thrived in such towns as Diamond 

 City, Cedar Island, Harkers Island 

 and Wade's Shore until the late 

 1800s. Then two hurricanes in 1896 

 and 1899 virtually wiped clean 

 Diamond City, Shackleford Banks 

 and much of the Cape Lookout area. 



SLUMGULLION 



multi-ingredient 

 stew 



Residents strapped what was 

 left of their houses across two boats, 

 called dories, and moved to the 

 mainland, landing primarily in 

 Marshallberg, Stacy, Broad Creek, 

 Salter Path, Harkers Island and a 

 section of Morehead City called "the 

 Promised Land." They called it the 

 Promised Land, Willis says, because 

 someone on shore watching the 

 exodus from the cape said, "There 

 come the children of Israel bound 

 for the Promised Land." 



With them, they brought their 

 brogue. Over time, one dialect 

 melted into several as each commu- 

 nity developed its own variation. 



"Our brogue is kind of like a 

 train with each word hooked 

 together, and your language is like a 

 bunch of cars going down a high- 

 way," says Willis, a student of 

 brogue since he was young. "So our 

 word — the way we pronounce it — 



depends on what's ahead of it and 

 what follows." 



That's why they drop the "p" 

 from Ca'e Banks, so two consonant 

 sounds won't clash. And the "t" 

 from "jest" as in "jes' right." 



"It all depends on what's 

 coming to make it flow smoothly," 

 Willis says. 



Ca'e Bankers tend to drop the 

 "en" from words such as "spoken" 

 and "ly" from most adverbs. But 

 they love contractions and Old 

 English negatives, he adds. 



"Anywhere they can contract a 

 word and make it smaller they will," 

 Willis says. "Ain't," "hain't," 

 "shan't" and "i'n't" are typical 

 contractions Ca'e Bankers still use. 



For example, instead of saying, 

 "I have not never been over there," 

 "hain't" takes care of that, he 

 explains. 



That brings up another point. 



"We have a thing about nega- 

 tives," says Willis, a retired chemist. 



Once, they were used in En- 

 gland to emphasize or stress, he 

 says. The more negatives you could 

 pile in a sentence the better. 



"Always," Willis preaches, 

 "you need to use at least a double 

 negative. Triple is even better. 

 Quadruple if you can do it. I don't 

 usually use it, but my land, you'd be 

 high society if you used quadruple 

 negatives." 



Willis has studied most the 

 dialects of the Salter Pathers and 

 Promised Landers, the two most 

 divergent of the Ca'e Banks brogue. 



"Now a Promised Lander is 

 slow and uses stress: 'Ain't yoou 

 ne-ver gon-na finish that?' Or T 

 ain't a never goin' over there with 

 her no more.' 



"Whereas a Salter Pather would 

 say, T ain'tanever goinoverthere 

 withher nomore.' Jest as fast as you 

 can. And Salter Pathers don't move 



their lips hardly none ... . You can't 

 hardly understand none of it." 



Either way is right, he contends. 

 A brogue, like an opinion, should be 

 taken at face value, not criticized for 

 bad grammar or chastised as wrong, 

 just savored like a bit of history on 

 display. 



PORT CITY 

 SPEECH 



Much less is known today about 

 the speech of the people farther 

 south. Little research has been done 

 in Wilmington. Only theories 

 circulate. 



A port since the 1730s, the 

 Wilmington area was the last part of 

 the Carolina coast to be settled. The 

 busy port attracted a large and wide 

 mix of people. Men, women and 

 children from England, Barbados, 

 Ireland, Scotland and France came 

 to a town north, called Brunswick- 

 town, where the pines grew tall and 

 tar ran thick. But the majority of the 

 newcomers came from other English 

 colonies and primarily coastal 

 towns, says Harry Warren, a 

 historian at the Cape Fear Museum 



16 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993 



