By Edie Everette / Herald Forum
Back when I took risks for what I thought was love, I moved from the Pacific Northwest to Arkansas.
Even though nobody moved to Arkansas, only away from it, a certain jazz guitarist made me travel to a state that contained the most poisonous North American vipers. Queue that Billie Holiday song: love can make you drink and gamble and stay out all night long; love can make you do things that you know is wrong.
One of my favorite things about Arkansas were the colloquialisms. When you walked into an establishment instead of saying “hi,” the person working there would say, “Ya doin’ alright?” And instead of saying “goodbye,” they’d say, “We appreciate ya!” They could use entire sentences for salutations because there was time; time to eat long lunches of chicken livers with gravy followed by a wedge of cream pie; time for front-porch conversations with the neighbor whose cat weighed 35 pounds.
Once there, I adopted the accent quicker than an armadillo leaps straight up when you surprise him in the woods. I loved the Ozark Mountain accent with its shifted vowels and Scotch-Irish ties, but mostly the way it made me feel: Looser limbed and playful, as if talking were a song. Maybe I’d been longing to feel closer to my father’s side of the family, the side that was “close to the earth,” the relatives we rarely saw who smoked and swore and sold cheap perfume door to door.
I came home one holiday with my new, borrowed accent and told my mother that I wanted to become southern, to become who I was really meant to be: A long-haired girl who ate fries without guilt and made babies with a hardworking man. A gal who never felt compelled to jog, calmly removed ticks and read fashion magazines. In other words, my opposite.
My mama shook her head and simply said, “No.”
This was discouraging. Didn’t she realize how dazzling it felt to belong to a place that acted like another planet? A place where 19-inch-tall pileated woodpeckers chiseled such big chunks of bark off the trees that you needed to wear a hardhat? Didn’t she know that an aspirin-caffeine powder folded up in white paper that waitresses stirred into their Cokes was sold in stores? That birds perched on the side mirrors of cars stared down their reflections, believing themselves the enemy?
But I didn’t belong to the south. I could only be an interloper to another culture, a pretender. I was born a Yankee, raised way north of the shifting border line that divided the Union and Confederate states during the American Civil War. I have none of that particular tragic history in my bones, unless you count bawling on the couch at 3 a.m. after finishing reading “Gone With the Wind” in the eighth grade.
After the jazz guitarist and I broke up, I moved back home to what I was accustomed to: slugs instead of flying cockroaches, salmon bakes instead of chitterling festivals, the magic of Luby’s cafeteria style restaurant versus The Royal Fork.
I still drop into a southern accent now and again, becoming euphoric when someone asks, “Where are you from?”
Edie Everette is a writer and news junkie who lives in Index.
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