An author friend, Linda Thompson, asked if readers preferred reading a transliteration of accented speech (“Oi ‘ere. C’mon. Now’t see ‘ere.”) or a modified use of some easily understood phrases to indicate that the speaker might have an accent (“Oui, M’sieur. It is true what you say.”).
I have gone both directions…but if the character is to have several sets of lines, I tend to start with the accent and then dissolve into more straightforward English. It strikes me that this happens when we are in regular contact with someone with an accent. We tend to normalize the sound the greater the exposure. See Maggie’s conversations with Kitty in Volume Three of the Bennet Wardrobe, The Exile: Kitty Bennet and the Belle Époque. Maggie begins with an East End accent which gradually vanishes. See the excerpt below.
The core of the question is…“What is the message transmitted?” as opposed to “What is the message received?” In other words, we do need to suggest to our reader that the individual is speaking with an accent…but then, to facilitate the normalization of the experience for the reader, we do with our writing that which they would normally undertake with their hearing but cannot with the printed word. Colonel Fitzwilliam would eventually “stop” hearing the rough accents of his men.
Now, this does bring us directly up against the great question in ethnography—something with which historians and anthropologists struggle mightily. Since language is a socially constructed discourse, the individual’s life shapes the creation of the language used to express that life. If we “correct” that speech to “proper” English, we destroy the underlying context for the speech.
In fiction, we can find an opportunity to use the vernacular, something equally as important in establishing character as an accent.
Jody heard nothing; saw nothing but his plate. He had never been so hungry in his life, and after a lean winter and a slow spring … his mother had cooked a supper good enough for the preacher. There were poke-greens with bits of white bacon buried in them; sandbuggers made of potato and onion and the cooter he had found crawling yesterday; sour orange biscuits and at his mother’s elbow the sweet potato pone. He was torn between his desire for more biscuits and another sandbugger and the knowledge, born of painful experience, that if he ate them, he would suddenly have no room for pone. The choice was plain.
— MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS, The Yearling (1938)
Here, we see Rawlings use vernacular to create a remarkable image of a young southern boy utterly ravenous! She establishes context by demanding that we consider what life in backcountry Florida must have been like “…lean winter…slow spring.” Then she parks us inside of Jody’s world… “supper good enough for the preacher”… “white bacon”… “sandbuggers”… “cooter” and “pone.” No, this is not an accent…but it is the use of a regional dialectic understanding that instantly places a reader in the 1930s Depression-era South.
Whatever we do as writers, we should NEVER seek to sanitize speech…much as Harvard researchers in the 1930s did with the transcripts of recordings of former slaves recounting their experiences by putting the verbiage into “proper English.” It was not until the 1990s that researchers went back to the original recordings to discover all that had been lost by the “efforts” of those privileged white men of the 1930s. Vernacular can and should be used…but ultimately, in writing fiction, we cannot let “authenticity” get in the way of comprehension, enjoyment, or reader experience.
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Please enjoy this excerpt from the 2023 Remastered edition of Volume Three of the Bennet Wardrobe Series, The Exile: Kitty Bennet and the Belle Époque, ©2017 by Donald P. Jacobson. Published in the United States of America. Reproduction of this by any means, mechanical or electronic, is prohibited. Use of this excerpt to train AI is expressly prohibited.
Chapter Twenty
Place unknown. Time unknown.
Her limbs weighed a hundred stone. Not much of her body responded to her command, and when it did, only the slightest changes would register. The air she breathed was dense and fetid with her exhalations inside the bag pulled over her head. There was also a pervading stench of human waste filtering through the loosely woven material. She lay on her side with her arms restrained in front of her. Her prison was a space that did not permit her to extend her legs to relieve the increasing cramping in her calves and thighs. This box—no, ’twas a basket, for she could hear it creak and flex as her weight shifted with the train’s motion—did little to insulate her from the clattering of the rail car as it rolled across uneven track and through noisy switch points.
But what trackage? Where am I being taken? And why?
The effects of the drugs continued to confuse her reality and muddle her dreams. At one moment, she could recall walking in Brompton Road with Winters. Then nothing: a flash of memory saw a serving girl pouring chilled chocolate soup.
Did she make eye contact with Winters? Did he nod? Why did he not have the soup? It was so delicious on such a warm day. Why did he insist on petit fours and Italian ice?
