Herb, please accept my apologies!

[Wilson Gray]

I'm watching an old movie, No Way Out - the first Richard
Widmark-Sidney Poitier buddy-movie - which I originally saw at the age
of thirteen, in 1950. The movie's plot, which concerns racial
violence, is, simplistically, that the white people of working-class
Beaver Canal, annoyed because one of them "seen a boogie drivin' a
Cadillac a mile long!", have decided to "jap" the laboring-class black
people of Niggertown, in order to motivate the latter to give up their
annoying biggitiness. Instead, the coloresd find out and ambush the
whites. Or something like that. Consulting of the iMDB may be useful
to anyone who cares what the flick is really about.

IAC, there's a scene in which the Head Negro In Charge harangues his
followers, firing them up for the coming race-riot. It was almost
laughable, listening to this guy - Harvard Hasty Pudding, followed by
Yale Drama? - tryina soun n ack, WRT to both spoken language and
body-language - lak he spoatn t'be comin fum dih shkreet.

Unreal!

I *still* don't believe that Motown had to school its singers in
sounding black. But I'm forced to grant that the idea that such
training may have been necessary in random instances is *hardly*
totally from left field. As is clearly the case, sound-patterns vary
from speaker to speaker. There's sounding black - as that actor did -
and then there's sounding the right kind of black - as that actor
didn't. Another cogent example is the black neo-bluesman of the '90's,
Robert Cray. He was black, had black voice, talked black, and sang
black. But, despite all that, nobody was taking him to be the second
coming of Lightnin Hopkin or Howlin Woof.

BTW, contrary to what current popular belief would lead one to
believe, the white people - abstracting away from the facts that they
were actors and that this was only a movie - used [nIg@], though the
movie is set in the North, about as often as they used [nIgr]. Quite
randomly, seem lak t'me.

--
-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

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