My Second (First? Third?) Language

What did he just say?
It's okay, I speak jive...

This language is one for which a student need not know all phrases; indeed, that is likely impossible. Knowledge of current slang is helpful, but the base of this language is intuition.

Standing in the dirt yard 'round the fire (fahr), beer or whiskey in hand or coat pocket, this poetry is amorphous and essentially laced with humor. It gets easier to understand and harder to say as alcohol thickens the tongue and steels the wit. These slick half words speak volumes nearly without a noun to hang on to - we say everything while seeming to say nothing, and the secrets stay in-club. I cherish the wide-eyes and the arm slaps 'round the circle each time I would give a properly-dressed response, the right color of humor, laced with taunting, covered over with the backwoods' accent and buoyed by facial expression. This is a whole body language.

Double negatives abound, perhaps because the practitioners have known doubly horrid injustice. We drop syllables in places and add in others. Double plurals, if one could have fathomed such a thing, are a favorite - maybe because so many never got a chance to speak or be heard.

It's a language that gets in you, encroaches on the accepted grammatical definitions, so that, long enough immersed, it is nearly impossible to recall the "correct" manner of speech...too long away, and the magic words evaporate, which is why I can only speak of it, and cannot recreate it here. I am not a gatekeeper, I slipped in and picked it up before the natives knew I could understand.

First, though, was Spanish forced from my head; pushed out by Southern pre-school teachers who might have let me thirst to death for not understanding my pleas for "agua," and a Spanish-speaking parent intent on an empire built of assimilation.

And now I'm in school for "English," far from my chosen dirt road heritage and no closer to a Cuban legacy I long to embrace. I sit studying language anew, and I realize I have always done this; even though I cannot call up the precious phrases that let me belong in culture for which my skin (and 'talkin proper') should have ensured my exclusion.

I am all of these things. I am reminded each day to "speak," to say hello to any I might pass on the street without reservation, 'cuz they didn't have to let me in way back when we laughed over hardship and learned from each other.