Chestnutt's language

Similarly to Leslie, I found reading Chestnutt's intense language differences between the narrators of the stories extremely difficult. In class, we've read many works that used ebonics to highlight the speech differences between slaves and whites, but most of them consisted of just scattered dialogue. There was often a good balance between the writing styles where some form of ebonics in dialogue would alternate between narrations in proper english. However, in Chestnutt's short stories, the language is primarily in very thick, intense ebonics. Chestnutt makes an interesting choice by writing the core of the stories in this dialogue and framing it with the language of a white narrator only at the beginnings and endings of each story. For pages, there would just be language written in ebonics, which was both frustrating and unique. I'm curious as to why he chose to do this and what effect it creates. For starters, it definitely immerses the reader deeper into the story and makes the story more believable and authentic. By eliminating the outside narrator, the reader is more heavily submerged in the story within the story. However, I found that the most effective story was actually The Sheriff's Children, which uses the least amount of ebonics in its language, but perhaps this is simply as a result of this story in particular being easier to read.