Where does the South begin?

As you can probably tell, I'm finished reading Ulysses. I got curious about the official "border" between North and South (is there a border between the East and the Midwest?) and I found this great article which is full of interesting and idiosyncratic facts:

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/01/where-does-the-south-begin/70052/

It features several different maps and ways of determining the beginning of the South, including a map of where you could buy sweet tea at McDonald's prior to their national rollout in 2008.

It has my favorite defnition ever:

What those accents have in common, according to Rick Aschmann's research of regional dialects, is that the South is defined by areas where people pronounce "pen" as "pin." 

Learning to say "pen" instead of "pin" has been one of the goals of my adult life. Apparently the "i/e" substitution is common across multiple twangs and drawls, throughout the south.

According to this piece, both southern Indiana and southern Illinois are part of The South.

My home is not below the Mason-Dixon line

It’s a long straight drive down through Illinois to get to Memphis, cornfields repeating themselves beneath a flat unwavering sky. It’s got to be one of the most boring drives imaginable. And yet somehow in that stretch of I-57 that takes you from Chicago to Cairo, probably around the time the flat suddenly becomes a hill and gully descent towards the Mississippi River, the world changes from North to South, and the accents change with the landscape, from flat Midwestern nasal vowels to a twangy drawl that Southern Illinoisans swear is Southern, and that as a child in Memphis I doubtless called Yankee.

If I’m the only one in the car (oh who am I kidding, even if I’m not) at some point I will begin singing “Going Down to Cairo” at the top of my lungs.

Going down to Cairo

Goodbye, and a goodbye

Going down to Cairo

Goodbye Liza Jane

I always sing it fast and twangy and I get louder on the “black them boots and make ‘em shine” part.  For those of you not from around these parts, I should probably tell you that Cairo is pronounced Kay-ro.  If you need to back up and read again with a corrected pronunciation, go ahead. I will wait. The right vowel can make all the difference.

Cairo, Illinois, and the rest of the state, I had always believed, was above the Mason-Dixon line. My Uncle was a truck driver and he used to talk about driving up to Cairo. Now I’m a Chicagoan, Cairo is down. When I was a child and people talked about the North (boorish Yankees) and the South (home), they spoke of anything-above-Tennessee as being “above the Mason-Dixon line.” It turns out that line, demarcated by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon back before the Declaration of Independence, was way East, keeping Pennsylvania out of Virginia and Maryland, and dividing Delaware in half.  There is no Mason Dixon line for me to cross over when I travel from Chicago to Memphis.

But there’s something there. I feel it. I see it. I hear it. My heart simultaneously leaps up in joy and fills with a dull thudding anxiety.  Usually the first rumblings of joy happen as the hills begin to bubble up, there are pine trees growing beside the highway instead of cornfields, and the blood in my veins feels the tug of the Mississippi River, slow and inexorable, so powerful it can’t be swum. The bridge is enormous, you drive over one more hill and then there it is, looming in the distance, a long high bridge of steel arches, and if I’m alone in the car, when I drive up the quarter mile of ramp it takes to get onto the bridge proper, I roll down my window and holler like Bo Duke. If the kids are in the car, I holler at them instead: “Look, ya’ll look, it’s the Mississippi River oh look!” And just like that, my accent is there, the second “look” has two or three extra syllables for emphasis.

Is it the bridge? Is it the water? It will be three more hours until Memphis, we will have to slip through a corner of Missouri and then wend our way through more flatness, Mississippi River flatness, passing soybean and cotton fields beneath an unforgiving sky, past ugly fastfood marquees through dusty West Memphis, Arkansas, and then again “oh look girls look, there’s the bridge!” the second Mississippi crossing is right in front of me, wider than the first, I have a moment of panic where I try to remember am I supposed to take I-40 or I-55 and then I drive up onto the huge M shaped bridge that is lit at night, I see downtown Memphis winking in the sun with it’s low-rise skyline, a sign in the middle of the bridge says WELCOME TO TENNESSEE, I holler one more time, and I am home.

Knoxville: Summer 1915

Knoxville: Summer 1915, the prologue to A Death in the Family (Agee) is so beautiful it almost hurts.  It's funny that we think of the lyric essay as something created recently by the Seneca Review, but this prologue is a lyric essay.  I'm recalling, Laura, you were reading a book on criticism written by Agee and two other critics, and you said "we think we've invented all this new criticism but they were doing it then."  I feel the same about this essay.

Agee describes that most magical of things -- a child's long summer twilight in the security of family and neighborhood. He invests a huge portion of the essay in sensory detail, especially in trying to capture the specific sounds: various types of hose sounds, locusts, crickets. "Meantime from low in the dark, just outside the swaying horizons of the hoses, conveying always grass in the damp of dew and its strong green-black smear of smell, the regular yet spaced noises of the crickets, each a sweet cold silver noise threenoted, like the slipping each time of three matched links of a small chain.

