P'laski's Tunament 1891 — Reading Companion

Dialect as Character and Barrier

The unnamed speaker's dialect is rendered with unusual consistency: dropped consonants, shifted vowels, and a syntax that follows its own logic. Phrases like "I wair p'intedly ashamed" and "dee redite me" (for "they indicted me") create a voice that is both specific and musical. Page does not flatten the speech into a comic stereotype; instead, the dialect carries the speaker's dignity and his own rhetorical strategies. When he says "I lef' it to Gord," the simplicity carries weight. Yet the narrator's frame never lets the reader forget that this voice is being transcribed by an outsider. The dialect becomes a marker of social distance, even as it conveys the speaker's interior life.

The Trial as Performance

The trial scene is rendered almost entirely through the speaker's recollection, filtered through his confusion and his sense of injustice. He describes the judge "settin' up in he pulpit, lookin' mighty aggrevated" and the jury "right in front o' me." The language of the indictment is reported secondhand: "dee read dat long paper to me 'bout how I done murder P'laski; dee say I had done whup him to death, an' had done shoot him, an' knock him in de haid." The accumulation of verbs suggests both the prosecution's excess and the speaker's bewilderment. He notes that a witness "Jim Sinkfiel' say he sutney hope dee would hang me, all jes 'cuz he owe' me two dollars an' seventy-three cents." The detail is small but telling—personal grudges, not evidence, drive the proceedings.

The Speaker's Shifting Self-Awareness

Throughout his account, the speaker reveals a subtle awareness of how he is perceived. He distinguishes between having "council" and having a "la'yar"—"not a la'yar, edzactly," he says, "I had a some sort of a la'yer, but not much of a one." The distinction is his own, and it suggests a man who understands social hierarchies even if he cannot navigate them. He also withholds information: he admits to having "forty-three dollars an' sixty-eight cents in a ole rag in my waistcoat linin'" during the trial, money he chose not to use for a lawyer. The narrative does not explain why, leaving the reader to infer pride, fatalism, or a calculation that the money would be useless. These small withholdings give the speaker a complexity that the frame narrator's descriptive prose cannot fully capture.

Setting and the Weight of Place

The story is anchored in specific geography: Hanover County, Virginia, and the town of F——. The narrator's opening praise of "broom-straw fields and heavy forests" establishes a pastoral ideal that the trial narrative will complicate. The speaker's memories drift back to "de ole doctor—dat's ole master—an' Marth' Ann, an' all de ole times in Hanover," suggesting a pre-war world that exists only in memory. The jail, by contrast, is described as "de ambitiouses smellin' place I ever smelt in my life"—a sensory detail that grounds the present in discomfort. The contrast between remembered Hanover and the actual courtroom creates a tension that the story does not resolve. The setting is not backdrop but active force, shaping what can be said and what can be believed.

Readers should attend to the gaps between what the narrator describes and what the speaker says. The frame narrator's language is precise and evaluative; the speaker's is associative and concrete. Neither voice is entirely reliable, and the story's power lies in the friction between them. Pay particular attention to moments when the speaker corrects himself or adds a reservation—as when he says of his wife's testimony, "At least she say she had," with a "glance of some suspicion." These small gestures reveal a character who is more canny than the narrator's ethnographic gaze might suggest.

I’ve often shelved Page’s old tale of the P’laski trial and noticed how its heavy dialect hides a tender grief, much like the quiet wanderers in Strangers and Wayfarers — Background and Themes. Both speak of people stranded between worlds, their voices cracked yet dignified. It is a gentle, knowing ache they share.