Long Time Leaving (19 page)

It was different at David's house. I spent the night there. At breakfast, there was grapefruit.

“Ew,”
I said. “I can't stand grapefruit!”

There followed, as well there should have, an awkward pause. My mother would have killed me, figuratively, for being so rude. But there was something else in the air.

I looked over at David. “I mean,” I said, one boy to another, “have you ever tasted grapefruit right after milk?”

“Don't taste it right after milk, then,” he said.

It hit me that I was wrong. Not only had I hurt David's and his parents’ feelings, which carried a different weight with me than my mother's did, because theirs did not assert the force of fiat. I had also caught myself nursing a repugnance, with unjustifiable pride. A more enlightened gut response began to dawn. I could ride with difference, with strangeness even, into a more bountiful life.

That little experience may not strike you as dramatic enough to be seminal. For that matter, you may doubt the sensitivity of my granddaughter's tastebuds when I tell you that two days after her betrayal by bacon and eggs, I caught her licking the screen door. She didn't go yuck, she didn't go yum. She looked like she was filing a sensation away, without fear or favor. Atta girl, said the grapefruit.

W
hen I brought up the
Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English
recently in Greeneville, Tennessee, book-loving residents of the Smokies gave me narrow looks. “Is it one of those kitschy things?” they asked. “Is it a Cracker Barrel book?”

No, I assured them, you will not find this book next to the cash register in one of those chain providers of quasi-home cooking off the interstate. This book provides real home cooking, with the bark on. And that is nearly an unmixed metaphor. Under “splunge,” for instance, we read: “She would fill the kittel to the crack with muddy water and splunge chips and leaves down deep into it with her hands and watch it close till she said it was done enough to eat.”

Nor is this book all roughage. Under “wonderly” we read: “I have been thinking what a wonderly sight it will be to sit by the fire and look at the snow through all them new glass winders!”

The
DSME
is the product of sixty years’ work by two scholars. Beginning back in the thirties, Joseph S. Hall visited and revisited Appalachian communities in a top-of-the-ridge area along the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, gathering distinctive bits of language. After Hall's death, Michael B. Montgomery edited the fruits of his research into a volume about the size of three good bricks. But this is no compendium of archaic expressions remote from contemporary usage. It's a gust of pungence, a loamy clump of roots, a big mess of pottage.

As opposed to potted message. Listen long enough to nattering heads holding forth on TV about, say, “wedge issues,” and you can lose touch with the core meaning of “wedge” (not to mention of “core”). “When you read that mountain folk, to this day, call a literal wood-splitting wedge a “glut,” you can feel the give of the American-English grain.

I'm writing too vividly, aren't I? It is this book's fault. But its influence, I believe, will be largely benign. Polluted as the meme pool is today by marketing slogans, maundering pieties, TV catchphrases, threadbare obscenities, affected emotion, and media self-regard (how's that for an
ugly turn of phrase?); inured as we have become to hearing it said of a politician that he is striving to “humanize himself;” resigned as we may be to corporate executives’ or government officials’ invoking faceless personnel (not to mention terrorists) as “folks”—it should do us good to learn that people somewhere in this artificially flavored land refer unfacetiously to an easily swallowed morsel as “a slick go-down.” These are people regularly humanized by creek water that is “straddle-deep” (up to the crotch), wild flowers that are not “fotched-on” (store-bought or imported), and free-range bears (“I heered the old she [bear] pop-pin’ her teeth”).

Why would those people in Greeneville assume that the Hall-Montgomery work is kitsch? Because so many books, fond or snarky, that purport to explicate Southern manners and language assume that the subject is a hoot. Professor Hall, a Californian with a PhD in linguistics from Columbia, ventured into the Smokies with a receptive mind, and returned again and again with relish. Maureen Duffin-Ward, a Philadelphia native working there in TV, moved six years ago, for the sake of her husband's job, to Raleigh, North Carolina, with deep reservations. She has parlayed her resistance to local mores into a column for the
Raleigh News & Observer,
a monthly radio show called “Don't You Be My Neighbor,” and now a book:
Suddenly Southern: A Yankee's Guide to Living in Dixie.