They talked of nothing. Then the world around her began to twist. She could not move. Her mouth would not work as her chest became so heavy that she could not breathe! Then Winters was on his feet, shouting something. People turned and stared.
Did he say that his sister was ill? Did he urge a lady and a gentleman to assist him as he carried me to his carriage? Did they all enter the coach?
Eventually, darkness relieved her of the bleakest of her phantasms.
***
She finally swam back to consciousness after the train had stopped, her prison rattling across a hard surface on its squeaking wheels. Grunting laborers lifted the basket onto a cart from the sounds made. Then she was underway again, this time more slowly, rocking and clattering over cobbled streets. Her legs had long since lost all feeling. She tried to moan, to call out, but even her loudest cries were no more than inarticulate croaks, feebly muffled even to her ears. The noise outside was different from before, as if every street barker had decided to shout his wares simultaneously but in French.
More silence. Had she slept? Fainted? Sounds came rushing back to assault her as her drug-addled brain cataloged its senses.
Rough hands, female hands, pulling off her gown, yanking at her shoes. She was lying on a mattress, its softness a blessing after the wooden planks that had been her bed. A faceless—the bag still blinded her—voice assailed her ears, repeatedly complaining, “Come on now, you. Stop actin’ like a sack o’ potatoes. It’ll go easier if you help me. I got’s ta get these dirties off’n ya, leastwise yore dress and stockin’s. Your shift, too. You ’ad an accident. I’ll see if’n I can find some small clothes that’ll do for you until yours see the wash tub.”
Kitty tried to speak: nothing again but guttural rasps. But they did get her warder’s attention. “Close your eyes. I’m takin’ the sack off. Not much light in ’ere, but enough to ’urt like blazes.”
Kitty squeezed her lids. Then the bag was whipped away, allowing cooler—if not fresher—air to wash over her face.
She tried again, “Wa…wa…ter, pah-leze.”
Strange the little things that impress, and Kitty’s tortured effort to make her wishes known through dust-caked lips was one of those. Not that she wanted water; it was to be expected after more than three dozen hours of confinement. Instead, it was that she asked as someone seeking a boon instead of demanding to be served water as a privilege due to someone of her station.
This slightly softened the jaded heart of Kitty’s warder, who had been relegated to this task because her loss to the receiving parlor would least injure the house’s income for the evening. That she was among the few English-speaking denizens of Madam’s stable necessarily placed her on the shortlist.
“Can you sit up, dearie? I cannot manage both you and the water at the same time.”
Kitty pushed both hands into the bedclothes and found that, while her legs refused to work, she could still drag herself from supine to reclined. The other woman pushed a few pillows under Kitty’s back. Then the coolness of the glass of liquid life touched her parched mouth. She greedily tried to gulp more than a small trickle but was arrested when the tumbler was snatched from her lips.
“No, no, sweetie, slowly. Your body may be screaming for water, but if you try to take it all at once, you’ll spew it all over me. That’s right. Sip…sip.”
Slowly, gradually, the nectar laved the swollen, dried tissues of Kitty’s throat. A coughing fit racked her. Ugly, nasty-flavored phlegm pooled in the back of her mouth and coated her tongue. Cool porcelain touched her cheek.
“’ere, spit it out. Get that stuff up.”[i]
More water brought more relief. Kitty leaned back and cleared her throat, recalling the countless times she had seen and heard Henry do the same, shielding onlookers from the foulness expelled with his handkerchief.
This is the first time I have thought of my family since this began, and it is of Henry. Oh, how I miss them. What will become of me? Why did Winters take me? Where am I?
Fear and frustration suddenly overwhelmed her. Tears flooded out from beneath her closed lashes. She started to sob.
She heard the glass clank on a nearby table. Suddenly, a pair of soft arms wrapped her; her face cradled into cushiony breasts. One hand stroked her hair gently as the voice softly crooned the universal nonsense phrases that offered comfort in an incomprehensibly uncomfortable situation.
“There, there dearie: ’twill be all right. You’ll see. It’s not a bad life here. New girls ’ave it the best ’cos Madame won’t hire you out to any connard ’oo has five francs.”
At this last, Kitty stiffened. Her eyes flew open to be shocked by the light flooding through gauzy crimson drapes. She immediately slammed them shut again.
“Oi there. Now don’ be puttin’ on airs with ol’ Maggie. I ’ave been around the block a few times and ’ave seen good ’n’ bad, but I’m tellin’ you: Madame Flournoy keeps a fair and decent ’ouse. She won’t put up with no ’urting the girls—not like some.”
