Even if my accent slightly drifted during my many years of living in California, New York, New Jersey, and Italy, I always said “y’all.” Now, at home in North Carolina, it no longer provokes a smile. And once again, the cake is covered with icing, not frosting, there’s dressing in the turkey, not stuffing, and I simply make slaw, not coleslaw. Caramel gets its middle “a” back and I don’t have to hear the grating “kar-mul,” or “pee-can” for “pee-kahn.” When the lemon pie comes to the table, I can ask “What does this pie and my hand have in common?” And I know my daughter will call out “Mah rang!” Though I won’t take up “that there,” or “this here,” or “might could,” or even “bless your heart,” I like hearing them. Southerners know that “bless your heart” isn’t always sugar sweet; often it drips with irony.
I’ve always loved the southern accents, each one. Now that I’m living back in the South, my own Georgia pitch and rhythm becomes more pronounced as I recall the useful “fixin’ to,” “yonder,” and “reckon.” “Fixin’ to” adds a dynamic that “about to” doesn’t have; “yonder” just sounds farther than “over there”; and “reckon” adds a certain summing-up note of judgment that “think” doesn’t give. “Y’all” has the same talent. While “you” acts as an ambiguous one or many, “y’all” is plural and an excellent clarifier. If I invite “you” to dinner, you might not know I mean to include the whole clan. “Y’all come to dinner” is precise in meaning. I even like “all y’all,” the ultimate inclusive you.
In my early peregrinations, responses to my accent varied. We girls jumping on trains up to Princeton and Annapolis parties from the women’s colleges in Virginia were surprised at the power we wielded. On those snowy weekends, the blind dates we met simply melted. They must have been dreaming in stereotypes of humid nights on some bayou, orange blossoms on the breeze, bees burrowing into the hibiscus flowers.
When the trips became frequent, my grandfather forbade me to go. He didn’t want me “to marry some Yankee two-by-four, most common of all pieces of wood.” Later, in accentless California, I felt exotic but a few laid-back classmates at first looked at me as though I came from three generations of intermarriage with second cousins. Moving to New York for my husband’s job, I was taken aback when his boss greeted me warmly, then, slightly into the conversation, asked with a smile, “Well, Miss Peaches, will you be enrolling in speech therapy?” I’d noted his harsh, nasal accent. “Why, no.” I answered in a cane syrup drawl, “Will you?”
Outside of the South, we know we’re often typecast as racist or dumb as a box of rocks the minute we open our mouths. Those stereotyping boors are unaware that we might be doing some fancy judging, too. I recall Lewis Grizzard, the 1970s Atlanta humorist, brutally observed that New York accents were “The most effective form of birth control…” Recently I came across an article written by a transplanted Chicago woman in Charlotte who worried about her three-year-old acquiring a southern accent. In the comments section, a responder to her said he didn’t fit in up in Michigan because people told him his southern accent sounded terrible. “So, I told them they sound like a dyin’ possum in a trash can.” My parents had one New York friend who came to visit. At eight, I recall, I made fun of him in the kitchen because although my mother called him refined, he still said “dwahg” instead of “dawg,” “ideers” for “ideas,” and he pronounced Miami “Mee ah’ me.” I got switched on the legs.
Mostly, I’ve loved the personal benefits of a southern accent. I thrill to the sound of a modulated voice with more soft notes than a harp. Etymologically, the root word of accent means “song.” Although some twangy accents rake across your ears, most are melodious. How many instant connections have I found? Even a sense of community in far-flung places. I hear at the next table at a trattoria in Rome the lilt and sass of a southern accent drifting my way. Before the waiter pours the wine, it’s a “Hey” and a “Where are you from?” and before long I know where her mother grew up, and what cousin went to Emory, and that Daddy was a car dealer in Gainesville. In the dentist’s chair in San Francisco, the hygienist says, “Do I detect a southern accent? I’m from Greenville, South Carolina, originally.” She hadn’t sounded like it before but immediately lapsed into her real voice. (Code switching is common in displaced southerners: Cover up your accent with a neutral voice.) She gouges my gums with her pointy instruments, regaling me with stories of crazy relatives. “You need to flawss more,” she concludes. I relish these bonds. That a cadence provokes a link. The dropped g or r (goin’, ov-ah), or a shifted emphasis (BE-hind, THANKS-giving, the-ATER), or run-together words—atall is one word—all signal home.
Accents are fading. Influxes of people from elsewhere, media rigidity favoring bland voices, the fear of being subjected to stereotyping—all these erode regional differences. People are sensitive to the possibility of a southern accent impacting their careers. Wait. Anyone think Molly Ivins, Truman Capote, or Tom Wolfe a bit dim? Dolly Parton or Morgan Freeman? Sam Ervin, the famous “law-yah” in the Watergate hearings? If so, you were shortly eviscerated by his rapier-sharp questioning. And the presidents Johnson, Carter, Bush, Clinton. Their panoply of local accents didn’t stop them. Won’t it be sad when we all sound as though we’re computer generated? “Say riv-ah,” I tell my grandson, but he won’t. His teachers and friends in this Triangle area speak no Southern and most probably he never will either. There’s nothing to do about this. I’m happy that the country is vast, with deeply defined regions and pockets and crannies and mountaintops. We’ll hold on to our heritages as far as we can see.
Learning Italian, I began to hear the differences between the Tuscans and the Venetians, the Neapolitans and the Sardinians. I was delighted to be acquiring an accent in a language I barely could speak. It meant I was from Cortona, my adopted hometown. I love the clackety sounds in Venice, the lightning speed and elisions of Sicily, and the posh Frenchified sounds of the rich Piedmont region. I gradually was loosened from my belief that if the angels came down to earth they spoke Southern. I fell in love with accents, all kinds. They belong to a place and time. And thereby the place belongs to the speaker of that accent. My husband’s Minnesota relatives sound as though they have snowflakes in their words. Flinty fields appear in the Vermonters’ voices, and old ballad rhythms linger in the tumbling Appalachian waterfall of vowels. In “I Hear America Singing,” Walt Whitman wrote: “Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else.” (And bless his heart—there, I said it—for including “her” back in the 1860s.) I like what belongs to me and mine, but why not celebrate differences? You say “motorcycle,” and I say “motah-sickle.” Let’s go for a ride.