This way of speaking sounds to the modern ear almost Caribbean. Family memories of my grandfather, who was born in 1899 and died before I was born, are sparse at this point. However, those still alive who met him as children remember that he sounded as if he were from the West Indies. Yet he grew up near Atlanta; he very likely had the old-school style of Black speech rather than the one that developed later.
This means that Black people of Southern origin from the 19th century portrayed in such films as “Lincoln” and “Django Unchained” did not sound as they’re depicted in those films, the way Black people do now. (And never mind that Lincoln actually had a highish, reedy voice, as in Daniel Day-Lewis’s portrayal, not the sonorous baritone we often expect from those playing him.)
The Black characters in “The Gilded Age” are mostly Northerners. How they would have sounded in the 1880s is more elusive to the researcher and would have varied according to class, education and life history. However, it is relevant that one would not even know from recordings of his voice that W.E.B. DuBois, raised in Great Barrington, Mass., in the 1860s, ’70s and ’80s, was Black. And overall, the Black English familiar to us today is the result of the original Southern dialect and its interactions with white English varieties after the Great Migration starting in the 1910s. This had not happened by the 1880s, and thus we can be sure that the Brooklyn Black gentry portrayed in “The Gilded Age” did not have the sound of Black English familiar today. However they sounded would, we can be sure, come off as unfamiliar and even somewhat odd to us today.
But there is no need to attend to any of this in modern dramatic depictions, and in fact, it would probably make for bad art. Speech is intimate, and its sounds and tones profoundly affect the way we process and respond to one another. The Caribbeanish tone of Black speakers of the gaslight era could blunt any lesson Black historical characters had to teach us about themselves or us, as would having a burgherly Black Northerner sound like Sara Roosevelt or her son. Sometimes a little inauthenticity has its uses.
The ending gag in the Bugs Bunny cartoon “Baseball Bugs” in 1946 has the Statue of Liberty coming briefly to life. As a kid, I found it strange that the statue was brown. But Lady Liberty was originally the copper color of a penny. The gorgeous green of today is the result of oxidation, which had changed her color by 1920. When the cartoon was made, the original hue was a living memory, and the artists in this case apparently still thought of it as the statue’s real color.
But even in the ’20s, people didn’t want the statue to be restored to the original, and I’m with them. The copper shade was undramatic in comparison with the way today’s green pops, becoming its own kind of real. In this way, authenticity can evolve.