"Coffee" as the name of a female slave

[Wilson Gray]

On the contrary, arnold, Irish surnames are very common among amongst
the colored, to the extent thaat I literally choked when I saw a
letter to the editor of TIME claiming that the Irish had nothing to do
with slavery, since there were none here, till after the Potato Famine
hit.

McGrew, Joyce, McBride, McComb, Lee, Carroll (Charles Carroll of
Carrollton, the only Catholic to sign the Declararion and brother of
Sean "John" Carroll, the first Catholic bishop in the United States,
was a slave-holder), FitzGerald, Connor, O'Connor, O'Brien, McNeil,
O'Neal, O'Neil, O'Bryan,
Healy, Kelly, McTeer, FitzMaurice, O'Leary, Riley, etc., etc., etc.

Patrick Healy, SJ, the "Second Founder of Georgetown," after whom the
Healy Bldg is named, and his brother, James, the "nigger" bishop of
Portland, ME, were of African-Irish descent.

If "Coffee" and its variants are rare in my experience, it's merely a
coincidence. I've never met a white person by this name, either.

Besides, how would looking into a telephone book tell you the race of
the bearer of a particular name? Unless, of course, you already held
the unwarranted, prejudged opinion that, somehow, a _single_ name of
genuine African origin had survived among black Americans, despite all
evidence to the contrary that none has survived.

Can you understand why this kind of thing might strike a random black
person as the height of racism, even if the white person involved
wouldn't care a whit whether his sister married one?

Oh, BTW, I went to grade school with boy surnamed "Sandoz." According
to various ANS respondents, this name is of Swiss origin. You may
recall that it as a Swiss company named "Sandoz" that developed
thalidomide.

-Wilson

-Wilson
–––
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.
-----
-Mark Twain



On Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "Coffee" as the name of a female slave
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Feb 12, 2009, at 10:52 AM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
>>
>> ... As for the name "Coffee," either as forename or surname, of the
>> thousands of black people that I've met over the course of more than
>> seventy years, I've never met any so named or even so nicknamed.
>
> Coffee is one of a family of surnames -- Coffey is a more common
> variant -- of Irish origin, so i wouldn't expect it to be particularly
> widespread as a surname for black people (though there are of course
> routes for the spread of white surnames to black people).
>
> arnold
>
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