a land more kind than home
Craft Essay
Jane Ellen Smith
First Semester 11/04/2014
The use of dialogue to create a sense of place and characterization
In a land more kind than home Wiley Cash has given us a window into the family- centric, lesser educated-world of rural North Carolina and much of Appalachia. He tells the story of a small church that’s been overrun by a self-proclaimed, charismatic preacher who practices snake-handling and poison drinking as evidence of his being filled with the Holy Spirit. Three narrators give us their accounts--a young boy whose brother dies, an older woman who tries to protect the children of the church, and the sheriff, almost an outsider. Cash uses the native speech patterns and colloquialisms of his characters to help his readers see and hear the North Carolina hills.
Many writers believe the best way to demonstrate the relaxed speech of Southerners is to drop the gs at the end of words in an effort to duplicate the softening of word endings. They try to create new spellings for words to help the reader hear their character’s voices. Unfortunately, instead of enhancing the dialogue, labored spellings act like stop signs. The reader has to stop and figure out what the character is saying. Done mindfully, a colorful word or an idiom well-placed is a reminder now and then of where the story takes place, and its cautious use doesn’t intrude into the story in the way that Twain’s use of the vernacular can make Huckleberry Finn nearly unreadable for modern readers. Thankfully, Wyle Cash is a master with dialogue and his characters’ voices flow smoothly through his story.
Words like reckon and figure are appropriate to both the Southern character and place. Many of the characters attend a church practicing a primitive orthodoxy, and it’s common for these churches to use only the King James Version of the Bible that contains an idiomatic English from the 1600s. The King James Bible has verses like this one in Romans 8:18, “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us. The Scotch-Irish who settled the North Carolina mountains would have been comfortable using reckon to mean to think or expect, so hearing Adelaide or Clem use reckon is true to type. When Adelaide says on page 2, “...I reckon some folks believed him; I know some of us wanted to,” we hear the history behind her voice.
Figure is another good choice. “I figure everybody in town knew what was going on...(9)” Using “figure” to mean “think” is an idiom common to Southerners. It’s a holdover from an earlier time when working out numbers in equations was referred to as “figuring.” Jess Hall uses it on page 50 when he says “I figured everybody in the church’d heard me holler out for Mama...”
Ain’t is a contraction for “am not.” It was brought over by immigrants from England, about the same time as reckon came, where it was verifiably a part of Cockney speech in the 1700s (Oxford--aint). Ain’t is hanging on today in the South, even though schoolteachers have done their best to eradicate it. Cash’s characters use it comfortably.
- “ ‘You ain’t going to find a man’s body in there,’ he said (101).”
- “ ‘You ain’t no Jesus,’ I said. (19)”
- “ ‘You ain’t got to be afraid if you believe,’” he whispered (21).
One construction that Cash doesn’t use is “I been,” unless I missed it. I been is extremely common even among college educated adults in the South. We don’t even notice when someone says “I been cooking all day.” I use it. I don’t write it, but I say it without even thinking about it. I was surprised to see it missing in the dialogue, but there’s no lack because of that.
I thoroughly enjoyed compiling a list of colloquialisms he used in dialogue.
- “Lord have mercy, Addie, it’s me...” (192)
- “...he watched her catch hold of the Holy Ghost...” (5)
- “We even had us a big purple quartz rock...” (29)
- “(God speaking)...but you know you can’t leave them children behind (9). I find it interesting that God speaks to Adelaide in her own speech.
- “I’d been a member of that church in one way or another since I was a young woman, but things had been took too far, and I couldn’t pretend to look past them no more.(9)”
- “If they do, they’ll come outside here and wear us out for spying on them. (41)”
- “ ‘We had us a healing in church today,’ she said. (60)”
- “About what all has happened...”
- “...that old buzzard’s truck drove clean off the road...(201)
- “...me and him shimmied down that bank and waded a piece out into the water. (201)
- “‘You fixing to turn in?’ she asked me?”
And I’ll repeat a quote I used earlier because it has a great contraction:
- “I figured everybody in the church’d heard me holler out for Mama...”
