About the South

It never gets old to see an outsider come to the South for the first time. Whether it be someone from the Northeastern United States, sunny California, or another country, they all seem amazed by the South. I feel I can write this because I have spent nine months in Korea, nearly two years in Boston and nearly two years in Washington, D.C. I have been around, worked with, and made friends with many city folks, many coastal elites, and many foreign nationals and immigrants. Many of them take a liking to me immediately for one reason, not my personality or my looks, but my accent. There are two very contrasting stereotypes when it comes to the Southern accent. The good one: it is very charming. The bad one: it sounds unintelligent. I’m not sure what sounds so unintelligent about it, have you ever heard the Bostonian or New Yorker accent? And we sound unintelligent? Once while living in Boston, my parents came to see me. My boyfriend’s parents invited them to their home for a visit and the six of us were outside talking. My mom and his mom were sitting with their feet in the pool talking. At the other end of the pool, my dad and his dad were in lawn chairs talking. Now my dad is an Arkansas country hick, and his dad has a blue-collar Boston brogue. Mat (the boyfriend) and I just sat back and watched them for a while and couldn’t figure out if they were even having the same conversation. I’m not sure the dads understood much of what each other said the whole weekend.

While in Boston I tried hard to get rid of the accent. I was attending a liberal university with my conservative values that apparently showed in my work, and the accent wasn’t helping me prove my worthiness to attend such an institution. Also, the first thing I ever got from anyone I met was, “Aww, I love your accent,” said in the same voice you would tell a six-year-old you love their light-up shoes. Is it a compliment or degrading? I never was sure. So, the best thing to do was get rid of the accent. I am good at picking up on accents when listening, but not so much when speaking. I eventually got away from the Southern accent just enough that I didn’t speak with a Boston accent, and I didn’t speak with a Southern accent, so I sounded funny in Boston and at home. Not what I had hoped. I left Boston and moved to Little Rock where I sounded uppity. Oh well. The Army would prepare me for Washington, D.C., because there are people from all over the world there, as in the Army where I was stationed.

For those above the Mason-Dixon line, you should know that there is no one Southern accent. There are many. Though there are subtle differences between most, it is difficult even for us to understand each other sometimes. As a northeastern Arkansan, folks from southern Louisiana can sound like they are from another country. There are as many southern dialects as there are quills on a porcupine. 😊

The vernacular in the South is foreign to those outside our borders (our southern borders). I had to change several things in my normal speech when I left Arkansas. First of all, the first time I said, “I’m fixin’ to…” everyone at the table just stared at me like I started glowing. My response was “what happened?” Someone was kind enough to tell me they didn’t understand what that meant. I also gave up ‘y’all’, ‘soda’, ‘supper’ and ‘ain’t’. Thankfully I never picked up ‘yous guys’ and ‘tonic’, I do use ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’ now instead of ‘dinner’ and ‘supper’, and it is very, very rare that ‘ain’t’ leaves my mouth unless I am making a point. Occasionally I will say, “I’m all set,” when a waiter asks if I need anything else and I am finished with my meal. I now pronounce pin and pen, and tin and ten differently, so I did pick up some good habits in my travels. For the most part, however, the Southern accent is back and probably here to stay, it may just sound a little more polished, hopefully.

About a year ago, I started talking to a guy. Well, we never spoke to each other, we only texted. For months and months, only text. We grew to know each other very well, but never spoke to each other. The way he wrote I expected someone who spoke way above my head with an intelligent accent and big words, a very eclectic type. The day finally came for us to speak on the phone, before we were to meet for the first time. His voice and accent didn’t match anything that I had expected. He had a very charming southern accent with a Mcconaugheyesque cadence. I felt like a stupid teenage girl again, I was so mesmerized by his voice I wasn’t hearing what he was saying, and I certainly couldn’t respond with anything intelligent. I was shocked he still wanted to meet me, but he did, and I’m very happy about that. I never get tired of hearing him speak. 😊 There is something about an intelligent, handsome man with a southern accent. 😉

There are things about the South that are not that great that I noticed during my travels. In the cities and in Korea, there are very few obese people. There are probably several reasons for this. People eat on the go often, if they eat at all. People walk everywhere. There are usually much healthier options available, but I think the number one reason is because the food in the South just tastes so much better and we eat a lot of it.