I found it masterful the way he invoked the cricket. His first descriptive phrase is musical, lyrical, delightful to the eye and ear, but I didn't follow his meaning (although obviously I know what a cricket sounds like) -- "each a sweet cold silver noise threenoted" -- I couldn't grasp his notion of a cold silver noise.  Then he clarifies: "like the slipping each time of three matched links of a small chain."  Oh! Now I hear it!

He also restates everything he said in prose in verse, before closing the essay with a kind of coda-prayer.

My clumsy efforts here are not beginning to touch the magic of this piece, which captured my heart with its lyrical blend of sound and image, of repetition and musical syntax. ("Now is the night one blue dew.")

I'm really enjoying reading the pieces in this Southern Selves book. There is something soothing to my inner ear. Because I'm interested in sound, and in meditative memoir, this piece in particular stands out to me as a model.  I'm going to find the whole book and read it.

On Joyce and Being an Expat

Since, no matter what else I read, everything is gobbled up by Ulysses in my brain, and I want to find my way back into this project, I've been looking at the common threads.

Here's an interesting fact: James Joyce left Dublin to WRITE ABOUT Dublin.

Isn't that what I did? Isn't that what so many Southerners do?

Why couldn't he stay there? Why did he have to leave?

One of the reasons he left was the intense moral authority of the Catholic Church; the other was the authority of the British Empire. He felt there were nets tying him up, preventing him from being able to make the work he wanted to make. He left to free his mind.

I think about myself as a young woman, trying to come out, trying to be a sexual being, trying to be vibrant and alive, trying to be free in my own body. I left Memphis because I felt my body unfree there because of the authority of the Bible and the Belt.  Not only was my body hemmed in and judged and shamed; my voice didn't work. I'm not speaking in metaphor.  I lost the ability to sing twice in my childhood and once in college.  All three times I lost it because of the intense out-of-my-bodyness I felt when the singing teachers told me the ways I was doing it wrong. I couldn't sing in Memphis, home of the blues, birthplace of rock and roll, cradle of american musical civilization.

After college I got a job as an actress and moved to the big city. Atlanta. Atlanta was easier in so many ways. It was Southern but enlightened; urbane but drawling; the music was good, the food was good, the air felt right, not too far from home, but I felt freer there.

Two years later I relocated to the real big city. Chicago meant a sudden imprisonment in my accent; it meant a backwards step in my freedom because I came as a girlfriend, not as me; I had to lose myself to find myself and it was only when I came to Chicago that I awakened that nostalgia, that physical longing for the past, for home, even though home had been in so many ways oppressive.

The things I missed -- that I still miss -- are sensual.  Food. Soft air. Slowness, drawl, I miss the sounds of Memphis more than anything. The rhythms of speech that are curved not angular, I miss the diphthongs, oh how I miss them in my own mouth, I'm all clipped nasal midwestern now. Chicago hurts my ears.

It was when I got here that I started listening to country music. Before that I despised country music as the ultimate symbol of redneck racism, of smallmindness, of violence, of white boys dipping snuff leaning against  the back of their pick up trucks before school listening to Hank Williams Junior sing "Just a-swanging."

It wasn't until I moved to Chicago that I began to truly write. I wrote my first song. I wrote pages of memoir (all lost, all lost, things I am sure I no longer remember, but I ripped up the pages in embarrassment) and I began to find my singing voice and my writing voice, in this cold place that hurts my ears.  It's a joke I used to make onstage all the time, that I never would've written these songs if I hadn't moved to Chicago and gotten so damn cold I had to sing just to keep warm.

Joyce is a viscerally aural writer; that is, his words are at times almost physical experiences, in the body and ear as much as in the mind. At times he uses language to imitate the sound of music, especially in the Sirens episode of Ulysses. He described the technique he used as a fugue, and the words wind in and around each other in phrases and rephrases, with onomatopoeia and repetition and double and triple meanings that operate like layered notes, with senselessness that slowly (oh-too-slowly) reveals itself as sense.

I'm thinking of playing around with writing prose using blues forms or other southern forms of music (for some reason I love bluegrass best, even though it's from the other end of the state) as a way of bridging the space between my thoughts and my ear, especially since it was my cold and homesick ears that led me to write.

Southern Selves

I've now read all the female contributions to Southern Selves, the anthology of autobiographical southern writing we are reading.  This includes the following selections:

Dorothy Allison, from Skin:  Talking About Sex, Class & Literature
Maya Angelou, from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Kaye Gibbons, The First Grade, Jesus and the Hollyberry Family
Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Belle Kearney, Slaveholder's Daughter
Florence King, Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady
Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Evelyn Scott, Background in Tennessee
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream
Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings

That's quite a list.

The book introduced itself as being one where writer's write evocatively with a "sense of place," beyond mere geographical location.  (Compare this as a location where black Americans "knew their place".) Certain hallmarks of Southern storytelling, humor, and folksy charm is lauded by the editor.  But, in truth, only the selections by white women fall into this category, and even some of the white writers do not.  Women like Florence King or Dorothy Allison clearly hail from this tradition, as is Kaye Gibbons, humor + personal insight and memoir + a certain colloquial storytelling charm.

