Chapter 16

This chapter started off with the regressive idea from a folklorist, Roger Abrahams. Being regressive simply means that you revert back to songs, rhymes, and taunts that have very important meaning in the form of a childhood expression. A Camingerly Negro goes through a regressive process when he reaches adolescence. Part of this device is when the African American would recite rhymes to entertain an audience in a social situation.  Black people often speak in rhymes or clichés. A new fact that I learned was that the phrase "See you later alligator" and "After 'while crocodile"was from a Negro origin. These rhymes are used in verbal battle, when men gather together and teas each other or boast. This is known as "sounding."

Roger Abrahams studied the patterns found in African American speech in 1963. He found that their speech was very reliable on materials from their childhood days. This is why he stressed the idea of regression, because this is very common for African Americans. Regression is "momentarily returning to our childhood days." An example of this is eating an ice cream cone, because while you are eating that ice cream cone, it reminds you how happy and young you were when you were a child eating an ice cream cone. This is also an intertextual example, because the person is using what happened in their childhood (something they are familiar with) to create new perspectives (eating an ice cream cone in the present time as an adult). Abrahams discovered that African American adolescent men are able to create rhymes and insert them in any social situation. The author relates this rhyming verbal dueling to rap music. I think this is a very interesting observation. It is true though, because African Americans are able to use rhymes and give them a beat, creating a song. Due to this ability, African Americans introduced a very popular genre of music to America.