As a Southerner relocated more or less voluntarily in the North, I can relate, on the one hand, to someone who finds aspects of the South uncongenial and, on the other hand, to someone who gets tired of being told “You're not from around here.” But a change of address ought to give some perspective on where you come from, as well as where you landed. Duffin-Ward asserts (not without reason) that Southerners regard everybody from outside the South as a Yankee. That, she seems to feel, gives her standing to speak for the category as a whole, but in fact her perspective is narrower. For instance, she can't get over the fact that in the South giving money as a wedding present is a faux pas, which I would say is the case in more places than not, nationwide. A certain amount of unwitting provinciality is universal, to be sure, even among authors, and may add spice. But anyone who got such a hackneyed and unreflective book as this out of moving from Raleigh to Philadelphia (taking Philadelphia as “the North”) would rightly be dismissed as a rube.

In one part of her book, Duffin-Ward undertakes to analyze the DNA of Yankees vis-à-vis that of Southerners. To Yankees, she attributes a chromosome called “Ability to laugh at themselves;” to Southerners, one
called “We'll tell the jokes around here.” To Yankees, “Sense of irony;” to Southerners, “Error, Error.” Will people who detect a lack of irony in other cultures never stop to consider that this may be a sign of their own irony deficiency? Maybe it's defensible when the apes detect a lack of irony in Charlton Heston, in
Planet of the Apes,
but not when, say, Brits detect it in, say, Americans as a race, and not when anyone as inattentive as Duffin-Ward detects it in anybody.

The point of irony, after all, is to say things behind people's backs to their faces. If you look around the poker table and can't tell who the pigeon is, it's you. That might explain Duffin-Ward's success in Raleigh media—but no, I think it more likely that she is part of a trend. Recently I became aware of an airy new Southern lifestyle publication—
Y'all, the Magazine of Southern People—
out of Oxford, Mississippi (a place of considerable cultural prestige), which might better be entitled
Y'all, the Magazine That Doesn't Know What Its Own Name Means.
In its premiere issue, in a little box inserted into a column about how to speak Southern,
Y'all
declared that “ ‘Y'all’ is singular. ‘All y'all’ is plural.” That bit of blatant misinformation also appears in the “Dixie Dictionary” portion of
Suddenly Southern.

I don't know whether
Y'all
picked this up from Duffin-Ward, or vice versa. She is not the first non-Southerner to insist that Southerners may call a single person “y'all,” but to my knowledge she is the first to declare categorically, in the face of everyday evidence and all philological authority, that it is always a single person we so address. And now she is in league, on this point, with a Southern magazine—which in its most recent issue features her and her book enthusiastically. Well, she has a lot of pep.

But she isn't one to brook elucidation. With regard to the singularity of “y'all,” she writes: “Southerners will beg to differ here. They insist that even though they use it to address one person,
it implies
plurality.”

Something, either second-person-plural envy or hyperjocularity, has affected Duffin-Ward's ear. People in the South do indeed sometimes seem to be addressing a single person as “y'all.” For instance, a restaurant patron might ask a waiter, “What y'all got for dessert tonight?” In that case “y'all” refers collectively to the folks who run the restaurant. No doubt the implication of plurality is hard for someone who didn't grow up with it to discern. It may even be that Duffin-Ward has heard a native speaker, in real life, violate deep-structure idiom by calling a single person “y'all.” That would be arguable grounds for saying that “y'all” is singular on occasion. But how can she have missed daily instances of
people unmistakably addressing two or more people as “y'all”? When a parent calls out to three kids, “Y'all get in here out of the rain,” does she think only one child is being summoned? (“All y'all” is of course an extended plural: “Y'all listen up! I mean
all
y'all.” Often it is pronounced “Aw yaw.”)