Now that I am older, I am understanding the importance of eating healthier foods. It is rare that I eat fried food, and very rare that I cook fried food. I eat more colorful stuff and less brown and white stuff. I steam or air fry just about everything. I cannot deny that if there is fried chicken, okra, squash, mashed potatoes and cornbread set in front of me that I will eat until I am sick. I love comfort food, but I try to stay away from it nowadays. This was never an issue in Boston. The only fried food available that wasn’t chain fast food, was calamari and the thought of eating squid was never appealing to me. To me, food in Boston had no flavor. I remember one Sunday when my boyfriend’s family was going to have a big formal dinner at the dining room table with the fine China. Mat was so excited about ‘boiled dinner’ and said they very rarely got it and it was a big treat for the whole family. His mom worked on this dinner all day. I finally asked what it was. Are you ready for this? The dinner was: boiled corned beef, boiled turnips, boiled potatoes, and boiled Vidalia onions. I think the turnips got mashed and there was probably some bread. Not a lick of seasoning in the whole meal, except maybe some salt. I know I had to salt mine, and I rarely have to add salt to my meals. Everyone at the table thought this was the greatest meal and I was choking it down wondering if any of them had been blessed with tastebuds.

This wasn’t my only weird food experience in Boston. Mat and his friend took me to a place that I think was called Redbones. They told me I would like it because it was Southern food. I was excited but when I walked in the door, the smell wasn’t right, the food didn’t look right, and it absolutely didn’t taste right. I’m sure it was to barbecue what my accent was to a Bostonian dialect. I tried to act tickled to death, after all, it is the thought that counts. One night we went to a bar to watch a game. I was again, with Mat and his friends. There were several of us sitting at the bar. I was sitting next to Mat, and he had three friends on the other side of him. One of them was a comedian who I thought looked like Neil Diamond. His name was Mark (still is, I’m sure). This bar had jalapeño poppers. I was so excited to see them on the menu, I had to order some. When my order came, Mark asked me what I had, and I told him. He opened his mouth for me to throw him one. He missed it with his mouth but caught it in his hand and threw the whole thing in his mouth. I got Mat’s attention and told him to “watch this,” and pointed to Mark. Mark’s face went from laughing, to serious, to eyes wide, to chugging the pint of beer in front of him. We all started laughing at him and he turned to me, red-faced, shaking his finger, saying, “that was a good one.”

For most of us in the South, a jalapeño popper is a nice little snack, and we can eat an order of four of them at the Sonic and go on with life, but when you are used to eating food with no flavor, a little jalapeno can mess you up, apparently. It was very funny.

Please don’t get me wrong, there was some very good food in Boston, it was the Italian food and Korean food, and Thai food; all the food that didn’t originate in the British Isles that Boston has come to call their own.

Finally, I want to talk about people and culture. I did love the coastal culture of New England. I loved the clean ocean air; I loved the cool summers and the cold winters. I loved the sailboats and the rocky beaches. Other than the cool summers and cold winters, the rest can also be found in the South if I wanted to move to the coast. Then I would have to worry about hurricanes, there are pros and cons everywhere.

I’ve always heard that northerners are rude. I did not encounter that any more in the North than in the South. What I did notice is that when you are packed into a subway car like sardines, one has to tune out everyone around them, especially the five who are pressed up against you at any given moment. Any time I ever asked a stranger for assistance, they were always kind to help, so I don’t think that it is rudeness, I think that they are so used to tuning out the world around them as a survival mechanism. No one is going to be as kind as the folks you find down here in the South. That doesn’t necessarily make others rude. In the North that I saw, most people had no idea who their neighbors were, they just knew if they were well-behaved and followed the HOA rules. If you met someone on the road and they greeted you with a finger in the air, it didn’t mean, “hey there?” like it does here. If you come to a stop before someone else, it is your turn to go, there is no letting someone go before you or you are letting them cut in front of all the people behind you and that isn’t fair to those folks. That isn’t being rude, that is just everyone taking their turn. It is just a different way of thinking.