But the other women fall into one of two different categories, both of which are inscribed by race.  The great African American writers included in this anthology write almost exclusively about being black in the South.  Whether it's the peerless Harriet Jacobs writing about being pursued by her lecherous master or the inhumane torture following the Nat Turner uprising, or Maya Angelou writing with pride and a sense of community about listening to Joe Lewis win a fight over the radio and the fear and care that followed such a victory when walking back home, these women are bringing important personal and social history into their accounts.  I fell in love with the style in which Anne Moody wrote her selection (none of which are essays in their own right, by the way, but excerpts from longer works).  Moody tells the story of Emmett Till's murder.  I knew the circumstances of his death, have seen art made about it, and had heard it used as a rallying cry against white racism.  But Moody made it far more personal than I've ever experienced by telling it with the very humanistic details of her own fear and awakening:  becoming aware for the first time that she could be killed for the color of her skin.  Her fourteen year old anxiety and worry is present throughout the piece, and is best represented by her dropping a china dish from her trembling hands in the home of the racist white woman she worked for.

The other category dealing with race was white women who grew up in the incredibly racist South, fighting against what they perceived as wrong and inhumane.  In all cases, these essays had telltale "confessional" moments of when the writer first became aware of the imbedded racism, or their early oblivion to it, or even the racist "sins" they themselves committed.  (One example:  Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, in The Making of a Southerner, describes how she and her childhood friends "played" Klu Klux Klan or how she successfully debated at school the "con" side as to whether or not black people should be considered equal to white.)  In all of these essays, the South and particularly the Southern tradition of racism -- that history so tied to slavery -- is the fundamental organizing principle of society and identity.

I am most moved by the African American writers.  It's what they write that sticks.

Anne-Marie and I were discussing Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  A Room of One's Own?  These black women writers didn't even have a body they could call their own.  The fact that someone like Harriet Jacobs rose out of this time as an enslaved person, taught herself to read and write, and then was a damn fine writer on top of it is amazing to me.  She exhibits voice, irony, satire, a good deal of journalistic neutrality, and scene-based storytelling as engaging as any in creative nonfiction.

I admired Eudora Welty for finding and using the very particular detail; the precise way she describes her family so that they seem original and real, not a roughly-drawn stereotype.  And yes, Dorothy Allison and Kaye Gibbons for their humor and examination of gender stereotypes or family misfortune with a discerning, wry eye.

Something in Florence King and Evelyn Scott reminded me of Anne-Marie's mother.  The way the writer slid into a sentence's payoff, tucked at the end, so that a joke is mostly undercut by tone but still zings.  (Anne-Marie, you can read those, especially Scott, and tell me if you hear your mother there in that subtle, sly humor.)  Zora Neale Hurston was the only Florida writer among the bunch.  True to form as a folklorist, her autobiography is made up of other people stories, folk tales of the town, legends that were passed around at the general store.  She is also unique in this group for writing in dialect, which I see as another folklorist turn.

Du Pre Lumpkin raises an important point to take with us:  she believes Southerners aren't born, but made, programmed in the ways of being a Southerner.  Of course, that's true of all cultures, yet it struck me when she said it.  Good to keep in mind as we go forward.

Southern Selves

Received the new Southern Selves book yesterday from Amazon.  A note on the back matter/metatext of this book featuring various southern authors writing about identity:

The publisher writes:

"Whether slave or master, intellectual or 'redneck,' each voice in this collection..."

Apparently these are the choices in the realm of southern selves who wrote here or might be purchasing this book.

It continues:

"... southern literature richly deserves its reputation for irreverent humor, exquisite language, a feeling for place, and an undying, often heartbreaking sense of the past."

Here we have the hallmarks (some might say the stereotypes) of southern lit laid out before us:  the sad sack, make-the-best-of-it antebellum humor; rich poetic language; sense of place (geography?); and nostalgia for the lost past.  Are these really the way we would describe varying voices of Southern writers, such as African American voices?  A nostalgia for the past?  Humor?

I'm thinking of Alice Walker's quote about Southern women writers, that all of them write so eloquently, beautifully, poetically about the South.  But none of them live there.

Washington Post Article

Michael,

Thanks for this excellent article!

I love that the author included Florida in "the deep South" category, while Tennessee was "Greater Appalachia".  When I told AM about this, she balked and immediately accused the author/researcher of being a "Yankee who had never visited Memphis."

Well, at this point, I don't think we know - she certainly didn't know - if the author was a Yankee or not.  I pointed out to her that one of the characteristics of Greater Appalachia was residents that are  "intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers."  I've never heard someone react so intensely to "Yankees" in my whole life until I met AM.  I don't remember many people in Florida saying "Yankees" although I do remember many a rebel flag.

