I may as well say here that my father did not speak dialect but the standard English of the eighteenth century. In pronunciation the criterion was the oral tradition, not the way the word looked in print to an uneducated school-teacher. For example, though he wrote ate, he pronounced it et, as if it were the old past tense, eat. He used the double negative in conversation, as well as ain't, and he spoke the language with great ease at four levels: first, the level just described, conversation among family and friends; second, the speech of the "plain people abounding in many archaisms; third, the speech of the negroes, which was merely late seventeenth or early eighteenth English ossified; and fourth, the Johnsonian diction appropriate to formal occasions, a style that he could wield in perfect sentences four hundred words long. He would not have understood our conception of "correct English." Speech was like manners, an expression of sensibility and taste. This view no longer holds in an era of public schools and state universities.
The conversation would have been in the early 1850s, the speaker a man born about the turn of the century, resident in Fairfax County, Virginia.
State universities go a long way back in the upper south: there is "Mr. Jefferson's university" in Charlottesville, of course, but the University of North Carolina is older still. The attitude towards the state universities if not the schools seems much more of Tate's time than his narrator's.
