The Cassie Edwards Drinking Game!

‘Savage’

• Any time a Native American starts a sentence with “Ho,” drink.
• Any time a Native American speaks in his ‘native’ language, which is rendered as a series of italicized syllables with dashes between them, drink. If he repeats the sentence in English, drink again. If the phrase turns out to be a secret nickname for the female protagonist that ‘translates’ to anything involving flowers, sunrises, does, or bodies of water, drink twice more.
• Any time a Native American’s skin is described as “bronzed,” drink. Drink again if it’s “shining.”
• If the female protagonist has a medical condition caused by an obscure combination of herbs assembled by the male protagonist, drink.
• If the male protagonist (and the Native American is always the male protagonist) is described as a ‘chief,’ ‘brave,’ ‘shaman,’ or ‘medicine man,’ drink.
• If the male protagonist at any time wears a loincloth, drink.
• If the male protagonist reluctantly but necessarily kills the father of the female protagonist, drink.
• If the female protagonist is in a near-death situation and the male protagonist revives her by singing or invoking any form of smoke, drink.
• If at any series of concurrent events the male protagonist is described as carrying a bow and arrow, hatchet, AND machete, drink.
• If at any time the male protagonist is depicted wearing a headband, drink.
• If the female protagonist is assimilated into the male protagonists tribe, at first treated with loathing and suspicion by the other tribeswomen but charming them within two chapters, drink.
• If the male protagonist already has a wife, drink. If he maintains two ‘homes’ in order to avoid any suggestion of actual kinkiness so as to avoid offending the strange people who actually enjoy reading this crap, drink again.

Non-‘Savage’

• If any character of African descent is featured with a name ending in ‘-i,’ ‘-ey’ or ‘-ie,’ drink
• Drink once if any Black character says one of the following:
  • afadin’ (“fading,” especially when used as a euphemism for sleep or death)
  • any variant of “you be” or “I be” when the verb should be “am” or “are”
  • fo’ (“for”)
  • y’all. Drink twice if “y’all” is used to refer to a single person. Drink three times if it’s rendered as “y’all” and “ya’ll” on the same page. (I’m not kidding. Page 250 of Her Forbidden Pirate.)
  • Reference to either protagonist as “miss,” “missus,” “mister.”
  • Drink twice if “mistah” or “mistuh” is involved.
  • Toast Stephen Douglass if “Massa” makes an appearance.
  • ‘Fore (“before”). Bonus drink if this appears in the same book as “fo'” (I’m not kidding.)
  • “Fret” in place of “worry”
  • afta (“after”)
  • sho (“sure,” usually immediately following “fo’.” A legitimate quote: “He’ll be fit to be tied, Massa Saul will. He’ll come afta’ us fo’ sho’!”)
  • “Land sakes”
  • Yes’m
  • and of course, the ultimate in badly-written dialogue for black characters, “sho’ nuff.”
    
• Drink if you can’t quite figure out whether the Black characters are slaves or servants.  Bonus drink if it’s obvious that they are slaves, but the word ‘slave’ is never used.
• Drink if any reference is made to whipping.
• Drink twice if it involves “whuppin’,” “whupped,” or “whup.”
• Bonus drink if this “whipping” business is referenced, close together, by the same character in at least two different ways. (“Massa he goan whup me, I’s goan get a whippin’ fo’ sho’!”)
• Drink if a Black character refers to themselves in the third person.
• Bonus drink if the character adds the descriptive, “Ol'” to their names, as in “Ol’ Mazie’s goan fix you right up!”
• Drink three times if this Steppin’ Fetchit pantomime of Blackness offends you even though you’re as Caucasian as Al Gore.
  • Add a couple of you’re politically conservative and still offended.
  • Add one more if you or any living relative under 65 regularly uses perjorative slang for Black people (e.g. the “n-word”) and yet you somehow manage to STILL be offended at how casually racist this woman is. I am. I’m almost offended at myself for even mentioning all of this, but this woman’s insane caricatures of ethnic minorities need to be drug out into the light where they can be properly examined before being beat to death.
    
• This next one is a little tough. Make a two-shot cocktail for the whole party for every page (NOT every instance, see the safety warning above) where you can find linguistic anachronisms in which a black character jumps back and forth between badly-rendered and obnoxious colloquial “black” speech, and badly-rendered, unnatural, and artificial non-colloquial speech. The only way to really explain this is to quote some of it. Please note that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the quotes in the list below is spoken by the same character, the same who spoke the “fit to be tied” sentence a few bullets up:
  • “Massa Bryce will arrive soon, posing as a Doctor Jamison. There is a new doctor in town with the name Jamison, one Massa Saul hadn’t met yet. Massa Bryce will disable the true Doctor Jamison momentarily until Massa Bryce will have time to get you on his ship.”
  • “Miss Natalie, your father depends on me to keep a watch on you while he’s gone…Land sakes, if anything’d every happen to you while he was gone, he’d take a bullwhip to me fo’ sho’…probably until I’d neva’ walk again.”
  • “You’ll stay on the estate grounds, won’t you?…I don’t like the look in your eyes. They be adancin’, Miss Natalie. Since your return from your outing yesterday you’ve been a different young lady. Did you by chance make the acquaintance of a man? Is a man why you are behavin’ so strangely…so defiantly?”
  • “Old Tami ain’t gonna do nothin’ to stir up trouble for Miss Natalie…The years have made you my own.” The idea here is to celebrate the insane juxtaposition of the oh-so-richly offensive colloquial “Black folk”-speak, or proto-AVE or what the hell ever nonsense this woman is trying to stuff into these poor caricature’s faces, often in the same sentence as speech rendered, by the same character, in such precise diction that it seems unlikely even a classically-trained butler would employ it. We’re not talking about code-switching; we’re talking about glaring continuity errors in writing, aside from the outrageous stereotyping