I was eleven years old when my father came home one evening and announced,
“They’re paving the road! They’re finally paving the road!”
People don’t believe me when I tell them that I used to live in the country. But I did. I used to walk around the yard with no shirt on and pretend that the can of diet soda in my hand was beer. I wanted to mimic my neighbor, who sported this look every time he stepped out to drink a Bud Ice on the porch or drink a Bud Ice and mowed his lawn. I was four, an age of unquestioning acceptance. Of
course it made sense to drink a beer when you mow the lawn. Of
course the old couple with the Chihuahuas and the motor home that parked in our yard once a year were related to me.
But four turned into five, and five turned into six, and six turned into, “Why do my classmates kill squirrels with BB guns and say
mee-maw instead of grandmother?”
I was from the country alright.
“The country, huh? Where’s your accent?” people typically asked
“I got rid of it,” I typically replied.
“What? You don’t just get rid of an accent.”
“Well, I did.”
“Why?”
I never understood this question. Rarely did “because I wanted to” satisfy the urgency to know why I rejected something so intrinsic of where I came from.
Why does any young person make a distinct decision to drastically alter their speech pattern? To me, the reason was obvious: after years of mortifying attempts to fit into the Madison County subculture, I telephoned my psyche and explained the inevitable: the battle was over and turned out Andrew Jackson was an asshole.
Dropping off the radar at school proved to be easy enough; as it turned out, the kids didn't even notice my sudden lack of trying. Shaking off their influence from the other facets of my life proved to be more difficult. They were everywhere, even the places you would least expect to find the popular majority.
To me, Girl Scouts seemed like it should have been the last place on Earth that you would expect to find a hive of young, popular teenage girls. Their brand emblazoned t-shirts and flat-ironed hair seemed to clash with my idea that Girl Scouts was the equivalent of the sticky tape for the flies on teenage society like me. Historically, a scout troop provided shelter for social misfits and budding lesbians. If you were dangerously into horses or held on to an overdue obsession with Hanson, no worries; the Girl Scouts would take you.
I don’t know how it happened, but somewhere along the line, my troop began to break free of that stereotype. The girls began shopping at Victoria’s Secret and wore short shorts to our weekly meetings. They brought bikinis on our trips. I tried to follow suit, but the more I tried to be like them, the more I failed.
“Why are yew so whaat? (Why are you so white?)” they'd ask.
“Because my mother and father don’t want me to get a tan,” I’d say.
“Wayeet, hah-wold on a saykund. (Wait. Hold on a second.) Your mother? Whah dew yew tawlk so faincy? (Your mother? Why are you using the Standard American dialect?)”
They had asked me these very questions countless times before.
“Say day-dy,” they’d prod, “Say paw-paw!”
“What, like
papa?”
“There, you did it!” they’d squeal and point.
“That’s so weird. Why do you talk so proper?”
I’d shrug.
“Say it again!”
At first, I was overjoyed for the attention and milked my accent for all it was worth. I’d overplay certain phrases like, “Good afternoon!” and “How do you do?”
It was fun enough for a few weeks, but the novelty eventually wore off. Soon I was crab walking on the outskirts, clicking my claws for laughs and the kids weren’t pointing and laughing the way they used to.
In a last ditch attempt to score points with the girls, I practiced blending words like
ya’ll and
hayouse into my vocabulary. My goal was to assimilate just in time for the three day, whitewater rafting trip that we had planned for a whole year. I had it all planned out: how I was going to talk like them and act like them; you know, the kind of plan that only makes sense to a fourteen year old. I even begged my mother to buy an expensive, two-piece swim suit from the mall. My mother, conscious of the fact I was always a little bigger than the other girls, tried to convince me to go in a more modest and less expensive direction, but I pleaded. She relented, bought the swim suit, and sent me on my way to Tennessee to go white water rafting with the troop. Little did she know about the bottle of sunless tanning foam I packed inside my sleeping bag. God, it was going to be such an amazing, life changing weekend.
