¶ … God, and the Word was God. So reads the first verse of the book of John, just two in a handful of bible verses I was made to memorize and recite before I was able to read. These verses and the ones preceding and following them were read to me nightly -- and often in the mornings as well -- by my mother, grandmother and grandfather in our home in the small Southern Baptist community of Perry, Georgia. In addition to the bible, I was read bible stories in books with colorful illustrations meant to engage children. The illustrations helped me to associate meaning with the words on the page, while the words themselves struck me as just another way of painting a picture. When I was asked to recite the verses or stories read to me, remembering the picture the words described often helped me to remember the requested words; or, if there had been no picture provided to illustrate the words, I began to construct my own internal pictures to help me remember the words. In any case, the descriptive power of words was impressed upon me at an early age, as was the respect of words as a primary means of communication. While the verses and stories had a certain formality to them I later came to recognize as English grammar, the everyday speech in my house was far from formal. Though all three of my caretakers were avid readers and adequate writers, only one -- my grandfather -- was college educated. Add to this the fact of our location in the South, were slang words and phrases are often used as linguistic shortcuts to expressing one's meaning, and the result was proverbial smorgasbord of "aints," "fiddle-faddles," "do-hickeys" and "bullhonkies." Imagine my surprise when I entered kindergarten and learned that "aint" was not actually a word, that my teacher had no idea what a "do-hickey" was, and that "fiddle-faddle"...

Later termed "Ebonics," these children had words and ways of saying them that intrigued, confused, and often delighted me. Not only were words and phrases like "sup," "brurva," "dis," "axe" and "sku me" unfamiliar to me, they were often said loudly and with dramatic hand gestures or facial expressions. Not that this was necessarily true of all my African-American peers; there were a few students of color who seemed as baffled by this strange language as I was. Nonetheless, the fact that there was a significant divide in language and its uses was apparent to me long before I began to question the reasons for the divide.
In Ways with words: language, life, and work in communities and classrooms, author Shirley Brice describes the communicative divide between the residents of Roadville and the neighboring town of Trackton, South Carolina in the early 1960s. As the mandatory desegregation of public schools and the community's textile mills required blacks and whites to work and attend school together for the first time,

Communication was a central concern of black and white teachers, parents, and mill personnel who felt the need to know more about how others communicated; why questions were sometimes not answered, and habitual ways of talking and listening did not always seem to work. (Brice, 1983)

Such was the case in my own community, in which black and white students had starkly contrasting ways of communicating and, as a result, often struggled to understand and to be understood.

As I've said, I had a far easier time of it in…