I get no less than 3 comments a week regarding the way I talk, coming in the form of “you are not from here” or “where is that accent from” or “I like your accent”. In fact, the accent of native Hoosiers is so homogeneous that I can now hear my own accent, which is more annoying than I expected. I have never enjoyed hearing myself recorded and I really do not like hearing my own accent when I talk. It is strange.
The good news is that no one has called me a hick, redneck, hillbilly (not an insult, by the way), or moron, yet. Unfortunately, in northeastern and some mid-atlantic states (I shall not name names to protect the guilty) I have endured rather cutting and insulting comments about my accent. I was once told by a dude in a NYC diner that I “must be a bigot based solely on how I talk”. Needless to say, our conversation was cut very short. Even worse, a store clerk in a town 3 hours from my hometown once sneered at my accent and insisted that “it could not come from a place that close”. It is sad, but in some quarters of the country, a southern accent is considered dumb, ignorant, and/or backward. Luckily, NE Indiana and the Midwest so far is not part of that contingent. And, for that, I am very thankful because I plan on keeping this accent.
I hope you do, darlin’.
One thing you learn pretty quickly in the aerospace industry, because of Lyndon Johnson’s determination to use NASA as a Marshall Plan for the south (literally, in the case of Marshall Space Flight Center) is that just because someone speaks slow, doesn’t mean they are slow…
And I actually never learned growing up to be prejudiced against southern accents, in southeast Michigan. It might be because in an auto town like Flint, you grew up with a lot of people who migrated up from the south to work there. A lot of the people I went to school with were from a poorer east-side neighborhood, whose parents were from Kentucky and Tennessee, and worked in the shop. Some of them might could have had better home lives, but most were damned good people, and not afraid to work, or fix things, and would give you the shirt off their back. And I noticed that they got along with the blacks a lot better than many of the native-born. Because they knew how to.
There was an extremely interesting portion in Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” regarding accents, Chuck Yaeger’s Drawl in particular.
To summarize: Since Yaeger was the king of the test pilots, they all tried to emulate him, including his manner of speaking and accent. The pattern repeated as test pilots were the cream of the military crop, and regular military pilots began copying their speech patterns. As Military pilots translated into civil aviation, and were generally the best trained and most capable flyers, their cadence and manner was again frequently copied.
Thus there was a period of years where you would invariably hear a form of Chuck Yaeger’s West Virginia drawl from your pilot, regardless of where the pilot was born.
That speech pattern was considered calm, supremely competent, and very confident. Apparently things have changed significantly in some parts of the country.
My dad was a bigot from the Ozarks; born in 1915 and damn near starved during the Great Depression. Rode the rails as a hobo to every edge of the country. After WW2 he settled in the South (first Jacksonville, then Atlanta), then became a national sales rep for International Harvester trucks, so he covered all 50 states.
HIs take on racism: “Son, down here, we love blacks (he didn’t use that word) as individuals, but we hate them as a race. Up North, the damnyankees just LOVE blacks as a race, but hate them as individuals. Now, Jessie here (a black man who my parents had raised from the age of 6) has a key to every car and every building I own; I prove every day that I trust that man with my possessions and to take care of my wife and children. He carries a gun that I bought for him, drives one of my trucks, and lives in a good solid house in a good neighborhood that I bought in his name. There’s a lot of loyalty there, and it goes both ways.
Now, if he lived up north, some busybodies would praise his right to go to college (not interested) or run for the Senate (not remotely qualified) or some other damn thing. And they’d swoon over his stories of growing up in Atlanta while Martin Luther King was preaching. But they wouldn’t give him a job. They wouldn’t give him their trust. And if he managed to acquire a good solid house in a good neighborhood, it might just burn down some dark night. With the exception of some damn fools in Mississippi, that just didn’t happen down South.
If you had a choice between being hated wholesale but loved retail… or the other way around… which would you pick?
According to the liberal NY Times, the Great Reverse Migration is already underway… smart, educated African-Americans choosing to move from blue NYC to deep red Georgia.
http://www.theblackurbanist.com/2011/06/28/the-reverse-great-migration-and-urbanism/
“Atlanta and Charlotte have emerged as areas that honor and respect black culture…” Yep. I don’t like all their music, but I don’t like all the music that the white kids play from their cars, either. Food’s good. And, outside of the pockets of despair created by soft-headed policies like Section 8, it’s easy to build trust relationships down here. I never feel I have a fully trust-based relationship in New York or Boston…. business relationships subject to change at any time.
I’m told that a lot of Northerners tend to think of Southerners – all of ’em, from rural hicks to city folks – as dumb.
