Talking Appalachian, page 22
Lee Smith’s novel Fair and Tender Ladies is a particularly rich source of distinctive words, usages, grammatical forms, and even pronunciations, all contained in the series of letters written by Ivy Rowe over her lifetime. The first letter alone contains several dozen examples: verbs and verb phrases such as seed for saw, knowed and growed, learn for teach, holp, fotched, heered, brung, set to, took up, lit out, start in, and heard tell of; nouns and noun phrases such as younguns, catamount, sprucey-pines, he-balsams, bloody flux, laurel slick, shucky beans, pallet, brain fever, play party, and pone; adjectives (including superlatives) puny, poorly, gayly, afeard, wore out, give out, store boghten, leastest, mostest, lastest, bestest, and even disablest; pronouns ourn, yourn, and hisself; phonetic spellings such as foller, yaller, sweet taters, rinch for rinse, clift for cliff, and atall; and the expressions “down in the back” and “like to have died.” There is something particularly appealing about young Ivy’s unself-conscious use of dialect in the letters, and the epistolary style allows Smith to accomplish things with language that would not be possible in a more conventional kind of first-person narrative. Ivy’s long letter to her “Pen Friend” Hanneke, who lives in the Netherlands, begins:
My dear Hanneke,
Your name is not much common here, I think it is so pretty too. I say it now and agin it tastes sweet in my mouth like honey or cane or how I picture the fotched-on candy from Mrs. Browns book about France, candy wich mimicks roses. Have you seed any such as this? I have not. I have seed them in her red book that is all.37
Ivy can combine her own language (fotched-on, seed) with that drawn from the “book about France” in a way that does not devalue the former.
Dialect can sometimes be used as a weapon turned against those who speak it, as Arnow demonstrates in a passage from The Dollmaker. Here, Gertie Nevels has been summoned to meet with her son’s teacher, Mrs. Whittle:
“What did you say your name was?”
“Nevels. My boy’s name is Reuben. Maybe you don’t recollect him, but—”
“I don’t what?” And she frowned as she might have at a child giving the wrong answer.
“‘Recollect,’ I said,” Gertie answered.
“Does that mean ‘remember’?”38
One can assume that Mrs. Whittle knows very well what recollect means and that she is using Gertie’s own words to humiliate her.
The pressure to conform, to change one’s way of speaking, is well known to those who have left their home communities to find work or attend school, as evidenced in the essays by Silas House and Jane Hicks in part II of this volume. The pressure to conform may be more subtle than that experienced by Gertie in her meeting with Mrs. Whittle, but it is present nevertheless. In Denise Giardina’s Storming Heaven (see part II), the character Carrie Bishop describes how being away at school has changed the language her brother uses:
Miles always said “it” now, never “hit.”
“It sounds ignorant to say ‘hit.’ They shamed us out of it at school. Same with ‘aint.’ Educated people don’t use those words.”
Ben sat by the fire and whittled. “Chaucer said ‘hit,’” he observed.
Miles looked startled, then said, “That’s different.”
“Why?” Ben asked.
“He’s been dead a long time. He was medieval.” He said this last word as though it described a very disgraceful condition. “This is the scientific age.”39
While regional pronunciation or “accent” may be the most common way people recognize a dialect, it is an aspect of spoken language that is particularly difficult to render in writing. Writers sometimes have no other means of illustrating broad dialectal differences than to comment on these differences directly within the text. In her short story “Holler,” Affrilachian poet Crystal Wilkinson (see part II) describes the social gulf between her narrator, Mrs. Brown, and the black “law man” who interviews her in the hospital after she has been attacked by her husband: “Almost immediately I see the law man’s face and shoulders get set a certain way as he listens to the way I talk with all the Mission Creek in me spilling out into the room. And it’s then, when he acts like each word I speak is throwing shit on him, that I know it doesn’t matter what else I say so I stop talking all together.” In the case of Wilkinson’s narrator, social and urban-rural distinctions transcend any shared ethnic connection. The “law man” may resemble her Cousin Ronnie in superficial appearance, but for Mrs. Brown, “He’ll be thinking we are all just a bunch of country niggers.”
Appalachian writers such as those featured in part II of this volume have often received critical acclaim and found wide and appreciative audiences both inside and outside the region. Most of these writers use dialect in one way or another as a means of creating a regional and cultural identity for their characters. A literary dialect can help create that sense of place, home, community, and family. Literary dialects can also be used to illustrate the social barriers inherent in language differences. Programs in English education, particularly those aimed at students preparing to teach high school English, typically require some kind of English linguistics curriculum, and this requirement often includes instruction in the nature of language variation and language change. Ideally, such programs will produce teachers who are more sensitive to language differences and more tolerant of the differences they will encounter in the classroom (see the essays by Reaser and Clark). Exposure to literature containing dialects can be an effective way of accomplishing this. Literary dialects often personalize language in a way that conventional textbooks cannot, and they may be a better means of encouraging discussion about how and why we positively or negatively value our own spoken language and that of others. This is especially important in the case of Appalachian Englishes, since these varieties have been the subject of negative stereotypes for so long. It is encouraging to see present-day writers take on the challenges of portraying spoken language in Appalachian literature in ways that recognize the rich linguistic heritage of the region.
