With this post, I begin a 10-part series on unusual diction successful writers have used to capture their readers' attention. Let's start by checking out the singular syntax in the first sentence of chapter 4 of South to a Very Old Place by Albert Murray. It's an awkward start for a reader of "fine literature," but knowing where Murray's coming from, I wouldn't change a word. Here it is:
The old place you used to come into coming in from Atlanta by railroad was Chehaw, from which you used to take the Chehaw Special on into the campus.
Before dissecting Murray's sentence, let's consider the topic of Murray's chapter, titled "Tuskegee." Few places figure more prominently in American history than this Alabamian city. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Muscogee people who lived there were displaced to Indian Territory. Tuskegee was a site of cotton plantations owned by white slaveowners. In 1881, Booker T. Washington founded the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers, a historically black land-grant university now known as Tuskegee University. The renowned Tuskegee Airmen who piloted fighter planes in World War II, originated from that campus. Tuskegee was also the location of the unethical and illegal 40-year Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, conducted by the United States Public Health Service, resulting in the death of many untreated black citizens at the hands of duplicitous healthcare workers and scientists. The racist gerrymandering of Tuskegee into a 28-sided voting district disadvantaged the dominant black voter base, leading to Gomillion v. Lightfoot, a 1960 Supreme Court case that found the redistricting violated the Fifteenth Amendment. In 1963, Alabama Governor George Wallace took a hard stand against the desegregation of Tuskegee High School. Today nearly 90 percent of Tuskegee's 9,000 residents are black with a third living in poverty. This is the Tuskegee Murray was writing about.
Now, for Murray's 29-word sentence, many stylistic flourishes appear:
1. Informal pronoun. Murray wants all his readers to feel as though they were listening to him talking to them on a street corner. The tone he sets with this device is remarkably conversational, frank, even endearing. Murray uses the pronoun you twice in the sentence, disregarding rhetorical purists who would eschew such a tactic.
2. Phrasal Verbs. Now Murray twice drops the same phrase in this sentence. He could have written the more concise came instead of used to come and took instead of used to take. I doubt he employed this language because he was being paid by the word. Rather, he again wanted that down-home-in-Alabama effect.
3. Double prepositions. The phrases in from and on into seem awkward at first read. Yet those phrases reflect the way people speak, especially from Murray's neck of the woods. He was a native of Alabama.
4. Mid-branching sentence. Murray divides the base clause, The old place was Chehaw, by 11 words: you used to come into coming in from Atlanta by railroad. I'm not sure how many people usually speak like that, but I do. The effect creates an element of suspense.
I admit that I had to read Murray's sentence twice to understand it. But sometimes that effort in itself is one of the pleasures of reading. He could have written Chehaw was the old place one would arrive from Atlanta by railroad, followed by the Chehaw Special to the campus. This 19-word alternative, a 10-word reduction (35 percent) just doesn't sing off the page like Murray's original—and original he was. The way he wrote that sentence, man, I could taste those words.
