MDDM Ch. 58 "a real Negroe"

[jbor]

Not sure what the argument is here, but this is the way I read the two
mentions of those terms in the scene.

" ... but that we're merely another kind of Nigger" (572.24)

This unidentified voice in the smoky billiard room is agreeing with the
sentiments of the previous interlocutor, complaining that the British are
treating white Americans as slaves (i.e. as "another kind of Nigger"), who
are "driven more mystically, not by the Lash and the Musket, but by Ledger
and Theodolite." (572.20)

theodolite n. surveying instrument for measuring horizontal and vertical
angles by means of rotating telescope

Thus, Mason is in jeopardy here now as much as Gershom (and as much as Dixon
is back in New York cf. 565.8).

"Wait a bit, somebody say there's a real Negroe in here?" (573.8)

As opposed to a white man pretending to be a black man (i.e. a minstrel, cf.
573.3-5). Think of a marked stress on the word "real".

The term "nigger" (18th C.) and its alternatives "neger" or "neeger" (16th
C.) derive from the French *nègre* and Spanish *negro*. Used to identify an
individual as African or African-American, black-skinned, and a slave, it is
most certainly a racial - and racist - epithet. To reappropriate this term
in any other context relies on an understanding of these three connotations.

If, as I suspect, Nathe McClean is pretending to be Gershom by telling "King
Joaks", then he is doing so to cover for him and protect his anonymity. The
description of "Young Nathe" as "more slothful than the narrow and restless
Camp-Factotum of the summer previous" (573.25) hints further at an
identification between this character and the author himself.

best




on 17/6/02 2:09 AM, public domain at publicdomainboquita at yahoo.com wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> Europeans in Colonial America used racial labels based
> on what was for them the critical category of
> enslavement. Thus, depending on status, Africans were
> referred to as "free" or "slave" (Franklin, 1969).
> Where enslavement status was unknown, or where there
> was occasion to use a collective term for all
> Africans, they uses "nigger" (not a racial epithet
> until the late nineteenth century) or "negro"
> (Portuguese and Spanish adjective "black"; used by
> fifteenth-century Portuguese slave traders; lovercased
> until 1920s). Although the small number of "free"
> Africans tended to refer to themselves as "colored,"
> the most frequently used label, for "free" and "slave"
> alike, was African (Drake, 1966).
> 
> Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin That Talk: Language,
> Culture, and Education in African  America. Chapter 2,
> "Ebonics, Language Theory, and Researchin" New York,
> Routledge, 2000, page 44
> 
> http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/history/usa/franklin/
> 
> During the first two hundred years of their existence
> as a racial and ethnic group in ? the United States of
> America, there was a tendency for Negroes to refer to
> themselves as "Africans." In the early nineteenth
> century, however, free Negroes . . .  sensed a danger
> in continued use of the term, since white friends and
> foes alike were supporting "colonization societies"
> and exerting pressure upon freedmen to leave the
> country for settlement in Africa. . . . Leaders among
> the freedmen felt that they might be told to "go back
> to Africa" if they continued to call themselves
> "African."
> 
> St. Claire Drake, "Negro Americans and the African
> Interest," in The American Negro Reference Book, John
> P. Davis, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: 1966),
> 662-705. Also see Minutes of the Proceedings of the
> National Negro Convention, 1830-1864, Howard Bell, ed.
> (New York: Arno Press, Inc., 1969) Convention Minutes,
> 1835, 14-15.
> 
> http://www.psu.edu/dept/cored/resources/term/term.html
> 
> http://www.lib.ksu.edu/depts/spec/rarebooks/price.html
> 
> 
> 
>