True enough, the "Deep South" is described as:  "Dixie still traces its roots to the caste system established by masters who tried to duplicate West Indies-style slave society... The Old South values states' rights [check!] and fights the expansion of federal powers [also check!]."

I confess that in order to complete this blog, I had to consult the map of the U.S. to determine exactly where Tennessee is.  I thought part of it touched the Atlantic Ocean; my mistake.  Did I mention they dropped Geography as a core requirement in the 70's and 80's when I went to school?

As for the concept of 11 nations in 1, in my Intro to Cultural Analysis class my teacher, who seems generally fascinated by our IS, pointed out that there are often two acknowledged concepts of America.  One being the Balkan, many states, many identities.  The other being the generalized America any European might pick out in a grocery store.  We have similarities and differences.  And so many micro-cultures, it may be difficult to discern only 11.  But overall, I tended to agree with most of his assessments, having lived now in various parts of the U.S.

About Race

I know this is going to be a long and complicated topic.  But I have to start with two things.

First, yesterday when I read Naipaul's book A Turn in the South, I noted that, even though he comes south from New York City, he still apparently is looking for race for the first time in the south.  In the first few pages of the introduction he writes, "A black boy was hosing down the veranda floor of the doghouse.  He looked timid -- for the first time that morning I had a feeling of racial constraint.."  It's as though race and "racial constraint" is only visible in the south and not in the north.  Naipaul, if he's felt racial constraint in NYC, hasn't stated it.

Having said that, I read this disturbing statistic this morning in Florida:  A Short History:  "The lawless character of the hinterland (the interior), combined with whites' racism, caused Florida to lead the country in lynchings, 4.5 per 10,000 blacks, twice the rates in Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana, three times the rate in Alabama, six times the rate in South Carolina.  An entire black town could be obliterated on the slightest suggestion of wrongdoing, as happened at Rosewood (near Cedar Keys) in 1923 with, it is believed, six black people killed, including women and children; so could an entire black section of a town, as at Ocoee (near Orlando), with four deaths, three years before.  In both cases, the entire populace fled."  (p. 135)

The writer marks a difference between the interior areas of Florida (backwoods, center of the state) to the booming coastal towns where the rich played and bought property.  It's funny that in my first essay for Michael I wrote about Florida being the interior, and not the coasts.  The popular conception of Florida is this coastal, tourist idea of Riviera living.  But the interior has always been much different, more devoid of northern influence and tourism, more agricultural, more dense, unknown, and apparently, more of what we traditionally conceive as the South, right down to its racist backbone.

Random Thoughts Thus Far because that With Drawl piece is sticking to me

I'm thinking about Y'all Quaeda -- how those militant anti-government terrorists are from OREGON and yet they are still tagged with the moniker "y'all quaeda"  It's a hilarious pun but geographically completely inaccurate. So why y'all? Because "y'all" means dumbass white supremacist.  Dialects are signifiers. I've been thinking about how deep the prejudices against Southern dialects go, how they are inextricably tied to provincialism and racism and conservatism in the popular mind.  (And also in my mind, depending on the class associated with the Southern dialect.)  I'm really only just becoming aware of what Wolfram was studying, this notion of dialect being a socially acceptable area of discrimination.

I'm thinking a lot about class, and dialect, and the many different Southern modes of speech that I encountered as a child. How by the time I was sixteen, when that person opened his or her mouth I could quickly make judgments about their intellect, their education, the way their house was furnished, what neighborhood they lived in, whether their parents had grown up in the city or the country, whether they were from Mississippi, Arkansas, or Tennessee; whether their father had a white color or blue color job; in a word, I assessed their class background and made judgments about it.

Add to that the complicated realities of my own class background -- working class pretending to the bourgeousie -- and I feel I may have found a subject I want to write about.  My mother, for instance, speaks with a different dialect than her sisters. She drawls, where they twang a bit more. My father's accent is extremely subtle. But he has cousins who sound, as my mother would put it, "like country come to town."

Further evidence of Southern Identity

I'm about a fourth of the way through my book on Florida history.  Definitely some important history has been fleshed out - such as, contrary to the popular conception of Plymouth Rock, the first city in America to be "discovered" and founded is St. Augustine, Florida by Ponce de Leon, a Puerto Rican governor looking for gems, minerals, and as the folk tale goes, waters that would prove to be the fountain of youth.  (He found none of these.  Florida turned out to be very commercially disappointing to the Spaniards, English and French who all at one point had possession.)  Ponce de Leon named his find Florida, which meant Place of (or Island of) Flowers.  By the time the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, St. Augustine had a full-fledged urban system and was celebrating its 55th birthday.

So why are we told the story of Plymouth Rock?  Because history seems to be the history of conquerors.  The Spanish ran Florida for a very long time, but eventually lost possession to the English.  It's the English history we are told and remember.

