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From "A Conversation with Harryette Mullen":

So I had the feeling we were growing up between the Anglos and, as we called them then, the Mexicans, you know. I was aware of Spanish being spoken; and in our community, a black Southern vernacular was spoken, which my family didn't exactly speak. When it came to class, our income and the neighborhoods we lived in, at first, were working-class, while our values and aspirations were middle-class, so in terms of class, we were also borderline. I also knew the prejudice of Northerners against the languid Southern drawl and the nasal Texas twang. I sound more Southern now than I did when I was a kid. And, you know, partly I sound more Southern, I guess, because I had to get with the program and blend in with my peers. My mother, my grandmother, the people who raised me, were from Pennsylvania. They were from Harrisburg. So my whole relationship to black English, like that of a lot of middle-class black people, is, you learn it to keep your butt from getting beat in the streets. You know, what we spoke at home was basically what I would call black standard English. You'd learn the vernacular on the streets and playgrounds in order to have some friends out there. The essentializing of black English as the natural way that black people are supposed to speak is problematic for me. Of course, I enjoy using different linguistic registers and I enjoy throwing Spanish words into my poems, you know, and I think that the variety of languages and dialects makes life more interesting. Standardization for its own sake is boring. We like to taste the different flavors, and that's something delicious about literature. You know, Langston Hughes' poem "Motto": "I play it cool and dig all jive and that's the reason I'm alive. My motto as I live and learn, is to dig and be dug in return." And the more people you can talk to and understand, the richer your life and experience can be, potentially. But also we learn these languages and these dialects and these ways of presenting ourselves in an atmosphere of coercion. There's the coercion of the school and workplace telling us: "You must speak this way or you will not be employable." Then there's the coercion of the streets: "You can't hang with us if you talk too proper." And on both sides there's coercion. So that's something to bear in mind when we're talking about language, that there is violence, there is pressure, there is force involved in making people conform to a particular way of speaking, writing and so forth.

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