Talking Appalachian, page 25
I refuse to be judged on either count, and so I just have to plow on, safe in the knowledge that the mountains will live on my tongue all the days of my life, alive and vocal in all their beauty and ugliness, in all of their dark, lush complexity, the same way these creeks and rocks have taken up residence in my blood and bones, the same way my people chatter on in every cell in my body.
I—and my dialect—will not be silenced and will not be put into a neat little box for anyone. I’ll defend my people to those who call them trash based on the way they talk. And I’ll defend my ability to see beyond the mountains with those who demand that we must cower in the shadows and defy the rest of the world to retain our identity. Sometimes I may feel as if I don’t have a place in either the world of Appalachia or the world beyond it, but the truth is that my feet—and my mouth—are firmly planted in both. Mine is the country of language.
Southern Exposure
Lee Smith
I have always known I have a strong southern accent but hadn’t focused on it in a while until recently, when a well-meaning (though northern) friend told me she thought that I ought to take speech lessons.
“What for?” I asked.
“Well, you’re always going around giving readings and talks, and it just seems to me that you ought to present yourself in the best possible light.” She was floundering now and turning red.
“I have no intention of ever giving up this accent,” I told her, the truth dawning on me as I spoke. “It’s a political decision.” But not, I knew, a decision that had come easily.
I first noticed a prejudice against southern accents years ago, when I was invited to read one of my stories at Columbia University in New York. The minute I opened my mouth, several urban, cutting-edge students glanced at one another, gathered up their books, and noisily left the room. I got the message: Nobody who sounded like I did could possibly have written anything that would interest them. Moon Pies, magnolias, and Hee Haw—I knew what they were thinking. I took a deep breath and went on, newly aware of how different my southern voice sounded from the others,’ how different I was from them.
So I am aware of all the reasons for my friend’s well-meaning suggestion. For many Americans, southern is the equivalent of dumb. Many believe “slow speech indicates slow thought,” southern sociologist John Shelton Reed once said. “Laboratory studies show that the average non-southern college sophomore assumes a southern speaker to be less bright than a non-southerner, even when the two are saying exactly the same thing.”
Truth be told, the perception of southern-as-stupid can actually work to a person’s advantage, especially at yard sales, for instance, or with car salesmen or tradespeople. I drive a mean—though sugarcoated—bargain and nine times out of ten get exactly what I want without the other person knowing. A well-placed, drawn-out “Thaaank youuu” can disarm its victim, lulling him into sweet surrender.
Some of my friends, especially those in business and law, actually cultivate their southern accents. They want to be underestimated so they will make the best deal, win the hardest case. My friend Drena Worth, who sells real estate in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is known for her southern wit and charm. But don’t eat lunch with Drena unless you want to buy a house.
As a young girl, I adopted my mother’s drawl automatically. She had a softer (less nasal, less Appalachian) accent than anybody else in our small Virginia mountain town, and more refined ideas to go along with it. My father, Ernest Smith, had “swept her off her feet,” as she liked to tell it, and brought her from the more civilized tidewater Virginia to the remote part of southwest Virginia he came from, to the coal mining town of Grundy, nestled deep in the narrow valley between the high, rough mountains.
My mother felt it was her mission to civilize us all—her students (she was a teacher), my father, and especially me. She intended to turn me into a southern lady. That included training in not only what I said but also how I said it. This was a tough project, since I was a mountain girl through and through. My mother realized reinforcements were needed and sent me to visit my aunt Gay in Birmingham, Alabama, every summer. She was an expert lady trainer with a southern accent to die for. There I wore little Cuban heels and went to the club for lunch.
But it didn’t take. Though I loved my mother and appreciated all her efforts in my behalf, and though I was told over and over again that I “looked just like Gig” (Mother’s nickname), I soon found myself rebelling against both the way she talked and the advice she offered—mostly, instructions on how to talk like a lady: a lady never raises her voice; a lady never mentions money; a lady doesn’t tell everything she knows; in a group, a lady never lets a silence fall; talk real nice and then you can do whatever you want.
What southerners do not say in those sweet voices has been the topic of much discussion. It’s almost guaranteed that you won’t hear anything distasteful come out of the mouth of a southerner. Author Pat Conroy told me once that the whole South runs on denial. And what is denial? It goes right back to another line of my mother’s bad advice: if you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all. That’s only one step from: if you don’t discuss something, it doesn’t exist.
The traditionally southern way to handle problems is by not mentioning them, the very definition of denial. Writer Rosemary Daniel once said, “Tears, sulkiness, hysteria, even girlish temper tantrums were expected of me as a southern woman, but I had never heard a lady, or even a gentleman express direct anger.” No, a southerner is much more likely to express anger by getting sick (attest the lingering illnesses prevalent among older southern women), getting drunk, wrecking the car, or cleaning the house with a vengeance. I once watched an older man, a friend of our family’s, crush a wineglass in his hand, smiling steadily all the while, at a wedding he disapproved of. “Everything is just fiiiiiine,” he said nicely afterward.
