In face of all this and much more, however, my conviction was unshaken. I talked it over with my companion. He remembered the episode of the dinner table exactly as I did. Moreover, I still had my notes, made in the hotel that night. The lady looked at me. My companion was several places removed from her at the other side of the table. How could she have meant to include him? And how could she have expected me to say how he took his after-dinner coffee?
At last, to reassure myself, I wrote to the wisest, cleverest, most trustworthy lady in the South, and asked her what it all meant.
"Well," she wrote back from Atlanta, "I will tell you, but I am not sure that you will understand me. The answer is: _She did, but she didn't_. She looked at and spoke to you and, of course, by all rules of logic she could not have been intending to make you Morg's keeper in the matter of coffee dressing. _But_ she never would have said 'you-all' if Morg had not been in her mind as joined with you. The response, according to her thought-connotation, would have been from you _and_ from him."
This was disconcerting. So was a letter, received in the same mail, from a gentleman in Charleston:
It is as plain as the nose on your face that you are not yet convinced that we in the South _never_ use "you-all" with reference to one person. The case you mentioned proves nothing at all. The very fact that there were _two_ strangers present justified the use of the expression; we continually use the expression in that way, and in such cases we expect an answer from _both_ persons so addressed. To illustrate: just a few days ago I "carried" two girls into an "ice-cream parlor." After we were seated, I looked at the one nearest me, and said: "Well, what will you-all have?"
Physically we are so constructed that unless a person is cross-eyed it is impossible to look at two persons at once; the mere fact that I looked at the one nearest me did not mean that I was not addressing both. I expected an answer from both, and I got it, too (as is generally the case where ice-cream is concerned).
The subject is one to which I have devoted the most careful attention for many years. I have been so interested in it that almost unconsciously, whenever I myself use the expression "you-all," or hear any one else use it, I note whether it is intended to refer to one or to more than one person. I have heard thousands of persons, white, black and indifferent, use the expression, and the only ones I have ever heard use it incorrectly are what we might call "professional Southerners." For instance, last week I went to a vaudeville show, and part of the performance was given by two "black-face" comedians, calling themselves "The Georgia Blossoms." Their dialect was excellent, with the single exception that one of them _twice_ used the expression "you-all" where it could not _possibly_ have meant more than one person. And I no sooner heard it than I said to myself: "There is _one_ blossom that never bloomed in Georgia!"