Spoken Soul is a book about the Black vernacular English. So far, they are giving background information on how it came to be and why the vernacular is so important in telling stories of the struggles that many Blacks faced. In the book there are many references to poets such as Claude McKay and Sterling Brown, whose goals were to expose Black struggles, but also empower African Americans to be pro-active and find happiness in their own skin. In addition, the Black vernacular was also used as a protection technique against outsiders, in which many African Americans were hypersensitive with lending out trust. It was to safeguard their knowledge, and offer people within the Black community a sanctuary to express themselves without judgement. This also entails why many Blacks live by the motto "keep'n it real", because in the African American community, trust is an important commodity. Words such as "conversate" was coined by Black people because of its fluidity from the lips, due to the influences of West African tongues infused with the English language. It has little to do with having a colleged background, but to the comfortablity and ease that these words provided.
I have learned a lot from this book about my culture that I have not previously known. Many Blacks could switch between the vernacular and standard English, but the vernacular is what many feel comfortable speaking. It is the common thread that each person share with one another aside from their American identities. With bi dialectal people, also comes these people with protean identities that has existed for many centuries. Although we are one nation, this nation has been so divided due to slavery and the Jim Cow laws that in a sense still remains divided today. Moreover, the spoken soul is the way African Americans speak, and the culture that is inherited from their parents, and I look forward to continuing the book for a future update.
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