is painfully flawless.
Chew hard as ever you can, if you tell Fannie, "There aren't any more
plantations," it echoes and re-echoes and shrieks at you from the four
sides of Christendom. But holler, "Fannie, there ain't no more
plantations!" and it is like the gentle purring of a home cat by
comparison. Funny how it is easier to say "My Gawd!" and "Where t'
hell's Ida!" than "I 'ain't got none." Any way round, you never do get
over being conscious of your grammar. If it is correct, it is lonesome
as the first robin. If it is properly awful, there are those
school-teacher upbringers. I am just wondering if one might not be
dining with the head of the university philosophy department and his
academic guests some night and hear one's voice uttering down a
suddenly silent table, "She ain't livin' at that address no more."
Utterly abashed, one's then natural exclamation on the stillness would
be, "My Gawd!" Whereat the hostess would busily engage her end of the
table in anguished conversation, giving her husband one look, which,
translated into Lena's language, would say, "What t' hell did we ask
her for, anyhow?"

Is one to write of factory life as one finds it, or expurgated? I can
hear the upbringers cry "expurgated"! Yet the way the girls talked was
one of the phases of the life which set the stamp of difference on it
all. What an infinitesimal portion of the population write our books!
What a small proportion ever read them! How much of the nation's
talking is done by the people who never get into print! The proportion
who read and write books, especially the female folk, live and die in
the belief that it is the worst sort of bad taste, putting it mildly,
to use the name of the Creator in vain, or mention hell for any
purpose whatsoever. Yet suddenly, overnight, you find yourself in a
group who would snap their fingers at such notions. Sweet-faced,
curly-headed Annie wants another box of caramels. Elizabeth
Witherspoon would call, "Fannie, would you be so kind as to bring me
another box of caramels?" Annie, without stopping her work or so much
as looking up, raises her voice and calls down the room--and in her
heart she is the same exactly as Elizabeth W.--"Fannie, you bum, bring
me a box of car'mels or I'll knock the hell clean out o' ya."

According to Elizabeth's notions Fannie should answer her, "One
moment, Miss Elizabeth; I'm busy just now." What Fannie (with her soul
as pure as drifted snow) does call back to