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.”