So I know I have been absent lately, but I am taking an expository writing class this semester that is taking all of my creative juices. This is something I wrote for that class....what do you think?
I grew up in Southeast Texas, close enough to the Louisiana border to smell the gumbo and to spend my formative years speaking a smattering of broken English, Spanish, and a few choice French phrases. In my hometown of Woodville, TX, we celebrated Cinco de Mayo every May, yelled “Laissez Les Bon Temps Roulez” (Let the good times roll!) before all hell broke loose on Saturday nights, and sat—without a touch of irony—in a Baptist pew on Sunday mornings with cowboy boots on our feet. My upbringing was a blend of very distinct cultures. Because of these cultures, you can only imagine the mix of accents and idioms that came out of my mouth every time I opened it.
The funny thing about all of this is that I had no idea that I sounded different than anyone else. I was in the middle of a community where everyone sounded just like me. My best friend growing up had a father much like my own, who spoke in a constant string of Texan idioms. My favorite has always been the one we heard most often. Anytime we asked to do something to which he had already repeatedly told us “no”, he would turn to us and say, “Girls, we done stomped them taters.” My own father hated nothing more than my brother and I trying to pull the wool over his eyes. He would frustratingly remind us that he “didn’t fall off the turnip truck last night.” So, as dad would say, I “came by it honest.”
Of course, the way I spoke was only the frame around the picture of my cultural identity. I was the Fair Queen in my junior year of high school. My duties included helping the following year’s auction of the animals at the fair, getting my pictures taken with all the stars of the show-chickens, cows, and pigs-and announcing all the winners of the various competitions. My rival at the time, knowing I would have to announce her pig if she won, named it Amy Sue just so I would have to say, “And this year’s Grand Champion hog...Amy Sue!” Who says Southerners are slow?
Basically, I lived the life that is so commonly associated with the accent-the good parts anyway. However, during my first semester at UT, only three classes into a linguistics course, my professor asked me to stay after class and speak into a recorder. She told me that I had the “worst Texas accent” she had ever heard, and so she set out to determine its origin. That's right; I had my very own Pygmalion moment. I couldn’t understand why, at a university in the heart of Texas, attention was being focused on me for having a Texas accent. And it wasn’t just that professor. Most of my new friends in Austin from all over the country, loved to tease Amy Sue, the girl with two names and the accent to match.
“Professor Higgins” was the beginning of the end for me. I knew that I wanted to be a doctor some day, and I set out to lose the accent so that as an MD, I would never walk into a room and say, "Aight what we gonna do today is, take this here needle and poke ya in da behind. So drop yer draws now." Because honestly, there were doctors in my home town that had done just that, many times. In Woodville, this works, but not if I want to practice medicine anywhere else.
Over the next few years, I practiced distinguishing between words that had never sounded different coming from my mouth. “Ten” was no longer a metal, “pens” were never used for sewing, and I stripped the word “y’all” from my vocabulary. Diction became my new religion. Crooked things were no longer referred to as wompajawed, and I ceased getting “drunk as Cooter Brown”—well I ceased calling it that anyway. I almost completely turned away from the cultures that had defined my identity for eighteen years. What can I say? At eighteen, and in a university with a freshman class three times the size of my hometown, I was easily swayed from my true identity.
I now know what my true identity is, because whenever my guard is down—either from being back home, really tired, or drunk as…well, you get it—my accent and all that it entails, comes streaming out of my mouth and gives me away. I discovered during my hiatus from myself, a few life-changing truths. First, denying yourself is very exhausting, so one way or another, our true colors tend to show. And second, that the stereotypes I was so desperately trying to avoid in myself still drew me to others who filled those stereotypes in my eyes (or more accurately, ears).
I have given up trying to deny my heritage, and therefore, no longer feel the need to hide the accent. The more I meet people with different stories to tell about how they grew up, the prouder I am of my own story. To the rest of the world, people who speak like I spoke, are slow-witted rednecks. But, the veterinarian who shows up at his daughter’s basketball games smelling of…well…shit, and tells his daughter, “Don’t be shy darlin’, daddy just smells like money,” probably attended more of her games that year than the investment banker in some big city who’s perfectly-pressed suit only ever smells of designer cologne.
My own father kicks off his shoes wherever we are because he hates the feel of them on his feet, after a childhood of only having uncomfortable hand-me-downs. I was in high school when he and my mother bought their first home. He hadn’t bought himself a new car until after they bought the house. Yet, when I graduated high school, I drove off to college in a sporty little car right off the lot, because my dad worked to provide things for his family that he himself had never known.
Sure, they are simple people, with simple pleasures. My dad’s most prized possession is his boat he named Knot @ Work, and he and my mom spend as many sunny days possible out on the lake by their house. Summer nights are spent with friends grilling or having a crawfish boil and fish fry. I guess that makes them come across as slow, or lazy, but these same people rally when something goes wrong. When I was in junior high, my dad was in a hunting accident, and the whole town raised money to help us out. I still remember how one of my brother’s friends, who was still in elementary school, sold eight hundred dollars worth of tickets to a Spaghetti Dinner that the local Lion’s Club hosted to raise funds for our family.
Are these the people I am so scared to be mistaken for? Sure, my mom has actually asked me to “run out and shoot another squirrel for the pot” (and I have done it), but she and my dad have also taught me how to sew, knit, cook award-winning meals (without a single squirrel), and change the oil in my car.
Knowing my love and respect for these people, it is truly no wonder that even in this tiny blue dot in my red state, I found and moved in with a friend who at least once a week comes into my room to ask me, “Jeet yet?” To which I reply, “Naw, ju?”
“Naw. Yawnto?” he asks.
“Aight,” I mumble, “whatcha want?”
He’ll stare at the ceiling for a minute as though he is thinking, but the answer is always the same. “How bout sumya fried chicken with a nice scald on it.”
I strived to separate myself from the negative side of the stereotype commonly associated with my accent. The only way I knew how to do that, was to kick off the accent like a pair of well-worn boots. Those boots aren’t a part of my everyday attire anymore because they don’t fit like they used to. However, from time to time, they find their way out of the back of the closet and onto my feet. So, whether I still sound like someone from Woodville or not, I whole-heartedly claim them as my people, and I pray that I never again forget why. I mean, y’all couldn’t beat this life with a stick!
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15 years ago