Notes
1. Various subdivisions of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada cover parts of the southern Appalachian region: the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States, the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States, and the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States. Publications based on fieldwork for the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (along with the Linguistic Atlas of New England) include Hans Kurath, Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949); E. Bagby Atwood, A Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1953); and Hans Kurath and Raven McDavid, Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961). Major dictionary studies include Frederick G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, eds., Dictionary of American Regional English, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985–2012), and Michael B. Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall, eds., Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004). Also of interest is the sociolinguistic study by Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech (Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1976).
2. George Washington Harris, “The Knob Dance—A Tennessee Frolic,” New York Spirit of the Times, August 2, 1845. Other early works include William A. Caruthers, The Kentuckian in New York (New York: Harper, 1834); Johnson J. Hooper, Adventures of Simon Suggs (1845; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969); and Harden E. Taliaferro, Fisher’s River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters (New York: Harper, 1859). Harris began contributing “Sporting Epistles” to the Spirit of the Times in 1843, but these contain few examples of literary dialect.
3. Harris, “The Knob Dance,” 267.
4. Cratis Williams, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction” (PhD diss., New York University, 1961).
5. Lorise C. Boger, The Southern Mountaineer in Literature: An Annotated Bibliography (Morgantown: West Virginia University Library, 1964).
6. George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool,” Warped and Wove for Public Wear (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1867).
7. James Russell Lowell, The Biglow Papers (Boston: Houghton, 1848). Every fall for the last twenty-two years, I have taught a course in American dialects. About halfway through the semester, after students have been introduced to regional variation and the various Linguistic Atlas studies, I hand out a passage from Lowell’s Biglow Papers. All I tell them is that it is a nineteenth-century literary representation of a particular American regional dialect. When asked to identify the dialect, students’ responses are consistently “Southern,” “South Midland,” or “Appalachian,” with an occasional “Ozark” or “hillbilly.”
8. G. Shorrocks, “Non-Standard Dialect in Literature and Popular Culture,” in Speech Past and Present: Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Ihalaine, ed. Juhani Klemola, Merja Kytö, and Matti Rissanen (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 385–411.
9. Paul H. Bowdre, “Eye Dialect as a Literary Device,” in A Various Language, ed. Juanita Virginia Williamson and Virginia M. Burke (New York: Free Press, 1971), 178–86.
10. Sumner Ives, “A Theory of Literary Dialect,” Tulane Studies in English 2 (1950): 139.
11. Ibid., 152.
12. Michael Ellis, “Literary Dialect as Linguistic Evidence: Subject-Verb Concord in Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature,” American Speech 69, no. 2 (1994): 128–44.
13. Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Mind (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978); Allen W. Batteau, The Invention of Appalachia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990).
14. George P. Krapp, The English Language in America (New York: Ungar, 1925).
15. For more details on this and other patterns of subject-verb agreement, see Ellis, “Literary Dialect as Linguistic Evidence”; Montgomery and Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English; and Wolfram and Christian, Appalachian Speech.
16. William Tappen Thompson, Major Jones’s Courtship (1840; reprint, Atlanta: Cherokee, 1973), 151.
17. George Washington Harris, “Sporting Epistle from East Tennessee,” New York Spirit of the Times, September 2, 1843, 313.
18. Hooper, Adventures of Simon Suggs, 40.
19. Caruthers, The Kentuckian in New York, 25.
20. Hooper, Adventures of Simon Suggs, 60.
21. George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood’s Yarns, ed. M. Thomas Inge (1867; reprint, New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1966), 108.
22. Hooper, Adventures of Simon Suggs, 75.
23. Harris, “The Knob Dance,” 267.
24. Among works of fiction set more or less in the region but produced by writers who are not natives, the most prominent is probably the second series of “Nashville” Crockett Almanacs (1839–1841), which were written and published in Boston. Also of interest are James Kirke Paulding’s play The Lion of the West (1831), loosely based on the life of David Crockett, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837). None of these contain examples of the pattern of subject-verb agreement characteristic of the Upper South.
25. Although some scholars appreciate Harris’s use of language, others find his dialect so annoying that they believe it is necessary to “translate” his work. For a good background to the scholarly responses to Harris’s language, see Inge’s introduction to Sut Lovingood’s Yarns (1966 reprint). According to Inge, “anyone who is familiar with southern speech of the less-educated classes, and with the East Tennessee brand in particular, will find that, when read aloud, Harris has achieved in the main a fairly accurate transcription of the native vernacular” (15). In her brief description of the Sut Lovingood tales, Boger writes, “The exaggerated dialect used in this group of twenty-two tales is a detriment to the enjoyment of the ribald humor in them. These are very southern, southern mountaineers” (The Southern Mountaineer in Literature, 37). For a “linguistic” treatment of Harris’s literary dialect, see Carol Boykin, “Sut’s Speech: The Dialect of a ‘Nat’ral Borned’ Mountaineer,” in The Lovingood Papers (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967). Boykin concludes that she believes Sut “‘talked like’ the illiterate, individualistic East Tennessean he was” (42).