Three days later, I walked in the door singing a slightly different tune. My mother was sitting in the recliner, reading a
SELF. She took one look at my stringy hair and runny tan and let two eternal seconds go by before asking,
“The …? What happened to you? Did you get into a vat of iodine and go running?”
“Mom,” I announced, “I’m not going to Girl Scouts anymore.”
“What?”
“I’m done.”
“Why?”
“Because the popular girls have taken over the Girl Scout troop and I’m pretty sure they’re just as sick of me as I am of them.”
“Ok. Any better reasons?”
“I said, ‘shit!’ on the climbing wall when I pulled my wrist. And the girls were being totally unfair about it and both they AND their mothers are calling me trashy and a bad influence -”
“Like who?”
“Lucy, for one!”
“Oh, come on. Lucy? That’s the pot calling the kettle black.”
“Yeah, well, they don’t see it that way. I’m just tired of this! I’m not trashy, they are. All of them. Do you know what Lucy did in the bathroom during that school dance? Or how about how Diane did it with her cousin the summer before sixth gra-”
“What? That can’t be true.”
“It is! She had to get therapy for it because she was like, twelve!”
“Says who?”
“The social worker who came to get her out of class every Tuesday!”
“Did you see or actually talk to this social worker?”
“No, but everyone knows about it and it’s not like she keeps it any huge secret and -”
“You shouldn’t assume bad things about people.”
“You’re not listening to me! These girls are trashy and mean and somehow they and their mothers are calling me trashy and mean because I said a bad word, one bad word, and I’m sick of it! All they do is make fun of how pale I am and how I talk and -”
“Jas, you’re not going to quit something that you have invested so much time in -”
“I am not going on one more troop trip where I have to be my own buddy,” I replied.
The conversation was over.
The southern accent had negative connotations seemingly everywhere. Whenever I watched
MTV’s True Life, it seemed to me that all of the troubled subjects - you know, the addicts, underage mothers, and couples who had married incredibly young only to learn that they had made a mistake - said,
Ya’ll and
Yonder. As I observed my classmates more and more, it wasn’t too long before I began to associate racism and homophobia with their twangy bitching. To top it off, I always had this sneaking suspicion that the road to leathery skin, Virginia Slims, and undersized halter tops was paved with unnatural tans, daisy dukes, and an over the top relationship with a white Jesus Christ. That wasn’t the future I had in mind for myself.
It wasn’t until my grandmother moved up from Brunswick, Georgia that I learned to appreciate southern accents. She has a southern accent that’s thick like molasses syrup. She grew up in Prattville, Alabama during the Great Depression.
“It was probably a lot easier for us that way,” she says, “We were a lot better off than the city folks.”
Her accent reminded me of a mix between
Steel Magnolias and
Fried Green Tomatoes, except she could spin a story better than any of those characters could. She moved so that she could live near my parents, making it easy to go to her house and listen to her tell stories about growing up in the (real) country. She had one story in particular that I absolutely love.
In the 1950’s, my grandfather became a priest in the Episcopal Church and moved the family to Darien, Georgia so that he could lead a small, beach community congregation. When my grandmother became pregnant with my uncle, the church hired a lady named Lettie May Netts to come in during the day and help around the house.
“Miss Lettie May,” my grandmother began, smiling, “had moved to Darien from the islands. And she had six little children that she raised all on her own.”
“Six?”
“Six. All boys, bless her,” she say, fanning herself, “So you can bet that nothing got by her. Oh, she’d be in the living room and when Birt got home she’d run to the door and snap her fingers and say, “Take off your shoes Mr. Birt!”
“Did he?”
“Oh yes,” she replied, a look of mild concern on her face, “You didn’t argue with her. She ran that house. And when I got too big to go up and down the stairs, she snapped her fingers at me, too!”
She normally starts laughing when she arrives to this part of the story.
