I was speaking to one of my wayward waifs today and they told me that they needed to hear my southern drawl.  Now I kid myself about a lot of things…I tell myself I’m young and beautiful, thin, and tall but I don’t have a southern drawl.  I wish I did.  There is nothing more warm and welcoming, in my opinion, than the rhythmic sing song sounds of a true southern drawl.  I have a southern accent and that’s different.  To have a drawl requires being from North or South Carolina or Georgia and it reminds one of honey and molasses.  It is rich and welcoming.  It rolls off the tongue with thick notes and lingers in the air like fog.  Let me try and explain.

I have always lived in Arkansas.  I am a hillbilly.  The accent that I have is hick.  I drop the g from words ending in ing and hang onto my r’s like there’s no tomorrow.  I don’t use ain’t, but I have family that would be at a loss for words if you took it from their vocabulary.  These same family members have trouble with verb tense and use colloquial phrases that would cause folks that aren’t from around here to scratch their heads.  For example, I’m not sure that someone from Italy would know what to do about a “hitch in your git along” but my family would.  If I am angry or upset my words come faster and my voice gets higher and my children claim I become more southern.  What they actually mean is…I become harder to understand because I become increasingly redneck.  I threaten them with harm that they know will never come to them.  “I put you on this planet and I will take you off!”  doesn’t scare them anymore because they know I wouldn’t dare, and my tone is increasingly nasal.  When he was last here, my youngest son told me I sounded like a cartoon character because “your little voice just gets higher and higher as you get angry.”  So they know I pose no threat at all at this point.

While he went to school, my husband lived in Raleigh, North Carolina.  I loved the weekends that I was there with him.  It was such a joy to listen to the natives speak.  They rolled their r’s around on their tongues for days before they released them for others to just barely hear.  Water became wahtah. Lights weren’t turned on, they were cut on and off.  But not even that they were “Cut own and cut off.”  They spoke in syllables that dragged on for hours.  They made time seem inconsequential if you judged by their speech.  Everything was slow and easy.  When we would go out in public I would just stop and listen to the beautiful trickle of their words.  It was as calmingand lovely as a cool stream on a hot day.  Even when they were angry or upset they sounded so genteel that you would never know by their tone that anything was awry. ”Do you won’t to be in time out?  We ahre heahto try own shoes!” an exasperated mother told her child.   It was the most amazingthingto witness.  I became fascinated by their words and ways.  I would have loved to have been able to download their speech patterns and dialects.  If I could effortlessly speak as they do it would be just a little piece of heaven.  When I speak people say “are you from Texas?”  Please.  I don’t even acknowledge Texas.  Well, my husband has an aunt who lives there that we love to the moon and back but she’s really from Kansas so I don’t feel like dissing Texas is being rude to her.  But the true south, the real old south, that’s the accent that sounds like money.  It’s southern east coast, but don’t get all the way down to Florida because then you will hear accents that are from much further north and much, much further south. 

I like that my children, the gypsy children anyway, think that I have a southern accent.  It adds dimension to my life.  I like to think that the people they tell that to think Scarlett O’Hara and not Granny Clampett.  Perhaps they envision me sitting on some huge old porch attached to some antebellum mansion with a mint jullep and a parasol.  Spanish moss is dripping off the trees in the yard and I am watching the sun set over the rows and rows… of golfers that are out on the course that day.  (You didn’t really think I would live on a farm did you?)  I know it’s silly but I’m fond of the sounds of the southern tongue.  Not hick…southern.  It soothes me.  It always has.  It means calm and collected, and for some reason people who come from cooler climates (further north and east) seem to have voices that effect me like fingernails on chalkboards.  It may not make sense to you but it makes perfect sense to me, and I have always assumed that for people from the north it is the same.  You need to hear the mother tongue to feel at peace.  It’s just that the mother tongue I need to hear is a little further south and east.  Perhaps I was adopted.