26. Harris, Sut Lovingood, 23.
27. Harris’s work is the source for numerous citations in the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English.
28. Mary Noailles Murfree, In the Tennessee Mountains (Boston: Houghton, 1884), 67.
29. In another passage from In the Tennessee Mountains, Murfree uses “Rick say,” “she say,” and “she know” without the -s suffix for present-tense singular, a feature that would be very unusual for the region.
30. Harriette Simpson Arnow, Mountain Path (1936; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985), 47.
31. James Still, River of Earth (1940; reprint, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1978), 80.
32. Michael B. Montgomery, “The Literary Representation of Appalachian English: A True Voice of Mountain Speech?” (paper presented at the meeting of the Appalachian Studies Association, March 1991). In this paper, Montgomery conducts a detailed comparison of three popular authors of Appalachian novels—Mary N. Murfree, John Fox Jr., and Wilma Dykeman—to determine whether there is any degree of consistency among their representations of dialect. Montgomery concludes that the three authors “are consistent with one another only to a limited degree. And their versions of mountain speech are not altogether close to reality, or at least certainly not reliable enough for linguists to use unadvisedly.”
33. Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain (New York: Grove Press, 2006); Sheila Kay Adams, My Old True Love (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2004).
34. Adams, My Old True Love, 16.
35. Silas House, Clay’s Quilt (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2001), 50.
36. For a detailed treatment of this feature, see Wolfram and Christian, Appalachian Speech, and Montgomery and Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English. Dialect vocabulary can bring a sense of authenticity to a literary dialect, but the meanings of these words may, on occasion, perplex readers who are not familiar with them. Take, for example, dommer for dominecker (chicken) in Still’s River of Earth, a word so obscure that it supplies one of the few citations in the Dictionary of American Regional English.
37. Lee Smith, Fair and Tender Ladies (New York: Putnam, 1988), 3.
38. Harriette Simpson Arnow, The Dollmaker (1954; reprint, New York: Scribner, 2009), 302.
39. Denise Giardina, Storming Heaven (New York: Norton, 1987), 59.
Part II
Voices from Appalachia
Voiceplace
George Ella Lyon
Early in “Song of Myself ” Walt Whitman declares that he is “one of the Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same” and then gives us fourteen long lines of places and ways of life, from the “Kentuckian walking the vale of the Elkhorn” to the fishermen “off Newfoundland, / at home in the fleet of iceboats.” He concludes the catalogue by saying: “I resist anything better than my own diversity / Breathe the air but leave plenty after me, / And am not stuck up, and am in my place.”
Whitman knew that democracy did not require and should not produce sameness—even within the individual (“Do I contradict myself?” he asks. “Very well then I contradict myself ”), that in fact our strength and vitality spring from our variety. No melting pot for Whitman, no stew even, but many pots aromatically bubbling with everything from grits to borscht to fricasseed buffalo. What has happened to our taste for differences?
“I hungered for the burr of Appalachian r’s,” writes West Virginia poet Mary Joan Coleman in “D.C. Working Girl Lonesome.” Living in the city she longed not only for the place but for the voice of home. She grew up where the ruggedness of landscape and life shaped the language, where metaphors outnumbered even kinfolks. Having moved to a place where her accent was ridiculed, she realized her loss. For the history and spirit of a place are in its voices; to accept the denigration of the speech you were born into is to sever one of the threads of ongoing life.
It is also to foster the false impression that culture happens somewhere else, New York or Los Angeles, Chicago or Boston, and has to trickle down to the rest of us, that culture is a commodity that we buy or travel far to see rather than something that comes from us and speaks to us. It implies that stories—and therefore the people who tell and hear them—are more important in the metropolis than in the mountains or the Midwest.
It took me a long time to recognize the vital connection between voice and place in my own life and work. I grew up in Harlan County, Kentucky, in the coalfields, and was in high school during the War on Poverty. I remember the TV stereotypes—not just on The Beverly Hillbillies but on the news—of mountain people both materially and culturally deprived. So I thought, if I am going to write, the first thing I have to do is go somewhere and acquire a culture. During that process I would learn to sound like I was from somewhere else. I didn’t know that was like cutting your throat to remedy hunger.
In college I wrote poetry primarily and my subjects were medieval music, Dutch painters, and love. The language was that of a person born in a book and majoring in men’s studies. We called it English. But I kept a journal, too, where I set down things that interested me. One was a sentence I’d seen printed in crayon on a young child’s paper at Pine Mountain Settlement School: “I hope how soon Spring comes.” I loved the way the rising sap of spring, hope itself, lifted the words into a new order. Not standard but rare, expressive. “How I hope Spring comes soon” is tired by comparison.
