Michael D. Picone
 

In the mid twenties, African American author Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was one of the founding figures of the Harlem Renaissance. She subsequently fell into obscurity until interest in her was revived by Alice Walker’s publication of "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" (1975). One of the reasons that Hurston fell into disfavor for a time was because of her use of dialect in the portrayal of African American speech attributes, which, in progressive political circles, was judged to be demeaning and to constitute pandering to the expectations of a white readership. However, Hurston was an ethnographer trained by Franz Boas, and, according to her own account, especially in her compilation originally entitled Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf South (post mortem publication in 2001), her intent was to preserve authentic speech traits. To the extent that her claim is accurate, her writings may provide valuable evidence about African American English, including the English of Cudjo Lewis. Lewis, a Yoruba speaker, was brought to Alabama in 1860 and was, at his death in 1935, the last known survivor of any slaver brought to the United States.  Excerpts of yet unpublished transcriptions of Hurston’s interview with Cudjo Lewis, conducted in 1927 near Mobile, will be presented and the salient speech traits that differ from other versions of African American English, in particular the frequent presence of verb-final –ee, will be considered for their implications and for their possible value as sociolinguistic markers in African Town, Alabama, where, after the Civil War, Lewis and others who had been similarly uprooted regrouped to form a community that was protective of African culture.