FINDING SPACE FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH IN A SIXTH GRADE CLASSROOM A Capstone submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English as a Second Language

CHAPTER ONE:  INTRODUCTION


Said vat you got to said, and don’t kick aftervard!
-Gust Runquist, at a church meeting, c. 1930


Growing up in northern Wisconsin, I loved hearing my mother tell stories of the immigrant characters who populated those rural woods years before my time.  How we’d all laugh when the punch line, which everyone had heard a hundred times, finally came.

There’s the guy who’s charged with setting up extra seating in church, so he’s carrying a plank which he’ll lay atop two chairs to form a bench.  Someone walks behind him, gets hit with the plank, and makes a fuss.  When repeated in a thick, Swede Finn1accent, his indignant response, “I don’t got eyes in my rear!” brings howls of laughter.  Then there’s
the guy who was chastised for not signaling as he prepared to turn from the highway into the little store owned by my grandparents.  He made clear his justification:  “Don’t you know I alvays turn here?”  By this time, we’re usually laughing so hard we’re crying.

We tell the story of my grandmother, whose father brought his hard-nosed, “old country” ways with him to Wisconsin.  Chasing the cows one cold winter night, she complained, “Nobody loves me, and my hands are cold.”  Her father’s unsympathetic reply, “God loves you, and you can sit on your hands,” still serves my family as a “stop complaining”
message in many situations.    This didn’t end her complaining, however.  Years later, as she became old and sick, she would often lament, “You don’t know what it’s like to be like this here.”

These stories themselves, of course, are not really that funny.  If I took them to an open mike night at the local comedy club, I’d draw more puzzled looks than laughs.  But to our family, they are priceless.  These stories tell our history.  They bind generation to generation, the “old country” to the new, giving us a feeling of solidarity and strength.
The thick accent and verbatim immigrant grammar with which they are always repeated remind us that not so long ago, our family – our whole community – was just recently arrived off the boats, through Canada or Ellis Island, from Finland.  They started a small church, built a school, opened a country store, worked the land, and two short generations later, sent their grandchildren, now full-fledged, English-speaking Americans, off to college.

The pride I have for my heritage is obvious.  Any editor of this paper who would dare to suggest the correction “Say what you have to say and don’t kick afterward” would be met with solid refusal.  The way these lines are delivered is as important, if not more so, than their content.  They remind us where we came from, and how very far we have come.  The accent and grammar don’t just help to tell the story, they are the story...