Kitty immediately moderated her thinking to avoid offending someone who might be her only ally.
She opened her eyes, more carefully this time, and looked up at the woman still holding her. She saw someone with a friendly, if heavily rouged, countenance: a woman who may have been up to ten years her senior. A halo of remarkably red hair wreathed her head.
Yet, upon closer inspection, Kitty could see that beneath the near-theatrical layer of powder and color, Maggie was not as old as she had implied with her hardened manner. Her skin still had that peculiar tautness of youth. Her face bore no crows-feet, no jowls. Her full womanly breasts, barely covered as they were, still rose proudly without any apparent support. It was the weariness that tightened her squint and narrowed her emerald eyes that put a modest lie to her outgoing bluster.
Kitty’s voice betrayed her by bouncing around the alto register. “Oh, Miss Maggie, please forgive me. I was not judging you or this house. I was shocked to learn that I was being cared for in a…a…”
“…brothel,” Maggie completed.
Kitty continued. “Yes, thank you, a brothel. I think I was walking through Harrods in London only yesterday or the day before. Now I am…where am I?”
Maggie responded softly, “I don’ think it will do any ’arm to tell you. You’re in Paris in a house back of the Madeleine.”
Paris? Oh, how shall I ever get back home?
The tears flowed again. Solace was offered again and was accepted. After a point, though, Maggie decided to move the proceedings ahead. She stood and planted her hands on broad hips. “As the Americans say: Okay now, what do I call you? We h’aint bin properly introduced, but I’se seen as much of you as your maid or mama. So’s I’ll go first.
“I’m Margaret Small, long ago-lately of Poplar in the East End, now of Madame Flournoy’s in the Madeleine, Eighth Arrondissement, Paris.” She bobbed a credible curtsy.
Kitty giggled nervously and blushed at the sight of Maggie, clad only in a near-transparent chemise underneath a scarlet bustier above net stockings held by garter ribbons, dipping in perfect form as if at her presentation to the queen. Maggie realized that the youngster was not laughing at her and let it pass.
Kitty experimented and learned that she could move her legs. Dropping them over the side of the bed, she sat up and dangled her feet down to the floor. She surveyed her condition. Dark bruises from her restraints stained her wrists. Her shift below her corset was discolored from the waist down, the result of what Maggie had so delicately noted as her ‘accident.’ Hours of immobility had left her feet swollen. She certainly was a sight!
She gripped one of the metal bedstead’s head posts and awkwardly stood up. With as much dignity as she could muster, she smiled at the older woman. “I fear that I am still wobbly from my ordeal, so my curtsy will not be as deep as yours. However, it is no indication of any lack of happiness on my part to make your acquaintance. I am Catherine Marie Bennet, formerly of Longbourn Estate in Hertfordshire and now of Matlock House, Belgravia, London. My friends call me Kitty.”
A large, friendly grin broke across Maggie’s face. “So, you are a real lady, huh? Well, that’ll be between you and me. Madame would latch onta that toot sweet and ’ave you earnin’ your keep on your back ’fore the week was out in spite of what He says. She’d make those Frenchie swells that come over after the opera pay double or triple.
“But I canna call you ‘Catherine Marie Bennet.’ Too much. And I’m thinkin’ you need a more grown-up nicker than ‘Kitty.’ So, I’ll be Mags, and you’ll be Kate.
“Now, let me go search out those small clothes. The water in the tub by the window should still be warm enough. There’s some soap. You need to clean up, and I’m not talkin’ just a whore’s bath. You sorter smell like the downwind side of a privy.”
She crossed the room with a snort, pulled open the door, and stepped out. Kitty distinctly heard the key turning in the lock. She wryly shook her head, lifted one arm, and carefully sniffed her armpit. Recoiling, she reached down and began to unhook her corset’s fastenings.
In the back of her mind, though, loomed the terrifying sense that her trials were just beginning.
Bottom of Form
[i] See chapter 3 of Henry Fitzwilliam’s War. “Then he made the mistake of trying to take a deep breath. His body instantly rebelled with a huge spasm and a bout of racking coughs that expelled foulness into the mask. The stink gagged him, and, struggling, he pulled the dripping mass away from his mouth. He was engulfed in rose and cut grass again. Gentle arms encircled him and turned his body. He felt cool metal against his cheek.”
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