I was raised by black parents but I can't understand any dialogue written in black dialect. I know not all black people talk like that but is there a way to mark that in a novel?

Man, I can see why this would be really hard to sort out when you've never heard the phonetics of words.

When someone hears someone speaking a dialect that's different from theirs, the thing that they tend to notice most is the pronunciation. There are other differences that you can notice without hearing the words, such as different word choices and different grammar. But the pronunciation can be different on nearly every word, so that's what hearing people notice the most.

In writing, you can spell words differently to convey that someone is speaking in a noticeably different dialect. It has the implication that the speaker is hard to understand, possibly "out of place", and possibly uneducated.

Note, for example, that if black characters in a novel are speaking to each other in AAVE in a situation where it's totally normal for them to be speaking AAVE, their dialogue will be written in standard spelling.

AAVE and Ebonics mean the same thing with different connotations. AAVE is a very academic, descriptive name for the dialect that many black Americans speak (especially within their own culture). Ebonics was originally intended to be a descriptive name, too, but now it's used as a derogatory term. "Jive" refers to a version of the dialect spoken in some places in the '70s; you would probably not refer to anyone as "speaking jive" anymore.

Here's what's going on with the spelling. If you say "for sure" in AAVE it sounds like the syllables "fo sho", so you could indicate that someone sounds distinctly black by writing "fo sho" instead of "for sure". AAVE tends to drop g's and some l's and r's at the ends of things.

I know you wouldn't expect "for sure" and "fo sho" to sound that similar from the spelling. That's English being messed up with dialects messing things up even more.

The interactions between dialects can be really confusing, and this is often used as a humorous device. That's what's going on in Airplane in the "Excuse me, I speak Jive" scene. The two passengers are speaking so strongly in dialect that most people watching the movie can't even understand what they're saying. Except it's got subtitles. The subtitles are in really formal standard American English and they sound nothing like what they're saying.

Another comedic reference that comes to mind is in Chapelle's "racial draft" skit. When Tiger Woods gets drafted as an official black person he excitedly shouts "for shizzle!". He's trying to say "fo' shizzle", a very black variant of "for sure" popularized by Snoop Dogg, but he says it like a white person who has only ever seen "shizzle" written down and never heard anyone actually say it.

Disclaimer: I'm a computational linguist but not a real linguist, and I am also totally white, so I probably said something wrong.