Florida was the 3rd state after Mississippi and (hmm.. one other.. can't remember...) to join the Confederacy.  In the antebellum era, as many as 40% of Florida's meager population were black; most were slaves.  The only Confederate city/stronghold not to fall to the Union was Tallahassee.  In the one major battle of the Civil War in Florida, the Confederates prevailed.  There is a strong Confederate history in Florida, with all the requisite post-war Jim Crow laws to, in a sense, reenact the conditions of slavery in opposition to the federal government's victory.  African American Floridians lost the right to vote.  The KKK flourished.  This political and racist history ties Florida to the Southern tradition and what we think of as the "South", beyond its simple location below Georgia.

Of course there are other rich Native histories.  The tribe that came to be known as the Seminoles was actually a composite of several other Northern tribes that moved South.  They were responsible for three great wars for territory and rights against the state and federal government, some of the strongest, longest, and fiercest battles fought in the United States by native people.  I was surprised to learn that "Chief Osceola," a great military leader of the second Seminole War was neither a chief nor wholly native.  His mother, I believe, was English.    (The Seminoles and Osceola being names every Floridian grows up knowing.)

Other than that, the early history of the Spaniards permeates the state, including setting up some of the first Catholic missions, long before the Californian missions were established.  I'm fairly certain this type of influence from the Spanish didn't occur in the rest of the U.S. (accounts for certain regional differences) but the physical territory of Florida - what is referred to as Florida -- was actually much larger than what we now know of as the state.  It extended west almost to Texas and north, at one point, almost to the Carolinas.  At one point, a good chunk of what we think of as the "deep South" -- Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana -- was part of Florida.

What I've discovered so far is that - despite the influence of the Spanish, the island-like beauty and topography which distinguishes it from the rest of the South, and other factors -- Florida, through its ties to the Confederacy and slavery, definitely solidified its own Southern identity.  When at last it became a state, Iowa was also granted statehood in an attempt to balance the pro-slavery and anti-slavery/"free" black votes in Congress.  This too sets up an opposition to the north.

Random Fun From "Florida: A Short History"

1)  Daniel Boone lived in Pensacola;

2) "Numerous visitors from English colonies to the north touted the Floridas for their natural beauty and abundance of plant and animal species.  Notable was the thirty-five-year-old Quaker naturalist from Philadelphia, William Bertram, who toured the region in 1774 and published a glowing account of his travels that became an inspiration for later Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge."  (p. 44)  That's right, Florida inspired high Romanticism.

3)  From the first British governor of "East Florida":  "There is not so gay a Town in America as this is at present, The People (are) Musick and Dancing mad.'  During Grant's first year in office he and his houseguests consumed 236 gallons of rum, 216 gallons of wine, 1,200 bottles of claret, and 519 bottles of port.  In May 1771 Grant sailed home to England, thoroughly pickled and gouty."  (p. 49)  Already, Spring Break was a thing.

Visiting Graves - AM

 I think the title, Visiting Graves, is a key part of what makes this piece powerful, because the title has multiple meanings. It unifies the essay and allows it to resonate on multiple levels.


He's not literally writing about the traditional Southern activity of cemetery visiting, which is what came to mind for me initially, but the figure of visiting a cemetery is the experience of the essay itself. Visiting graves was, in my part of the South, a pastime for many.  My mother dragged me through sweaty musty cemeteries throughout my childhood, searching for the graves of our ancestors.  In elementary school we had a field trip to a cemetery, where we all carried large pieces of thin paper and black cray-pas, so we could do rubbings of gravestones.  I already knew how, because my mother or my Aunt had shown me on other family trips. It was February, and cold, we were ten and eleven years old, and we knelt in the damp dirt and pressed our paper against the old rough stone to capture images of dates and crosses, then walked back to the parking lot with our chosen rubbings rolled under our arms and left the dead behind.  I suppose no one does this anymore, now we all have a camera in our phone; there's no need to rub a black stick of wax against a moldering slab of granite.

These were the associations in my mind when I began reading Visiting Graves. Sharpe is writing about losses, especially the illness and impending loss of his mother, by telling a story about visiting Elvis grave.  I love the way we first hear about Elvis as "the man" in a cardboard cutout. We know it's likely to mean the King of Rock'n'Roll.  His restraint in not telling all is played against the "tell all" nature of the title. The explicit purpose of the visit is slowly revealed to us, as is the fact that his mother is probably dying.  The careful revealing of facts is also part of the magic of the story.  Sharpe is precise and masterful in the timing and placement of detail, which is important in memoir.

I was a bit off-put by the Gone With the Wind longings at the beginning of the piece, and this is something I will be grappling with each time I address the subject of the South.  (On a personal note, it was nice to read someone who knew the proper restaurants to go to in Memphis. Authenticity - a Southern obsession.)

I admire his descriptive passages about music -- I could hear what he was describing.  This is something I'm always listening for and trying to do in my own writing.

