Jeff Whitten

Columnist

The lady behind me in the checkout line the other day sounded like Joe Pesci.

That might’ve been unusual in this part of Georgia, once. Not now. These days it can seem just about every other woman in the Coastal Empire sounds like Joe Pesci, as decades of mass migration southward and childhoods spent parked in front of television screens have changed the way the place sounds.

Not that I have room to talk, mind you. My accent is all over the place, probably due to childhood trauma. On my first day of school in a sixth grade class at Bartlett-Begich High and Middle School in Anchorage, Alaska, I said “here” when the teacher, whose name was Mr. Harrington, called my name during roll call.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“South Carolina,” I answered, all too aware of what seemed like about 100 kids looking at me to see what sort of weirdo came from South Carolina.

“I thought so,” Mr. Harrington said. “You have a nice soft Southern accent.”

That sentence, and particularly that part about “nice” and “soft” stays with me now, half a century later.

How he figured out where I was from because of one word I still haven’t figured out. But oh boy, did I catch it from classmates.

Mind you, this was back in the 1970s when the movie Deliverance was popular, and in those pre-Jimmy Carter days being from the South and especially the rural South was looked down on in some places. I didn’t know that then; I just knew I didn’t like being singled out.

But I was. On that fateful day in 1973 I’d been discovered, and in the always perilous hallways of middle school America I knew I was probably in for it afterward. Only there was no probably about it.

Walking out of class and into the hallways, I heard it for the first time. “Hey boy, you sure do talk pretty,” voiced by a burly kid in snow pants and a ski hat, who had a hockey stick in his hand and ice skates around his neck. In Alaska, it seemed every kid over the age of 2 toted a hockey stick and ice skates around. And they all knew I talked pretty.

Which I likely did, in retrospect, because there’s nothing more beautiful in the spoken American language than a good Southern accent. Shelby Foote had one. So did Richard Davis. So does Johnny Miller and Frank Grimm and Jimmy Hires. They don’t all sound the same, because there isn’t a single Southern accent. It depends on where you’re from.

I’m particular to Rose Mock’s and Marcia Clark’s and Wendy Bolton’s and Wendy Futch’s, and Diane Sadler’s and Luella Sanders’ and Kathy Grimm’s and a thousand others. And my wife’s. Or the one that came barreling out of the mouth of my late aunt Retha Murray from Atlanta, who sounded like Paula Dean would sound if she chainsmoked Pall Malls and swore like a Marine and cackled like a crazy woman.

But back then none of that was obvious to me. I was just a new kid in a classroom trying to lay low and make it through the first day of school, and the next.

I think it was then I subconsciously decided I’d learn to blend in, and during moves from post to post during my career-Army father’s duty stations, and later my own time in uniform, I picked up the local lingo and inflections and adapted them as my own. There was even a time when I was stationed at Fort Bragg when I sounded like Bill or Ted, or both, of Excellent Adventure fame.

“No way, dude!” “Yes way, dude.” “Excellent!”

That’s also probably when and where I developed the unconscious smirk that comes unbidden to my face and makes my wife mad at me. But that’s another story–I digress.

I should know better, I know, but as a South Carolinian whose roots go back to well before the War When The Yankees Invaded America, as Granny Clampett put it during one memorable episode of the Beverly Hillbillies, I do on occasion tend to bemoan the ongoing fate of a part of the country I once heard described thusly, and I probably messed it up since I can’t remember where it’s from and Google hasn’t been any help: “The north, east and west are directions. The South is a place.”

It’s a place fast filling up with women who sound like Joe Pesci, and their husbands and children and grandchildren. To make room for them trees that perhaps stood when the Yamacraw Indians welcomed the first Europeans to this part of the world, and if not then at least were around when Sherman handed Savannah to President Lincoln as a Christmas present, have been and are being bulldozed and burned along with hundreds of thousands of their descendants – if trees have descendants like people do, and I don’t see why not.

That leads me to remembering that us Southerners weren’t here first, weren’t always here no matter how much we might like to think so. The Indians were here first, from here as far back as time itself goes, then we Europeans came, ran the Spanish off and elbowed the indigenous people out of the way by hook or crook. We of European origin brought people over from Africa in chains and worked them for our benefit for generations, then fought a bloody war to keep them from being free -- though in fairness to our forebears slavery has forever been and remains a horrible thing and a stain on our history and humanity, and in fairness to ourselves we had nothing to do with things that happened well over a century ago despite efforts by some to make it seem that way.

In the meantime, there are still places in the South you can go to hear a good accent, places that haven’t yet been discovered by the developers and the builders and the politicians and the carpetbaggers and sales teams and marketed into everywhere else and thus no different than anyplace else.

But give it time, and those places too will be gone, just like me and you and everybody else we know.

What will remain of this place, once it’s been developed as much down to the last square foot and gallon of water and profits have been maximized to the last decimal point, that’s what matters.

I hope, five or six generations from now, in this place, there will still be dolphins and Spanish moss on live oaks, and towering pines, and people to hold Juneteenth get togethers and Fourth of July celebrations and Easter egg hunts, and especially Gullahs and Geechees, and people who can say “bless your heart” and not screw it up. I hope those here then will still have the differences in language and outlook and tradition and not be some homogenized, filtered version of what we were, once.

I’m not hopeful, but I still have hope. Bless my heart.

Now retired, Whitten is a former editor of the Bryan County News.