Southern ladies never, ever discuss sex; the two don’t fit together, a southern accent and sexual talk of any kind. My mother referred to anything that took place below the belt as down there, as in “Trixie is in the hospital for tests. She’s been having trouble down there.” Other topics to avoid are death, mental illness, politics, and, of course, divorce. Until she died, I never knew that one of my aunts had had a previous marriage. It had been edited right out of the family, in the same way all the pictures of her young husband had been removed from the family album.
This southern habit of not saying, of denial, has given rise to some of the most negative images of southern women—that we are shallow, bubbleheaded, or hypocritical. While it is true that some stereotypes exist because there is a grain of truth somewhere in them, by and large, these adjectives just don’t apply. In the words of novelist Reynolds Price, “Southern women are Mack trucks disguised as powder puffs.” Therein lies the power of a southern accent.
It is also true that those sweet voices are very skilled at storytelling. If there is anything recognizably “southern” left in the high-rise apartment buildings and outlet malls fast spreading over the once-rural South, it is a particular approach to imparting information. Everything is anecdote; this is how we all learn and maintain our accents and traditions. As speakers, we put experience into the form of a story. As listeners, we are wild for detail: What was she wearing when he told her he was leaving? Where were the children? What did they have for breakfast? Listening to these kinds of things can wear you out. No wonder all I wanted to do when I was a teenager was to get out of town. I felt closed in; I was imprisoned not only by the mountains but by all this talking—trapped in a steel net of southern syllables, of endless anecdotes transmitted all over town. Everybody seemed to know everything about me and about my whole family. I hated that. I felt as if I could never break free of that net.
My last image of home, the day I left for college, was my mother and two of my aunts sitting on the back porch, drinking iced tea and talking endlessly about whether one of them did or did not have colitis. More than anything else, I wanted to get away from there.
At this point, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and in college I insisted on writing stories about anything but the South; none of my characters would have the drawl I was escaping. They were instead stewardesses living in Hawaii, where I had never been; executives with foreign accents; alternative universes. I ignored my teachers’ instructions to “write what you know.” I didn’t know what they meant. I certainly was not going to write anything about Grundy, Virginia—ever. But then one professor, Louis Rubin, had us read the stories of Eudora Welty. Aha! I thought, with the awful arrogance of a nineteen-year-old. Eudora Welty. Setting my feet on more familiar ground, I wrote a story about some women sitting on a porch, drinking iced tea, and talking about whether one of them had colitis or not. I got an A.
Now, years later, I have come to understand that my best work is, in some sense, these stories from home—of the South, often of the Appalachian South. (By the way, the story I read at Columbia went on to be included in an O. Henry Awards anthology.) Each story has its own voice, and those voices are always southern. Just as I have come to appreciate my own heritage more and more, I have come to value my southern accent.
So I won’t be signing up for speech lessons anytime soon, though—thank you kindly, ma’am—it’s a real thoughtful suggestion.
A Matter of Perception
Jane Hicks
“I reckon poor old Tyler Farrar expected a better day. They’re crashing everywhere, the whole field is blocked.”
On paper, this sounds like Darrell Waltrip commentary on a NASCAR race. On television, uttered with a British accent, it becomes quite something else. These are the words of Phil Liggett MBE (as in Sir Phil Liggett) in a commentary on Le Tour de France. Sir Phil, former professional bicycle racer, is the premier English-speaking commentator and broadcaster of the tour. For a number of years, I have kept a notebook of Sir Phil’s familiar expressions that would get me laughed out of any non-Appalachian company if I used them. Among his regular repertoire are: “I reckon,” “poor old,” and such familiar expressions as “running like a scalded cat” and “bless his heart.”
Sir Phil hails from Wirral, Merseyside, England. Many of my ancestors came from that region. It only stands to reason that we have remnants of the expressions of our ancestral speech.
I grew up in extreme northeast Tennessee, only a mile or so from Virginia, up where folks think of Knoxville as middle Tennessee. Some of my classmates’ backyards were on the state line, where we sometimes amused ourselves jumping from one state to another.
Our house stood at the end of the street, the last house in the outer suburbs of a small city. On the one hand, we roamed the neighborhood; on the other, we roamed the ridges, the woods, and the banks of the Holston River. To call us town kids would have been a stretch. We spent as much time on our maternal grandparents’ farm as we did at home. I could tie a hand of tobacco as well as I played the trumpet in my high school band.
At my blue-collar high school, we were expected to follow our parents into the workforce at one of the three large plants in town, where jobs were plentiful and secure. Teachers and counselors (a new thing when I was in school) implicitly and, sometimes, explicitly steered academically promising students away from “here.”
I never understood this mind-set until VISTA workers visited my school during the War on Poverty days. It was then I found out I was Appalachian. I had always thought of Appalachia in terms of heartrending magazine pictures and tragic stories seen on the nightly news. For the first time, I faced being stereotyped and was told that to be successful I needed to leave the region.