I found Visiting Graves to be a beautiful, delicate and moving way to write about family, affection and loss. By focusing on a pilgrimage, on other deaths, on a real and an imagined Elvis (Hound Dog), Sharpe meanders through a cemetery of his family.

Response to With Drawl

I could have written With Drawl. It hit that close to home. It opened up a whole can of worms, too, (fishing worms, the kind I can't stand to bait a hook with), so that I'm only going to post about 2% of what's bouncing around in my head.  

The drawl, the twang, the Southern accent, the supposed accent-less speech of northerners…nothing unhinged me more when I moved to Chicago than discovering that I, a professional actress, a trained vocalist, someone who had memorized the international phonetic alphabet and could sing in five languages…I had an “accent.”

Suddenly I was other, whereas before, I had blended in. Suddenly my intellect, my politics, my urbanity, my essential goodness were called into question. Because of my voice. And my voice was me.  

Deciding to lose my accent (the one I thought I had lost in college) was less of a decision than an imperative.  The reasons were as follows:

        1)   I was an actress and the only working actress with a noticeable accent was Holly Hunter. All us          Southern actresses longed to be Holly Hunter.  But she was already being her.

        2) People thought I was stupid.

        3) People thought I was a racist.

Reason #3 was the most horrifying. White strangers would say racist things to me in a tone of appalling complicity, engaging me in their secret club, anticipating my agreement. I had left the South thinking I had left racism behind.

I didn’t want to be stupid, I didn’t want to be a racist, and I didn’t want to be unemployable.   So I systematically set out to learn to say “pen” instead of “pin.” I had to listen very closely to the unheard sounds I hadn’t dropped.  These were the buried ones, the ones more felt than heard, and not easily uncovered.

They aren’t all gone.  I was 45 when Laura Jones the Floridian ™ pointed out to me that I say “white” (the word as written) instead of “wite” (the word as yankee.)  I spent most of my adult life thinking everyone else was being lazy about it. I still do. But it didn’t take more than a week in Chicago to learn that my Southern speech made me “Wite” for a number of old-school racist cabbies who thought I wanted to agree with their rants about “those Blacks.”  So I found myself replaying the arguments I had with my Grandaddy, and with the well-to-do “White” boys at my college who spouted racist nonsense.  “Now I’m not prejudisst,” their statement usually began, “but…” 

And here it was in Chicago. Witeness.

As Relyea hints at in her coverage of Wolfram’s work, there isn’t one Southern Accent.  (Actually there aren’t any. The correct term is “dialect.”) Trained as an actress, I studied dialect work.  Regional speech differences contain many variations: differences in vocabulary, sound substitutions, melody and inflection, differences in syntax, and vocal placement (the part of the mouth where the sound is produced.)  If you get the vocal placement right, the sound substitutions flow much more naturally.

If you have to change your vocal placement in order to fit in, the words in your mouth don’t taste right. They don’t feel right.

Because I grew up in the South, and didn’t move there as an adolescent as Laura did, Southern speech is the sound of my mother tongue.  It’s how I feel inside. Every kind or loving word I heard as a baby came with a melody of Memphis or Mississippi, with long soft vowels and mysteriously buried “r”s. There is security in a dipthong. There are simply feelings that cannot be expressed on a flat Midwestern “a.” And yet I speak, for the most part, as a Midwesterner.  If I step out of line and speak in my native tongue, my youngest child flinches and scolds me for talking like Grandmimi.

I could write fifty pages on dialect and how it makes me feel, how the main thing I miss about the South has to do with melody and language. How I understand what the character in Crimes of the Heart means when she says, “Did you hear? Doc married a Yankee.”

Towards a New Southern Lit Studies

Somehow I chose an article to read first that aptly describes the scope of our independent study.  This article talks about the South as an oft castigated and sometimes valorized area of the country.  McWhirter calls it, "a last line of defense, or so it is argued, against a soulless, rootless, corrupt urban industrial (hence 'northern') modernity."  He points out that this model has come under fire from feminist and African American critics for, as Michael pointed out, its willful ignorance of history.  A fairy tale South, lily-white and peaceful as a stroll on a country lane.

The south is connected to a concept of agrarian tradition, of old, homespun values, of life that resists urbanization and modernity.  (In "With Drawl," 'hillbilly' Marvin 'Popcorn' Sutton, states about the northern (and even southern urban) environment, "You don't like your neighbor.  You don't speak to your neighbor.  You're bitter with the world... You drive down the street and everybody is wide open blowing their horns and don't know nobody and don't want to know nobody and don't care about nobody.  It's quite a bit different up here."  p. 10).  Of course, that lauded "friendliness" and connection hangs on similarity not difference.  It depends upon everyone doing and thinking the same way and that way is generally authentic, white, Christian, heterosexual values.  Here's where my experience having lived there, especially as a gay teenager, helps me read between the lines.

