a lima bean, a lima bean.”  Repetition is common in Gullah-Geechee speech. Back in Atlanta, I asked my father, do you know what a sivvy bean is?” And he smiled. “Oh yeahhhh!” he said, drawing out the sound. “A sivvy bean—a sivvy bean is a lima bean. I haven’t heard that word since I left Charleston.”

I had been writing and researching for nearly two years at that point. An author friend urged me to read Lorenzo Dow Turner, and I decided to take another stab at Turner’s sentinel 1949 study, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect.  The scholarly linguistic book had frustrated me on my first attempt.  This time, it resonated because of having listened to the interview recordings so many times. What I was hearing were Gullah influenced linguistic patterns in the speech of my older white relatives! I felt like an explorer, thrilled to find an answer to a lifelong question: Where does that Charleston accent come from?

[cigarfactorynovel-blog]

Blame it on the bean (Part 1)

**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

When I began research for my first novel, set in Charleston in the first half of the twentieth century, I did not set out to commit what many consider to be a mortal sin of fiction writing: the use of phonetic spelling to convey the sound of how a character speaks. Yet, commit it I did, though never with abandon. Of that at least, I can assure my harshest critic, and beyond that, all I can say is, blame it on the bean.  

In his foreword, Pat Conroy wrote that the novel presents a “street level perspective of Charleston, one that breaks new ground on every page.” It is indeed more Catfish Row than South of Broad, telling a tale of two working class Catholic women from 1893 to 1946: Meliah Amey Ravenel is African American and Cassie McGonegal is Irish American. I suspect few visitors to the Holy City realize that the hulking brick building overlooking the harbor in the Eastside community was once the world’s largest cigar factory. In its heyday, the factory employed over a thousand women, black and white, who were kept rigidly segregated and unaware of the conditions the other experienced.

The fictional story of these two families, however, resides in the decades leading up to the historic 1946 tobacco workers strike. What Meliah Amey and Cassie cannot see, of course, are the many ways they are more alike than different.  They share a devotion to Catholicism, yet each retains a strong belief in supernatural forces to heal and protect the vestiges of their ancestral homelands: West Africa and West Ireland, respectively.  

In the novel, language and food, and the language of food, reveal a strong commonality between the two families. Cassie and Meliah Amey never take their family’s next meal for granted. These women work to put food on the table in a time with limited refrigeration, no supermarkets, and no processed foods. Cassie will get out of more than one potentially fractious event by putting a pot of sivvy beans on the stove, knowing it will be at least an hour before they are tender enough to eat. Meliah Amey’s husband Joe is a captain in the legendary group of African American fishermen known as the Mosquito Fleet. 

One morning, as she watches them rowing out of the harbor, Meliah Amey wishes for Joe to come home with red snapper. “Red snappuh be a good eatin fish, that’s right, a good eatin fish.” She plans to marriage’um (a Gullah cooking term meaning to mix or blend together) to sivvy beans, tomatoes, and rice, making a perlo (a Gullah stew) for supper. If I had to pick only one thing that has given Charleston its unique language and food, it would be the influence of the West African based Gullah-Geechee culture.

One used to hear the terms Geechee or Gullah, now the official designation is Gullah-Geechee and it refers to the people of African descent who were enslaved and brought to the Sea Islands of the southeastern United States. The National Park Service’s Gullah-Geechee Heritage Corridor extends from Jacksonville, Florida to Wilmington, North Carolina. Slave traders sought people taken from the West African “Rice Coast” countries because of their skills and knowledge of the intricacies of growing rice. 

Being from different countries, they spoke different languages. To communicate with one another, as well as with white slave holders, a creole language developed. Gullah has primarily English vocabulary but many African words, as well. Grammar, syntax, and pronunciation have features from several African languages.

[cigarfactorynovel-blog]

Atlanta to Charleston: Where it all began

Long before Michele Moore was an award-winning author, she was a “free range” kid growing up in Mid-Town Atlanta learning about cinematic and literary genius from creators like Francois Truffaut and Tennessee Williams.

Moore has vivid memories of riding her bike at all hours of the day and night through Ansley Park, exploring rooftops of Colony Square buildings while under construction, and napping on sofas at the High Museum.

Atlanta was Moore’s playground, and it laid a foundation of influences that would lead her down the path of novelist and playwright.

“Early on, I was quite taken with theatre and film,” Moore said. “I went to work at Rhodes Theater when I was 13 (yes, I lied about my age) and I got to see – over and over – a huge range of films. (Federico) Fellini and Truffaut taught me about soft oblique endings rather than huge battle victories.”

She credits the surrealism of the 1975 film version of The Who’s rock opera Tommy for  encouraging her to let her mind go to far places creatively. “Pushing boundaries of any one medium has always been appealing.”

Admittedly, Moore didn’t read much as a teenager. It wasn’t until her mid-twenties that she became a habitual reader. But, while she was in high school, an energetic drama teacher introduced her to the famous playwrights Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Henrik Ibsen and Tennessee Williams.

“A friend and I would often skip biology class at Grady High and walk up to The Majestic on Ponce to get a cup of coffee and a slice of apple pie with cheese,” Moore said. “We’d go back for drama class because we had an engaging drama teacher, and we read and acted out scenes from the major canon: Ibsen, Miller, O’Neil and of course, my favorite, Tennessee Williams.”

Moore actually got the opportunity to see the infamous playwright when he was at Alliance Theatre in the 1970s for the premier of his play Tiger Tail.

For Moore, writing about Charleston was a natural choice. Her father, a Charleston native, came to Atlanta in the 1950s for a job with the main branch of the Post Office.

Even though Atlanta became his home, Moore said he never left Charleston or the sea behind.

As a child, Moore said she loved to listen to her father’s sea stories and tales of roque waves, and “sharks as long as our little ranch house.”

“Charleston was magical and mythical in that way, which increased its value perhaps because it was not home; it was the unknown,” Moore said.

“The Cigar Factory,” Moore’s first novel, got its first breath from a simple question: why were so many women working in the Charleston cigar factory?

Through her extensive research, Moore said she found multiple answers to that question.

“The large tobacco companies in the early twentieth century sought to hire exclusively women because – and they were clear about this – they could pay them less,” Moore said. “Management believed that women wouldn’t show up drunk on a Monday nor would they take cigars since they believed they would not smoke them.”

In her research, Moore said she found a comment from a manager who wanted to hire “a dumb and docile workforce.”

“I believe in real life and with my fictional characters, the cigar makers prove themselves to be anything but ‘dumb and docile,’” Moore said.

In February, “The Cigar Factory” was awarded the Langum prize for best American Historical Fiction. While Moore was writing her debut novel, there was a lot of doubt and wonder that came along with the extensive writing and research.

The novel was shortlisted alongside author Annie Proulx for her novel Barkskins. Moore said she was “more than a bit shocked” to have won over the Pulitzer Prize winning author.

Legendary literary agent, Charlotte Sheedy took on “The Cigar Factory” manuscript and placed it with Pat Conroy who brought the book to publication and wrote its forward not long before his death.

Winning the Langum prize gave Moore affirmation as a novelist and brought her work full-circle. “I do wonder if my sixth grade teacher from Spring Street Elementary is still alive because I’d like to tell Mrs. Montague that I still have the note she wrote to me back in 1973, which said, ‘I hope to someday read a novel or attend a play you’re written,’” Moore said.