Good story Stephen. I’d have to say your father’s observations reflect my own for his generation. I say for his generation because the overall race bigotry in the south is disappearing with the younger generation. Still, it was never hard to find a truly race bigotted person in the south who still had a good friend from the other race. And in times of need, bigotry rarely got in the way of giving aid and comfort.
I come from Connecticut. The lower Connecticut River valley, to be precise; the former home of Connecticut Shade and Broadleaf tobacco, greatly valued as cigar wrappers. You can still (or could about five years ago, the last time I went back) find references to the area being called the “Tobacco Valley”.
Thousands of Carolinians came north after World War II to work the fields. As a result, my Tobacco Valley accent sounds more Southern than anything else, even though I’ve never lived south of Bergen County, New Jersey.
Accent isn’t even a reliable marker of where you’re from, let alone what you think and do.
Have you never encountered the non-Southerner who puts on a pretend southern accent because they have some maudlin attachment to clichés about how Southerners are “warmer” and “more emotionally open” and “more authentic” than people from elsewhere? I have. I had a friend who just loved my mother’s Tennessee accent and used to imitate her all the time. It grated on my nerves something awful — I could never seem to get across to said friend that I found it awfully patronizing.
Shorter Stephen Flemings father:
In the north its “I don’t care how big he gets as long as he doesn’t get too close.”
In the south its “I don’t care how close he gets as long as he doesn’t get too big.”
At least that’s what I remember hearing years ago.
My kids were born in the midwest and raised in the south. My daughter, the youngest, is the only one who still says, “fixin to” and “all y’all” among some others.
Just to be sure we state the obvious: there was plenty of racism in the South back in the day. And though it has declined greatly, it still remains in some quarters. I grew up in Texas. My grandfather was an unreconstructed racist. He used the N word freely and made derogatory remarks just to be funny. My grandmother would chide him and say, “Now dear, they don’t want us to call them that any more.” She had more Christian charity than he did, but her basic opinion was hardly any different.
My own parents tried very hard to raise us without any prejudice, but they revealed by their actions more than their words that they, too, had racist attitudes. Now I do not consider myself racist, but when I meet someone of another race I am very conscious that they are different than I am. Skin color somehow seems more significant than hair color. We have in turn tried to raise our kids without any prejudice, and I think just maybe we have succeeded. My younger son is about to spend a semester studying abroad in Dakar, Senegal and counts among his friends people of many races and nationalities.
My point is that old attitudes die slow and hard, even with the best of intentions and effort. The laws were changed fifty years ago, but the cultural change is still ongoing.
I’m in New England and at one point I had to call out one of my friends for using a bad Southern accent when mocking the crime-ridden Lovecraftian hicks in the next town over.
I’ll just say this … I think that the Army must teach the Southern accent to Drill Sergeants. Except for a few from Neu Yawk who just couldn’t do it, they mostly had southern accents when I went thru Basic.
BTW, there was a guy in my unit from Indiana … his accent was so country that he could have easily been mistaken for a southern boy! lol
FWIW, I’m originally from TN.
To Bill Maron – the term “y’all” is incredibly useful, and should be in much wider use.
Irony, Rand–you used the expression “might could have.” I use that expression too, but I’m told it is a Michigan expression.
cthulhu–my kid went to Long Beach poly high school, where the cheerleaders used y’all hundreds of times per game, along with my personal favorite, “all y’all”
I used to work on a helpdesk making calls out to customer’s all around the world. By far, the northeasterns were the biggests a-holes when it came to how I speak (born and raised Texan). One even going so far as to while I was talking, he put me on speaker phone and I could hear him whispering to co-workers around him to, “come listen to this guys accent, he just said ‘yall’ a moment ago; it’s hilarious!” I guess my accent lead him to believe that not only was I dumb but deaf as well.
But one thing I can’t stand about Northerners is not so much how they talk but their pattern of speech You see, down here we speak when it’s our turn to speak and then we stop and let the other person actually have their chance to say their peace and then back and forth again. A northerner will have no problem talking over you while your trying to talk with constant, “uh huh, yea, right, sure, right, uh huh, right, right, right, uh huh.” I find these people have very low retention rates as to the actual content of what you are saying because well, they aren’t listening to what you are actually saying because they are busy with their verbal ticks. While they may talk faster up north I find that they often repeat themselves over and over again saying essentially the same thing just in a different way.
Irony, Rand–you used the expression “might could have.” I use that expression too, but I’m told it is a Michigan expression.
That was deliberate. If it’s a Michigan expression, I’ll bet it was one imported from the south.
Oh, and “y’all” is singular, “all y’all” is plural.
There’s a simple biological reason why Southerners talk slow – it’s natural selection. Back in the Bad Old Days before air conditioning (praise be unto you, Mr. Carrier!), people with defective “fast” genes tended to die too young to have children (12 or 13, tops). Those that went about life at a more reasonable pace tended to live longer and establishing slowness as a way of life.