It was a strange meeting. I was dressed in my best Bobbie Brooks preppie attire (bought on layaway), complete with kneesocks and saddle oxfords. The VISTA workers looked like many college kids looked in the late 1960s—hippies. One had on tattered bib overalls my grandfather wouldn’t have worn to the fields.
One of my classmates and I were National Merit semifinalists. The VISTA workers advised us to go anywhere but “here” to college and to get rid of our accents. Neither my friend nor I was impressed with the advice. We both started at the University of Tennessee that fall. She continued on to grad school. I transferred to Virginia Tech. It was there that I met the next group of people who judged me by my accent and I became aware of the astounding varieties of Appalachian Englishes.
My fiancé grew up in extreme southwest Virginia, about forty miles from me. He and his family had accents with remnants of a Scotch burr. My classmates from other parts of southwest Virginia sounded different. Besides Scotch-Irish, many Italians, Poles, and other nationalities immigrated to and worked in the coalfields of southwest Virginia, leaving subtle marks on each locale.
My first public-speaking class proved frustrating. Students from Maryland and eastern Virginia often made fun of our accents, invariably complaining that they didn’t understand us. When my time for an impromptu speech came, I said, “The students from southwest Virginia do not have accents. We live here. If you do not live here, you have the accent, not us.” The rest of the natives applauded.
We moved to Minnesota when my then-husband graduated and took a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I worked in a four-star restaurant because no one else would hire me with my accent. The first night, the head waitress looked at me and said, “You talka vit an accent, ja?” Customers often called me over to “just say something.” Most of it was patronizing, not cruel, but it became wearisome. The owners were hot-tempered and sharp-tongued. The day one of them called me a stupid hillbilly, I was gone.
The big skies, the constant belittlement, a crumbling marriage, and a horrifying tornado sent me heading for the hills. When I crossed out of Ohio and headed down 421 into Kentucky, people started to sound as they should.
As a student at Emory and Henry College, I took two classes as a visiting student at East Tennessee State University: Appalachian Geography and Appalachian Literature. The Appalachian Lit class changed my life. Jack Higgs made the class challenging, and his knowledge of the subject was (and still is) encyclopedic. This was 1976, and an Appalachian Renaissance was in full flower as part of the Bicentennial. Dr. Higgs whooped with delight when I brought in my copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalogue with the original Divine Right’s Trip serialized within its pages. In this class I read Jim Wayne Miller, Gurney Norman, James Still, Harriette Simpson Arnow, Jesse Stuart, and other authors who wrote about things I understood.
It was chic to be Appalachian, and I encountered a different type of stereotype—a romantic one revolving around the idea of the contemporary ancestor. People assumed I could sing ballads and play a dulcimer. I had never seen a dulcimer, and when I inquired of my grandmother about ballads, she firmly told me that “those old love songs” were about people who “didn’t know how to act.” All I ever heard her sing were hymns and gospel music.
I disappointed more than one person on this count. But I made up for it by the fact that I was a quilter, taught by my grandmother. Quilting was also wildly chic at the time of the Bicentennial. Possessing this skill made having an accent easier. I brought a New York City quilt shop to a standstill when the owner shouted, “We have a genuine Appalachian quilter here in the shop.” No one cared about my accent; they wanted authentic technique.
I had begun to publish poetry and short fiction in regional journals and signed up for writing workshops. The first two I attended were led by people I had read in Appalachian Lit classes. Jim Wayne Miller and Lee Smith sounded like me, and their work was taught in colleges and universities. Becoming acquainted with writers who wrote about things I knew, with expressions I knew and cadences that fell easy on my ears, made me sure I could be a writer.
By this time, in the middle eighties, I grew a bit militant about my accent. I heard east Tennessee writer Jo Carson say, “I keep my accent as a political choice.” Amen. I did, too. I wouldn’t dare let anyone suggest that my words and thoughts were less valuable because they were spoken with an upper east Tennessee inflection. I chose to use formal English with my native speech.
Being militant sometimes means laying it on thick to goad prejudiced people. At the school where I was teaching, I suffered two years of hell dealing with a set of parents who fell in that category. One morning, the intercom came on and the secretary requested that I answer the phone. This was not standard procedure. Thinking it must be important, I went to the workstation to answer.
“Good morning, this is Mrs. Hicks.”
“I wanted to speak to the person in charge of gifted education,” clipped the woman on the other end.
“Yes. How may I help you?”
“Oh, God, another hick drawl.”
I hung up.
Shortly, the principal tapped on my door. “I hate to ask, but did you just hang up on a parent?”
“Yes, I did.” I related the conversation.
He promised to take care of it, and my first meeting with the parents was coolly civil. The parents went on to explain that surely, by our standards, their recently enrolled children were gifted. I explained the regulations and procedures and started the process to evaluate their children.
When the results came back, my teaching partner and I agreed that we would never meet alone with these folks—both of us would always be present. My teaching partner at the time was an extraordinary teacher and person. A Californian of Lithuanian descent, she had acquired a faint twinge of Appalachian in an otherwise rather neutral accent. We explained that both children had qualified for gifted services, and we each planned to assume case management for one of the children.
