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.