A good number of people in the South still have the mentality of respecting their elders. They say answer with “yes, Sir”, “no, Ma’am” out of respect if they don’t know your name. Many in our woke society are saying this is outdated and disrespectful of non-binary people, but no one means anything but respect when they say these things and that is how it should be understood. Here we hold the door for the person behind us. One would think that would be expected instead of letting the door close in someone’s face, but apparently it is a southern thing, I’ve been told. We like to work hard and play hard and do it outdoors. In the South we have beautiful lawns with gorgeous gardens and landscaping. Many of our houses are kept pristine, but not as much as our trucks. We take pride in our homes, our animals, and our toys (the boats, side-by-sides, guns, campers, smokers). We are tough in the South. We will work outside in the deadly sun rays, soupy humidity, and swarms of mosquitos, while sucking pesticides into our lungs with every breath, not for money, but to make the place look good, or to have fun. Yes, we’re nuts, tough nuts.

So many of us are God-fearing but can’t agree on anything, so there is a church on every corner and sometimes several between those. Almost all of them are protestant Christian churches. Sunday potlucks, funeral visitations, and town picnics are social events.

I had a long-distance cousin in Delaware, who had been communicating with my grandpa over the years. When my grandpa died, he drove down for the funeral. On visitation night, the line to get into the building was out the door. People kept pouring in, but few were leaving. Everyone just stayed around talking. He told me he had never seen such a thing. The next day when we went to the cemetery and everyone pulled off the road for us to pass, he didn’t understand what was going on. We told him that is just what we do to show respect. There are so many things we do and never think about that cause outsiders to just scratch their heads.

When he came for a visit, it was in October after the cotton harvest. This was before the tightly bound round bails, and the big rectangular modules left a lot of cotton along the roadway on the way to the gin. He asked us what all that white stuff was along the highway and was amazed when we told him it was cotton. He had never seen raw cotton before.

People have misconceptions about the South. When I lived in other places, I heard some of the strangest things. I was asked if I had ever seen snow. I said that yes, I had, I didn’t live that far south. My boyfriend told me once that he couldn’t come home with me because he didn’t have a passport. I asked him if he was serious. He said he was. I yelled at him. “It is the same country!” Someone once asked me if there was something wrong with the corn, all of it they saw in the fields on the way, was dying. They were worried about my dad’s crops. I had to reassure them that the corn had to die so it could dry and be picked. The best, and worst, one I heard was on a bus in Boston the day of the Westside school shooting in Jonesboro, Arkansas. There were two women sitting close to me and the bus was near empty. They were talking about the shooting. One said she didn’t understand how a kid that young could get a gun. The other responded that in the South that we gave small kids guns so they can hunt for food. That was how we survived down here. I wanted to tell them we also didn’t get our first shoes until we started school and all the women stayed barefoot and pregnant while the menfolk brought home the varmints for us to cook.

Arkansas has its own claim to fame, apparently worldwide. While in Korea I got into a taxicab and the driver asked me where I was from. I replied, “Arkansas”. He said, “Ahhhhhh, Biwww Kwinton!” with a big grin. I just smiled at him in the mirror and shook my head in the affirmative. The South gets a bad rap, mostly because of history and economic trends, but the most beautiful land and the nicest people in the country live in the South. We are just as smart as anyone else, and about some things, much more so. Most stereotypes about the South are false, but it is ok if they don’t want to come down here and breathe our clean air and drink our clean water and have our rich natural resources. I don’t mind the South, actually I quite like it, if we could just get rid of the heat, humidity and mosquitoes, I would like it more.

May God continue to bless the South with all our pros and cons, and keep those away who talk bad about us because we don’t need them down here ruining our part of the world and way of life.