The character is African, IIRC (it's been a while since I read the book). I usually think of the phrase "Black English" as a US term. Do people elsewhere use it to refer to the way Africans speak English?
^^^^ CB: Interesting question. It's like patwas and pigeon dialects in the colonies.
Would be quite a coincidence that African and American Black dialects derived independently the same grammatical shift to " He dead" for the non-standard dialects from the "He is dead" in the standard English dialect.