McWhirter also raises the notion of the "unitary South" as a constructed, flawed idea.  As AM and I are investigating, perhaps there is no "unitary South" but many Souths that connect and, at certain junctures, fall apart.  The "unitary," McWhirter says, derives its otherness "from, and against, history."  (Robert Dainotto, Place in Literature:  Regions, Cultures, Communties).  And, further, that fetishism for "authenticity" is divorced from African American history, culture and literature.

As Florida goes, I think there is also going to be additional influences from other multi-racial, and multi-cultural sources:  namely, Native American culture (still relatively rich in Florida, and certainly not underground) and the Spanish.

In general, McWhirter's article raises key points for AM and I to consider as we develop our work.  I had no idea prior to creating this IS that these ideas were being bandied about in what I now know to be Southern Studies.  It seems AM and I have stumbled upon an entire area of inquiry previously unknown to us both.

Visiting Graves

Response to Visiting Graves.

From a craft perspective, what I took from this piece was the use of the timeline/road trip as a way to describe physical locations; the relationship between him and his mother; and concepts like familial relationships versus imagined relationships with the famous (who can feel closer than family) and also life/death.  I think this is an interesting essay for AM and I to read because we are planning a road trip as part of this project.  I hadn't thought of using a simple diary structure (Anniston, Alabama, November 14, 2012), but it works and simplifies things.  We can discuss if we will use this for our collaborative piece.

Another thing I got from this essay is the use of observation.  This writer is essentially writing what he sees, without elaboration.  There's not a lot of rumination or research or information provided.  But it works.  In many ways, that's how I approach the art criticism I write for the paper.  I write what I see.  In doing so, you not only end up with a visual narrative - showing rather than telling - but also the reader is left to draw their own conclusions as to what the piece means.  I think such a style also allows for lyricism, and frankly, can be easier to write.  This is what I saw; this is what happened.  Mood also comes through quite naturally.

Oh and one other thing:  the writer's relationship to the south is marked by iconic, almost touristy settings:  Graceland, Nashville, the Reverend Al Jones' church.  It's interesting to think about what marks something as "must see" location.  Sometimes the most unreal spaces stand out in our minds as "the real".

With Drawl

As to the matter of accents...

I remember the moment when I finally lost my accent.  It came amongst my own confusion that my tendency to say "y'all" and "all y'all" and especially "fixin'" (as in "I'm fixin' to go to the store") was somehow tied to my lack of worldly experience and suitable education.  Freshman year at NYU, my best friend Jason told me about his senior trip to Paris; another friend Steve told me about vacationing in other parts of Europe, and I realized, I hadn't been anywhere other than a smattering of states. This was entirely due, not to the region I grew up in, but to my family's economic circumstances.  We were poor.  My "parents" - my mother and grandmother, two working class women who raised me together -- couldn't afford to send me anywhere.  The only way I made it to NYU was a full scholarship and by selling the beat Army green 1972 Mustang my dad had unexpectedly dropped at my front door on my 16th birthday.  After that, my father disappeared again for another half decade, and the car sold for $700, just enough for my plane ticket to New York, and some additional odds and ends.

The second part of that shame equation - the lack of good education -- was tied to the region I grew up in.  Central Florida had notoriously bad schools.  There was a rumor that our ACT and SAT scores were scaled up, based on our poor school system.  This is perhaps best evidenced by the ACT itself, which to my knowledge, was only offered in the Southern states.  No one I knew from the north or west had every heard of it.  There's a story I tell about my AP English teacher senior year, a Mr. Crews, who showed up to every class wearing a Georgia bulldogs baseball cap.  We never read Shakespeare in his class; we watched it on TV.  When we covered poetry, we read "Thanatopsis" but we also analyzed the lyrics of popular songs, such as his favorite, The Eagles' "Hotel California".  (He explained to us it was all about the devil and Satan worshippers, it was right there on the page clear as day.)  Most importantly, after I turned in my senior research paper, a little ditty I whipped up on Sartre's No Exit and existentialism, Mr. Crews returned my paper with an A grade, but no comments.  When I asked him afterwards why, he leaned back in his chair, interlaced his fingers and said, "Well, Laura, I didn't understand what you were talkin' about, but I thought you did, so I gave you an A."  (Insert his slow, dumb Georgia accent here.)

Needless to say, by the time I got to NYU with kids who had gone to prep schools, or private schools, or traveled to Europe, or read all of the collected works of anybody other than Danielle Steele or Stephen King, I was embarrassed for myself.  That embarrassment was best exemplified by the twang and verbiage that issued from my mouth every time I spoke.  I sounded country in that big ol' city.  I, like Laura Relyea, author of "With Drawl," set out to fix all that by forcing myself to lose the accent and start sounding like my peers.

Now even though I'm occasionally a mishmash of angered New Yorker, and dippy Angleno, and midwestern saying, "yah," my southern drawl still comes out.  It emerges when I speak on the phone to my sister, who is still deeply entrenched in the deep South of Central Florida, living near lakes and gators and swamp grass and hanging Spanish moss.  It comes out if I see a Southern movie, or read a book by a Southern author that I know to be written in his or her accented English, even if that's not readily seen or heard by anyone else.  Hearing it in my head literally slows down my reading.  Mainly, it comes out - came out - when I talk to Anne-Marie, first emerging when she and I met for the second time (as it turns out) at a Buddhist conference in South Florida.  

