Langston Hughes adorns much of his poetry with African American Vernacular English (AAVE), an American dialect spoken by Black Americans that derived from the dialect spoken in the American Southeast during slavery. By including AAVE (also known as Ebonics, though this term implies that Black English is a distinct language rather than a dialect) in his work, Hughes works against the stigma imposed on dialect in comparison with the conventional English spoken by Americans, especially in the North. Since prevalent themes in Hughes’s canon include social justice and equality, he aims to make art of the language spoken by the Black lower class. In “Daybreak in Alabama,” Hughes not only makes art of AAVE, he makes music.
Though AAVE is a distinctly American dialect, there are debates regarding its origin. In Sarah H. Buschfeld’s The Evolution of Englishes, scholar Salikoko S. Mufwene disagrees with claims that the roots of AAVE are Creole in his chapter titled “The English origins of African American Vernacular English”. He argues that while AAVE has Creole influence, its origins lie in Jim Crow. During the Great Migration between the years 1910 and 1970, millions of African Americans moved from plantation states to northern cities in search of a better quality of life. While there was markedly less lynching and violence in these cities, African American populations still found themselves segregated from the White population and living in poor living conditions. This continued segregation resulted in a divergence of the vernacular used in the American Southeast. Northerners then distinguished White Southern English from Black English, as there was now a racial distinction in the way that American Southern English was spoken. It was the circumstances of Jim Crow and the Great Migration that led Northern White Americans to label the dialect spoken by African American migrants in ghettos as abnormal. AAVE grew to be more stigmatized than White Southern English, resulting in its development as a barrier to professional opportunities, a barrier to public office, and a general mark of inferiority (page 359).
For this reason, much of Langston Hughes’s work was criticized by the Black middle class for its use of Black English and its emphasis on the plight of the Black lower class. Hughes often wrote in free or loosely rhymed verse, as he drew inspiration from Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg (according to Bryan Conn and Tara Bynum’s Encyclopedia of African-American Writing). Describing how he used reading to combat loneliness in his childhood, Hughes writes in his 1940 autobiography The Big Sea, “I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books—where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language” (page 381). If there was a specific population that suffered in the mid-twentieth century United States, it was African Americans. Hughes does not name Black English a language of suffering, but he definitely found beauty in it—enough beauty to make it the content of his poetry and plays.
Mufwene outlines some characteristics of AAVE such as its distinct negation patterns (“Didn’t nobody tell me he was behind me”), associative plural (“Billy and dem/Billy nem”), the remote phase "bin" (“your breakfast’s been ready”), and the habitual be (“he be busy”) (pages 351-358). In AAVE the verb “to be” takes on another usage as well. When placed before a verb or adjective, it describes not a present action, but the action or condition on a habitual basis. The “habitual be” elaborates on the present tense. For example, in standard English one might say “he jogs all the time”, but in AAVE one would say “he be jogging.” To this day, the “habitual be” is flagged in spell-check systems and marked as incorrect in grammar books. However, Hughes uses the habitual "be" in the future tense in the first line of “Daybreak in Alabama.” He writes, “When I get to be a composer / I’m gonna write me some music about / Daybreak in Alabama” (lines 1-3). He writes “get to be a composer” instead of “become a composer,” thus emphasizing the state of being a composer in addition to just becoming one. The word “gonna” and the phrase “write me some music” are also instances of AAVE that Hughes embellishes the poem with. For many during Hughes’s time, to think of AAVE or Black English as poetic was an oxymoron. Langston Hughes protests the stigmatization of Black English and the culture of the Black lower class by presenting this language as art. His hopeful message in “Daybreak in Alabama” is that a “colored composer” will be able to make music made of nature and languages of all races.
