Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 45, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 November 1894 — “Tote” Not An African Word. [ARTICLE]

“Tote” Not An African Word.

In nothing is the student of Amei* ican folk-speech so liable to error as in assigning geographical limits to a word or phrase. The English local dialects were pretty thoroughly mixed. One gained a little more dominance in one place, another in another, but a stray provincial term is prone to turn up in places the most unexpected. “Tote” has long been regarded as a word of African origin, confined to certain regions where negroes abound. A few years ago Mr. C. A. Stephens, in a story, mentioned an “old tots road” in Maine. I wrote to inquire, and hetold me that certain old portage roads, now abandoned, bore that name. I find the word used in a“Remonstrance” from the people of Gloucester County, Virginia, preserved in the Public Record Office inLondon. This paper bears date 1677, when there were four times as many white bond servants as negroes in Virginia. “Tote” appears to have been a well-understood English word in the seventeenth century. Itmeant then, as now, to bear. Burlesque writers who represent a negro- | as “toting a horse to water” betray j their ignorance. In Virginia English, the negro “carries” the horse towater by making the horse “tote” him.—[Century.