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I have a niece who is beautiful. I don't mean cute, pretty or nice looking. I mean BEAUTIFUL. She was always a little tomboy when growing up and preferred climbing trees, playing baseball and jumping into the creek to look for crawdads as to sitting around dressing up Barbie dolls. One of the many things I use to love about her was her voice. When I closed my eyes as she was talking it was always Loretta Lynn's image that appeared. Her accent was like music to my ears and many a time I would practice talking the same way, but it never seemed to stick with me.
In the South, although we all have an accent, each area has something a little different in the drawl, even if living just one town over. For example the people who live next to the river at the county line of where I am from pronounce "egg" as "eg" or "chair" as "chare" whereas the people living up in the hollers will call an "egg" an "aig" or a "chair" as "cheer". None of the "ing" words will be pronounced with the "g" included. A couple of examples are "nothing" will be "nuthin" or "thinking" will be "thinkin".
I moved away from my niece when she was 12 years old and although I kept in touch every now and then, I did not see her again for over 11 years. When I did she took my breath away!
She undoubtedly had taken the breath away of many others because she had been modeling for Victoria's Secret catalog for a couple of years. Aside from her beauty, the other thing I quickly noticed was her accent.
My Loretta Lynn was gone.
It its place was a Midwestern nasal twang.
Sorta like listening to the 6:00 news.
I spent the better part of the day with her, rehashing old times, shopping, laughing, hearing stories about her exciting new life.
During one of our many conversations I finally found the nerve to just blurt out what I had been thinking about since early morning. I asked her where the accent had disappeared to?
It was then she began to inform me that Victoria's Secret had actually required her to go to speech school to learn how to "talk normal". Although I know she had to see my shock she seemed to just shrug it off like it was just as though it were one more thing you do before you put your shoes on, or go to feed the cat. How in the world could anyone justify that? For Christ sake, her job was to model, not to speak.
I asked her if she didn't feel at least a twinge of guilt for even agreeing to such a thing? To actually feel like something is wrong with the way she sounded, with having to actually change, wipe away, kill, what her ancestors not to long ago had died trying to save. She looked at me and said "But I sounded different than the other girls".
That is when it hit me.
Not only did the North invade our country, destroy our crops and burn down our homes, they also somehow convinced us we should be ashamed of the way we sound. Ashamed of who we are. Ashamed of the way we think, and the way we feel. Made us believe somehow that the beauty of our voices was not worth being heard. How sad.
They say the winner writes the history books but in this case the winner also changed the dialog of an entire nation. Or at least they are working at it. |