I’m from Alberta. The predominant accent here is the same one that most TV newscasters use across North America. Now, are they imitating us or did we imitate them?
“I was once told by a dude in a NYC diner that I ‘must be a bigot based solely on how I talk’.”
I usually reply to this–and it happens more often than I’d like–in my best California stoner accent, “I think that’s called projection, dude.”
“Oh, and “y’all” is singular, “all y’all” is plural.”
Rand, I was born and have lived in the South most of my life, and I can tell you that “y’all” is NOT singular.
If I’m talking to you with no one else around, and say “Y’all come over to see us,” I don’t mean just you – I mean you and your wife and kids and whoever else is around, including your crazy aunt in the attic.
I’ve lived almost all my life in either Virginia, North Carolina, or Texas (with a few years in the middle spent in NYC and Germany), and I’ve never heard any native Southerner use “y’all” to mean just that one person they’ve talking too. We do use “all y’all” too, but both are plural (I suppose “all y’all” could be described as more plural, but I don’t know anybody that really thinks about it).
Maybe there are native Southerners who use “y’all” in a singular manner, but I’ve never met them. Or maybe that’s a mis-interpretation by non-Southerners.
Aside from that, I do agree with the rest of it. Yankees can’t seem to understand that someone can be a bigot about a whole race, but deeply trust individuals from that race. I understand why so many black Southerners moved north, thinking they would get away from racial prejudice. I think a good number of them moved back because they also found racial prejudice in the north, too, but the northerners lied about it. Actions speak louder than words. It’s easier to deal with prejudiced people who wear their prejudices on their sleeves, so to speak, but will give you work, than to deal with people who proclaim they’re not prejucided but don’t want to hire you.
Hal, the way I always heard it is, “In the South, they don’t care how close black people get, as long as they don’t get too rich; in the North, they don’t care how rich black people get, as long as they don’t get too close.” Same thing, really. And pretty much true. 🙁 (Though I think the “rich” part has pretty much changed in the South; can’t speak for the North.)
I grew up in Louisville KY. It leaves me with no regional / boundary based identity.
To anyone from north of the Ohio River, I’m from the south. For anyone south of the lower KY border, I’m from the North. I have ‘some’ parts of my southern accent. But after having lived in 6 different states, traveling all over the world, and being something of a Social Chameleon, I NEVER have anyone guess where I now live or where I grew up. It is sometimes handy, but it leaves me without a background to some extent.
Regardless of that, I’d rather spend time with poor people of substance than rich people who suck. I’d rather be in a crowd of any race behaving well than a crowd of white idiots. (white skinned college sports fans or ‘educated’ liberals especially) And I don’t care who your daddy, momma, grandma, or great uncle was. I’ll base my opinion of YOU on how YOU act thanks!
Yes, Great-Uncle Charley DID get the CMH at “the ‘canal”, but that was 18 months before YOUR dad was born. How does that make YOU anything?! ( and many of us know this type person)
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The amazing thing I’ve found in, literally, 50 years of national travel, border to border and coast to coast is the LEVELS of racism in places where people are supposedly SO much smarter and more urbane than those of us who are labeled red neck, black skin hatin’, sister humpin’, poor, southern white trash. Or even the rich biggots for whom they work.
Having lived in IL, Waukegan to be exact, it seemed to me that every ethnic group looked down on all the other groups! Poles didn’t like Germans. Germans didn’t like Irish, each Spanish group disliked the other Spanish groups. And as I said, they EACH thought they were ‘better’ than everyone else.
I’ve found the same thing in NYC, Boston, Philly, blah, blah, blah.
In California, it’s about split between that and acceptance regardless of race. In the Northwest, I found the kind of old fashioned, irrational racism I supposedly support as a Southerner. In NorCal, Washington and Oregon I’ve seen my AA business partner treated like a second class citizen. He of the Masters in Animal Science, me the HS drop out, University of Hard Knocks.
In Sumas Wa, one sunny Sunday afternoon, he and I went to a “casino” there. Buffet or order from the menu, drinks, gaming, and the NBA Final Game of the 1997 Championships.
We ordered from the menu, never got our starters, couldn’t get refills on drinks and ultimately could NOT get anyone to bring us a check! After asking three of the wait staff for a check, and then two more for a MANAGER, I walked out, with him in tow. We were thinking someone would stop us and ask for $$$$$$$$$$$$!!! They never did.
But as the door closed, several men and women yelled “nigger!!”
And, I repeat, this was a room full of white faces, watching the NBA!!! So I’m guessing to be a ‘worthwhile’ African-American you just need a good jump shot? Otherwise, nigger?
I think that great philosopher Ricky Ricardo said it best, “…eetz jus’ so ridic-a-luz!”