One reason Duffin-Ward can so breezily dismiss Southerners’ own explanations of what they mean is that she implicitly—and her illustrator, explicitly—takes “Southerners” to mean “white Southerners.” The Southern types she delineates by their attire and accessories are as follows: “Daddy” (pink golf shirt, wrinkle-free khakis, and so on), “Politico” (panama fedora, bolo tie with Confederate flag), “Redneck” (spit cup, Stars and Bars trucker hat), “Southern Belle” (peach blouse, bow ribbon), “Daughter of the Confederacy” (khaki skirt, clutch purse), and “Mrs. Redneck” (denim miniskirt, tattoos). This is not the full spectrum of people, or even just politicos, in the South, or even just in Raleigh. I haven't spent much time in Raleigh, but enough to know that its populace includes a variety of fully visible black Southerners, not to mention more and more Mexican and Asian ones. (When I was in Greeneville, Tennessee, I heard a white workingman hail a Hispanic one as “Bubba.”) Reducing these people to stereotypes, however sportively, would not do. But ignoring them, in even a superficial treatment of what it's like to live in the South, is bizarre.

There was a time—a long time—when white Southerners, generally, expected to be regarded as a people apart from black Southerners (but even then it wasn't easy), and on that ground they, the white ones, deserved no better. But if Duffin-Ward has found herself in a circle of Raleighites who still invite that assumption, well, for one thing, you'd think she would have found that harder to accept than sweetened iced tea or the plurality of “y'all.”

The traditional culture of the Smokies is anything but ethnically diverse. Scotch-Irish, German, and English stock has predominated, in isolation, since the late eighteenth century. And yet many of the expressions defined
in DSME
appear also, with essentially the same meanings, in Clarence Major's primarily urban-hip (now out of print)
Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang.
For instance: “high blood,” “jump the broom,” “funky,” “sister,” “old lady,” “old man,” “poke” (meaning bag, though
DSME
says this is of German origin and
Juba
says Bantu), “pone” (meaning a swelling or growth on the body), “pot liquor,” “like” as in “like to laugh herself crazy,” “big” (meaning pregnant), “bodacious” (though
DSME
holds this to be “fanciful usage by outsiders, esp in comic
representations of mountain speech”), “devilment,” “dog my cats,” “doings” (as in “big doings”), “biggity,” “blue john,” “booger bear,” “breakdown,” “fuss at,” “goober” (meaning peanut, of African origin, both books agree), “hisself,” “joy juice,” “setting up” (meaning a wake for the dead), “step out on” (meaning commit adultery), “store-bought,” “sorry,” as in no-account, and for that matter “no account.” Paging through these two books side by side is to some extent integrative and to a greater extent dissociative, and poignant both ways.

Hall and Montgomery's respectably fotched-in research may under-represent, as Major's surely does not, the language of sexuality, or maybe in this regard Smoky Mountain culture is far less articulate. What
DSME
abounds in is terms richly evocative of tightness, narrowness, meager-ness: “scrootch,” “scrouge,” “squidge,” “squinch,” “scringe,” “scription,” “skiver,” “scanty, “spindling,” “squez” and “squoz” as past tenses of “squeeze,” “swively,” “swimp up” (to shrivel), “piddling,” “toddick” (a small amount), “weasely,” “shadow soup,” “smidgen.” These groove in with the references throughout to hard physical work: “She went down that row like a hen a-peckin’.” “She's the workin'est woman!” “I don't want to hear that nary another time, boys. I'm a-showing you how to work, and I mean for you to know how to work.” A machine operated by hand is called an “armstrong machine.” To “grabble” or to “granny” potatoes is to dig them up by hand and then smooth the dirt back, manu-ally, around the plant. To “groundhog it” is “to live on the poorest rations.” No one will pass casually over the expression “hardscrabble farm” after perusing this dictionary.

Not that everything in the world of this book is straightened or straitened. There are plenty of deeply felt and hard-earned terms to do with wildness and messiness: “splatterment,” “sprangly” (sprawling), “wooly bugger,” “shagnasty,” “antigodling” (askew). A free-range bear can help keep the wolf from the door (“wild pork” means bear meat), but it can also give a person “the all-overs” (the shivers).