“That woman,” she’ll say, pantomiming the story, “would ru-u-u-un up the stairs and r-u-u-un back down. Lord have mercy, she was like lightning. I said, ‘Miss Lettie, slow down. You could fall!’ and she just snapped her fingers and said, ‘Miss Betty, go lay down like the doctah said, now!”
A Caribbean accent wasn’t my grandmother’s strongest selling point, but part of the charm was that she had no idea how funny it sounded.
“Anyway,” she’d continue, “She helped me give birth to your uncle at home. And I thought it was strange when she said all matter-of-factly, ‘Miss Betty, you gotta tell me when the cord comes off.”
“The umbilical cord?" I inturrupted, "I thought that comes off when the baby’s born."
“Sure it is, if you go to a hospital. But if you have a baby in the house, you’re out of luck until it falls off. So,” she continued, giving little time for that piece of information to process, “days go by. And each day, she asks me, ‘Miss Betty: that cord come off yet?’ or, ‘Don’t worry, Miss Betty, I went and checked. That cord’s still on tight!’ So one afternoon, I was chatting with Mr. Laudale, the bachelor from over the fence, and out the house runs Miss Lettie May Netts, just a’screamin, ‘Miss Betty! Miss Betty! That cord done come clean off! That cord come off!’ Oh, you should have seen Mr. Laudale’s face. He had never been around any children except mine and -”
“…Did she have it on her person?”
“Oh, no, she had wrapped it up in one of your uncle’s cloths. She said, ‘I’m gonna bury it, Miss Betty, I’m gonna find some…’ Oh, what was it she wanted… Turkey legs, gizzards, something. It was so long ago, I can’t remember. But she was so excited, saying, ‘I’m gonna bury it, Miss Betty, I’m gonna bury it and don’t you worry: your baby boy will live a long life and be real smart!”
“So what did you do?”
“I let her have it.”
“Really?”
“I mean, I didn’t need it,” she replied, “so I said ‘go ahead.’ She buried it and danced and - oh, I don't know. Said she did it with all of her boys. They turned out fine.”
“You let her do an island ritual with Uncle J’s umbilical cord?”
“Well, he’s healthy and smart, isn’t he?”
You can’t argue with logic like that; of course my grandmother, wife of an Episcopal priest, let Ms. Letts use my uncle’s umbilical cord to secure a possible voodoo blessing on his life. The story was too good to keep to myself. I eagerly tried to share it to a friend of mine during college, only to deflate as I realized that a key component of the story was missing: I could not, for the life of me, recreate my grandmother’s accent. I couldn’t even approach it. She had generously gifted me a piece of oral history that demonstrated my lineage’s fondness of all things seemingly bizarre and I was completely unable to do it justice. Suddenly I felt very sheepish. I had fought against the accent for so long that I had nearly eradicated it. But why? Because I was scared of sounding like people I went to high school with?
“Oh, boo hoo,” I thought to myself.
Then it dawned on me.
It isn’t the accent that makes a dumbass and/or a bigot. It’s the fact that they are a dumbass and/or a bigot that makes them a dumbass and/or a bigot. They always were and, if they’re stupid, they always will be.
Here’s the thing. I am dangerously obsessed with Dolly Parton and Reba McIntyre; I think
Talladega Nights is one of the funniest movies I have ever seen; and, for the record, my grandmother is
awesome. I want to be able to tell all of her stories with the same, tangy enthusiasm that she has. In fact, I want to be able to tell my own stories with that same, twangy enthusiasm; some of the most hilarious stories from my childhood are the most southern ones.
When people asked why I lacked a southern accent, I used to give them a long winded explanation that left all parties bitter and confused. Since I’m at a point in my life where it doesn’t matter what my classmates did however many years ago, I can give it a rest. Now whenever someone asks me where my
ya’lls went, I look back fondly to my childhood days – the ones where I’d rip off my shirt and tell my mother that I was going to drink my (diet coke) beer and wear cut-offs - and say,
“Oh, who knows?”
Think Sweeney Todd. Except not Sondheim-y and with a psychotic farm-girl instead of a demon barber.
