In the very first paragraph of "Talking Wrong", author Patricia Smith looks through her mother's eyes on a trip to her speech therapist. The therapist is described as, "a pinstirped benevolent white angel who has dedicated two hours a week to straightening the black, twisted tounges of the afflicted." As the audience, I felt as if the mother believed she was diseased; that the way she spoke was a disease. Throughout her article, the author bemoans the loss of her mother's Black Vernacular English. To her, it was comforting "like cornbread, buttery and full of places for heat to hide."
Smith's personal rhetoric is powerful in expressing her feeling of loss. She felt as if her mother was distancing herself throughout her assimilation to "standard" English. The mother's dialect was a part of who she was, and in changing that aspect, discomfort arose.
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I agree with the fact that there was a "disease like factor", in the attitude of her mother. She wanted to be cured of her history and given a future...which was a false sense of hope and at the same time she lost a piece of her heritage.
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