"blue-gum"

[Wilson Gray]

It's too bad that that isn't true. Otherwise, the first time that
someone told me to bite his ass would have been the last time.

Fangs for the memory, Jon!

-Willson

On 3/7/07, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "blue-gum"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> We discussed this some months ago, but the following exx. have appeared from the dead, so to speak, so here they are.
>
>   1892, in John W. Blassingame _Slave Testimony_ (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1977) 507: She is what is known as a "blue-gum nigger."...There was a superstition, not yet extinct, that the bite of a "blue-gum nigger" is more deadly than that of a rattlesnake.
>
>   1896 M. E. M. Davis_An Elephant's Track_ (N.Y.: Harper's) 192 : Der ain' no whiskey in de jug dat kin heal up de bite of a blue-gum nigger
>
>   a1898 in C. W. Brann _Complete Works of Brann the Iconoclast_  IX 164 :But seriously, a man who will make such a suggestion doesn't deserve to die a respectable death. He ought to be bit by a blue-gum nigger, clawed by a buzzard, kicked by a blind jackass and buried face down in a pile of compost.
>
>   1899 in Seymour Stark _Men in Blackface_ (N.p.: Xlibris, 2001) 70: I'se a blue-gum nigger, / You don't want to fool wid me, / I'se as bad a nigger as a nigger man can be.
>
>   1900-02 Joel Chandler Harris _The Making of a Statesman and Other Stories_ (N.Y.: McClure Phillips, 1902) 155: "I'm a blue-gum nigger," remarked the hack-driver, with a frown.
>
>   1928-29 William Faulkner _The Sound and the Fury_ (rpt. N.Y.: Random House, 1956) 84: They making a bluegum out of you....And when family woman look him in the eye in the full of the moon, chile born bluegum.
>
>   1931 John E. Uhler _Cane Juice: A Story of Southern Louisiana_ 294 (N.Y.: Century, 1931): Dey's a conjur' hyah!...Dey's a blue-gum nigger hyah.
>
>   1952 Eugene Brown _Trespass_ (rpt. N.Y.: Popular Library, 1964) 116: Just who in hell you think you is, you blue-gum jigaboo?
>
>   1965 _New Yorker_ (Apr. 10) [http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?060123fr_archive01] : A relatively friendly sheriff in Sunflower County, Mississippi, warned me, confidentially, that my client was a "blue-gum nigger." "Their mouths are filled with poison," he said. "Don't let him bite you."...I said I'd try to be careful.
>
>   With luck, I'll never think of this again. The date to beat, from last time, is 1891.
>
>   JL
>
>
>
>
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--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
                                                      -Sam'l Clemens

Dope wil get you through times of no money better than money will get
you through times of no dope.
-----
                                         -Free-Wheeling Franklin

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