“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.
“Oh, no,” declared the father. “We want the person of higher educational attainment!” He turned to smile at my teaching partner.
Trying to smother her laughter, she simply pointed at me.
“No, we want the one with the highest educational degree.” Again, the parents turned and looked at my partner.
Finally, I tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “That would be me, honey.” I know it wasn’t professional, but I had reached my limit, and he was rude. To make a long story short, nothing I ever did suited them. The mother sent me a list of possible topics for investigation. When I thanked her and proceeded with the agreed curriculum, she complained to the principal that I couldn’t be sophisticated enough to plan a course of study for gifted children. He assured her that I had traveled widely and was trilingual. Then the parents complained that their children were picking up “hillbilly accents.” They finally went berserk when I introduced an Appalachian studies unit.
They fled back north, and the entire faculty breathed a sigh of relief. Both these people were highly educated but ignorant, in the sense that they were simply ill-informed. They equated accent with intellect.
When I first started attending the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, I met kindred spirits. Intelligent and talented, most of them speak a variety of Appalachian English. We all speak with perfectly “correct grammar” and can soften the edges of our accents when we choose. In our close circle, we code-switch and lapse into our comfortable dialects, using expressions and syntax we would never use in professional life. It’s a form of militancy, I suppose, against people who devalue our spoken words while admiring the written.
My writer friends and I have all had this experience: after a reading, a person comes up and offers to introduce us to someone who can “help with your accent.” I once had a man offer to read my poems to me so I could hear them free of my accent. Another said, “Thank God you don’t write like you talk.”
I suppose if Sir Phil Liggett read my poems aloud, the reaction would be quite different. He could even get away with saying, “I reckon my new book will be ready soon.” Confusing accent with intellect, it’s all a matter of perception.