One of the ways in which Gaines evokes the story’s Louisianan setting is through the speech of his characters. Members of the Black community freely use common slang, such as “ain’t,” as well as that which is more particular to the South, such as the tendency to drop the first syllables off of words like “reject,” “about,” and “beside.” Additionally, they also drop the “to” from infinitives, as when Octavia asks James, “You want eat and walk back” (105), and fail to conjugate irregular verbs, thus, the past tense of “know” is “knowed” instead of “knew.” This loose command of grammar reveals the levels of education among certain characters. When the dialect disappears, as it does when the young man with the book and the dentist’s nurse speak, the reader becomes aware of how language can become a marker of education, class, and even race.

James, the boy who narrates the story, frequently repeats himself. Though Gaines uses the character to tell a story in the first-person omniscient voice, the character repeats words and statements to himself, as though they were mantras, to reinforce certain habits and behaviors.