She mentioned to me today that she met someone this weekend and instantly knew he was Southern, although he had no accent to speak of (no pun intended).  When I met her, I'm sure we told each other where we were from, but I imagine instead that the accents met on their own, lilting out from inside of us because they too just somehow knew.  In the first few weeks after we met, during which time we talked each other's ears off on the phone, I think everything we said was done with a Southern drawl.  It was proof we knew each other in some part of our souls in a way no one else knew us - not my best friend and father of my child (Kansas), not my wife at the time (Iowa) and not Anne-Marie's wife either (Michigan).  Certainly not our children (Illinois and California/Wisconsin, respectively). The accents cued a knowing, a shared experience and upbringing, set of values, but also something deeper, something sensory.  Hot summers and springs; a certain propensity for foods, deeply fried; a slower pace you could almost feel on your hands and face; trees, water, and air you could still smell.  Yes even from me, who had lived in New York and Los Angeles most of my adult life; and yes, from her who had moved to Chicago 20 years before.

Relyea points out the common belief that Southern drawls cue "stupid" and "slow" and "backward".  (I did it myself just then when I described Crews how I did; in his case, maybe I was right.)  She relates the work of Dr. Walt Wolfram, a linguist who believes that "linguistic discrimination is the most socially acceptable form of discrimination in the United States."  (p. 7)  She recounts the origin of the word "hillbilly," probably more appropriate for the mountain folk of South Carolina.  I'm from Florida; not really a hillbilly, no hills, although Anne-Marie has flirtatiously called my people "crackers".

She's right about one thing.  While the word "cracker" is a perjorative term used to refer to poor rural whites in the South, it apparently has specific connotations for Floridians and Georgians, where according to Wiki, it apparently is sometimes used in a "neutral or positive context or self-descriptively with pride."

That's news to me.  The word's origins relate to cracked kernels of corn - a staple food in Georgia and northern Florida at a certain time in history -- but also may have some connection to slavery and whipping (the sound of the whip being a crack).  Wiki relates that Floridians and Georgians may pridefully use it to distinguish between originals to the state as opposed to those that move in.  I was surprised to learn that FSU, where my sister went to college, nearly voted to have their mascot be the Crackers as opposed to the Seminoles, which is what it remains today.

Anne-Marie and I are from different parts of the South, and yet, the differences when it comes to accents may be less significant than the similarity of sharing an accent (repressed though it might be) at all.  One we can clearly still put on, or "let out".  Anne-Marie's accent to me sounds more refined, in some ways more traditionally Southern, whatever that is, more lilting, more filled with lovely piccadillos like her pronunciation of "wh" sounds in words like "white" where you can hear the whooshing of the "wh" sound (whereas the rest of us simply say "wite").

I'm not an expert in accents or dialects but the International Dialects of English Archive notes a couple of distinctions about the Floridian accent including the "hard r" sounds, which may sound less  lyrical or fine than that Memphis belle thing Anne-Marie has going on.  (Take that people who say Florida isn't the South!  Just go to this website and listen.)  I hear that in my voice.  Feel how my cheeks tighten and I speak high up in my jaw to make that unique sound I remember as being Florida; it's slightly jauntier, dirtier, and yes, probably sounds in some ways more stupid or backwoods than the Akinesque Memphis dialect.  

Other distinctions to consider:  1) my parents are midwesterners from Wisconsin not Southerners like AMA's parents; and 2) I grew up in the rural South, unlike AMA, who grew up in Memphis.  (The article does point out that the "twang and drawl" the author "longs to hear was seldom found in the city -- despite living in what's considered to be 'the deep South.'")  Physical location in the geographic map of the south is not always the determining factor in an accent; urbanity plays a role, too.  As does, according to the author, things like highways and air conditioners (more northerners suddenly able to tolerate the sticky heat), to which I would add normalizing factors like MTV, which I recall being widely reported in the 80s for destroying regionalisms in American kids addicted to music videos.

Another interesting though unrelated point that came up in this article:  Southern pride.  Wolfram states that in North Carolina there's a lot of state pride and Southern pride.  Do we really see this in any other region?  What is it that makes us hold on to pride?  What are we proud of?  Our exclusion?  I'm thinking of all those white people saying the Confederate flag was about pride and heritage.  Of course, the rest of the world sees racism, and that's not to be denied, nor is their historical ignorance (who hangs the flag of any conquered people?)  But I wonder if in their own way, those Confederate flag-huggers truly do believe it's about heritage and pride.  This is in no way an endorsement of their thinking, just me stating that, thinking back on the people I grew up with, I can see that they may honestly feel that way.  Then again, I'm just a cracker.