antedating (?) "Katy, bar the door" (1890)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 10/3/07, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/3/07, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> > 1888 _Current Literature_ Dec. 499/1 When she say that, hits 'Katy,
> > bar ther do', then, fer she's gwineter do it.
>
> I assume that the passage is a bit of eye-dialect BE.

I didn't see anything in this story ("Chunk" by Lum Duke, from the
Atlanta Constitution) explicitly mentioning the race of the
protagonists, Tom Hubbard and his beloved Mary Elizabeth (aka Chunk).
They're described as rural Georgia folk  -- she had "always lived hid
away in the pine mountains on the Chattahoochee River." When such
19th-century stories featured black characters, they tended to be more
"marked" -- unless, of course, the eye-dialect itself was intended as
evidence of racial markedness.


--Ben Zimmer

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