The Thangs Mama Nem Said

My first thoughts about this book “The Thangs Mama’ nem Said, was around 2008. After reading one of Langston Hughes’s poems in the dialog of African Americans after slavery, the broken English, and what I to call laze tongued poem awakened something within me and inspired me to try and write one of my own, that birthed the poem “Devil Keep On Bother’n Me.” This caused me to think about the sayings I heard my great grandparents, grandparents, parents and the older people in my community use, and caused me to realize that this dialog and the sayings were slowly fading away. This made me realize that my children and grandchildren had never heard most of these sayings. In no way am I implying that we should teach our children to speak this way. I am a firm believer in using correct grammar, and speaking correctly. This book is just one way of taking a peak into our past, preserving it for the future and maybe in the process we just might get one of them gut busting laughs on the way.