Talking Southern

Being with folks from Georgia always juices up our Southern accents and memories. When talking to people from back home, wherever home is, it's like wearing your most comfortable jeans and sweat shirts. 

Even native speakers of American South sometimes mimic colorful Southern accents--there are so many variations--but when non-Southerners do it, and when most actors do it, it's nails on chalkboards to us. You have to have lived there to get the nuances and hues of it. (This is probably true of any place, but it seems to me that Southern accents are the most-often imitated-- verified by Ms Google.)

"When you gone [long o sound] do your homework?" a Georgia parent asks for the third time in an afternoon. 

"I'm fixin' to...." my former self replies, "After I finish practicing piano." 

"We're gone [going] go see Mama and 'em"  some say when setting off to visit grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  

Whoever lives at or visits a grandmother's house--that's the "them."

No matter how much we love the daddies, no matter that they own the house along with mamas, a house in the South is always "Mama's house." It is, traditionally, Mama who picks the furniture, makes the curtains, and hangs the pictures.  It's she who cleans and cooks; the house is always Mama's, from front porch to back door.  Daddy gets the yard and the car. 

Even though we Baby Boomers and our parents tend to be excellent spellers, we often omit final G's and other letters when we speak.  From years of reading and spelling bees, we know how words are to be spelled and spoken in standard English, and we follow the rules in school.  But at home, and with other people from home, we relax into the accent we grew up speaking.

Oprah used to do that on her show.  She'd be talking in impeccable standard English, then she'd switch the register and say something in Black Southern, like "Y'all know what I'm talkin' about." 

When Nellie and I were in Italy twenty years ago, we perked up our ears when we heard Georgia-speak at the next table.  Before speaking to them, we each guessed what part of Georgia they came from, a nuance only a sister-Southerner would hear.  One of us said "Fort Valley" and the other said "Unadilla"--two tiny towns a few miles apart and three hours south of Lawrenceville.  

Later we struck up a conversation: "Where are y'all from?" we asked, knowing that they were "Y'all" people. 

Turns out one of us had guessed exactly right--though I don't remember which of us. 

Last week,Nellie and I saw a book at The Twig about pies--we say PI instead of PYE--and it sent us down the pie trail.  She found a recipe for soda cracker pie--Southern mamas made it--so I tried it out and it was delicious.  I found an almost identical recipe in my recipe box in Carlene's handwriting, but she called it Macaroon Pie. 

When Nellie arrived, I'd just found my little green leatherette diary of my first year in Lawrenceville, junior year of high school, and I read Nellie a few pages.  I used words like "splendid" and "magnificent"--most often to describe, I'm embarrassed to say, the college man I was dating--and would marry less than two years later. 

We were on two different tracks in high school.  Nellie, the red-haired cheerleader and dynamo, dated boys our age while my boyfriend was seven years older and opposed to "all that high school stuff." Even after I was crowned Homecoming Queen my senior year, we didn't go to the dance--as he'd had enough of teenagers for one night. 

"It was almost like I was..." I trailed off, and she finished the sentence, "married already."

We talk about our mamas' cooking and things our daddies used to say.  She tells me about being a childhood playmate of Art, their mamas "best friends til the day they died."  Early on, they married different people, and Art served in Vietnam as a Marine. But in 2000, they found each other again and married on the beach in Florida.

I tell her about driving around town selling donuts for a Cochran High School fund-raiser.  I was fifteen; my boyfriend was the requisite adult in the car. 

Nellie tells me that the two of us and one more are "probably the only Democrats" in our 1966 class.  My diary tells me that I played the piano at graduation to Nellie's solo, "Our work is done."  

It wasn't.  But at seventeen, we didn't know all the stuff we know now.