I was delighted recently to hear from a distant Swafford relative about some of her forebears, to whom I\u2019m even more distantly related: \u201cStingy Jim\u201d Swafford of Sequatchie Valley, Tennessee, and his wife Mary Polly Nail. The latter is a splendid moniker. In her childhood I can hear her mother crying, \u201cMary Polly Nail, you come down outen that tree this instant or you\u2019re lookin for a whoopin! You hear me, Mary Polly?\u201d According to my relative, one day as Stingy Jim lay on his deathbed Mary Polly was in the kitchen making coffee. He hollered to her, \u201cGo there easy on the coffee!\u201d Those were Stingy Jim\u2019s last words.<\/p>\n
Except how he would have said that would have been roughly: \u201cGo thar aisy awn the cawfee.\u201d That brings up some thoughts about the accent I grew up with in various Tennessee towns of my childhood, mainly Chattanooga and Riceville, the latter where my mother was born and my grandparents lived, a red-dirt village of some 400 souls and maybe 200 cattle and swine. I\u2019m thinking about how to spell the way we actually talked. For example, the mammalian head. \u201cHead\u201d in Southern is usually represented on the page as \u201chaid,\u201d but that\u2019s misleading\u2014it reads as \u201chayd.\u201d What that spelling is trying and failing to convey is how it\u2019s actually pronounced, which is \u201chayid,\u201d a classic Southern diphthong. So misleading is the usual spelling that when we did the musical Oklahoma<\/em> in my Chattanooga high school we pronounced the word haid in the script as \u201chayd,\u201d even though a lot of us in real life said \u201chayid.\u201d<\/p>\n That brings up the pronunciation of a familiar Southern phrase. In Standard English it would be, \u201cI am going to knock your head off.\u201d Where I grew up, that was properly pronounced, \u201cAhm\u2019o knock yore hayid awf.\u201d Which I submit is a more vivid and efficient way of threatening somebody with decapitation. \u201cAhm\u2019o\u201d is my favorite of all contractions: \u201cI am going to\u201d squashed into two syllables. That\u2019s Southern genius, such as it is. \u201cAhm\u2019o go downtown. Yawngo?\u201d My best friend in Riceville was named Morrow, which was pronounced Marr.<\/p>\n One whole summer in Riceville my friends and I were at any opportunity exclaiming \u201cHot-O-Molly!\u201d, which was our version of Hot Tamale. On blazing hot days\u2014which was most days in the summer– we frequented a swimming hole in the creek that my grandfather had dug out for the kids in the 1920s. At the hole you could do two fun things: splash around in the shallow water, or shoot cottonmouths with a .22. If you wanted to swim it was a good idea to chase the snakes away first. We\u2019d throw rocks, or a couple of us would do a cannonball into the creek. (Boys in Riceville got a .bb gun at eight, a .22 at ten, a shotgun at fourteen. I was a visiting city kid so didn\u2019t get guns, but I used to go out with my friends hunting. I still remember the gamy smell of rabbit blood.)<\/p>\n Also comes to mind my Chattanooga schooldays friend Kevin, who was tall. He grew up in Manhattan, so had a Yankee accent and thought Southerners talked funny. His little-kid neighbor used to play a game in which he would climb up Kevin’s body. He called his game, “Peter Spider climbing up a tree.” Kevin reported that in the kid\u2019s pronunciation it came out, “Peter Spahder climbin hup a tray.” The kid\u2019s father was Superintendent of Schools for Chattanooga.<\/p>\n When my mother used to call me in college and my roommates answered they\u2019d crack up at her accent. I’d remind them that she had a Master’s in Speech from the University of Chattanooga. Every year in my Jr. High school the principal would announce over the intercom the annual Kiwanis Club Oratorical Contest. With him it came out, “The Ky-wanis Club Artarcal Contest.” Could he have won an Artarcal Contest in Chattanooga?<\/p>\n The next linguistic item is a little racy, so be warned. I learned many of my best cusswords at that swimming hole in Riceville. One of the terms I learned was \u201ccock,\u201d meaning the female genitalia. You heard right. Every kid I knew used that term for lady parts. For me this persisted until eighth grade, when I happened to use the locution in front of Kevin, the New York import noted above. \u201cA cock isn\u2019t a pussy, you idiot!\u201d he sputtered. \u201cA cock is a dick!\u201d I stood corrected. Kevin later attended Columbia in English and he was already concerned with the proper use of language. Many years later I mentioned all this, for some reason, to my writer cousin John Bowers, who grew up in Johnson City, Tennessee. I told him I assumed it was some incomprehensible mixup by local kids where I grew up. Not at all, John said. Cock is a common term for women\u2019s junk in the lower South; that\u2019s the way he used it in childhood. As to why it was common usage, I\u2019d like to know. It may be one of many indications of characteristic Southern intelligence and connection to reality. I could cite more.<\/p>\n When I was a senior in high school I took lessons with the principal trombonist of the Atlanta Symphony. That involved getting up at 5AM and driving there from Chattanooga (on two-lane roads, pre-interstate) for a 9:30 lesson on Saturday morning. (That year I was first-chair trombone in the Tennessee All-State Band, one of the leading distinctions of my life.) As I drove I would keep myself awake reciting vowels, trying to lose the diphthongs: learning to say aee eee eye oh you<\/em> instead of aiee eee ah owh yiu<\/em>. I wanted to get rid of my Southern accent because I was intending to become not only a famous composer and conductor like Leonard Bernstein, but a famous actor too. And famous actors didn\u2019t have hick accents like mine. (In high school I was named Best Actor in the yearbook Senior Superlatives for my hearty performance as Mr. Antrobus in The Skin of Our Teeth.<\/em>) In practice my Southern accent withered away at college in the East. I miss it. It had some character as compared to how I speak now, which doesn\u2019t sound like anyplace in particular.<\/p>\n I was born in Chattanooga, but for about three years before I was four we lived in my father\u2019s natal house in Etowah, Tennessee, a smallish town straddling the railroad. A while back I was contacted by my father\u2019s niece, Peggy, who grew up in Etowah. Talking to her on the phone, I suddenly realized that she didn\u2019t have a Southern accent. I asked her why. \u201cEtowahans mostly didn\u2019t have the accent,\u201d she said. \u201cThat\u2019s because it started as a railroad town, and a lot of the population were imported there by the company from out of the region.\u201d From that I realized that there were other abiding effects of the town\u2019s founding: the streets were wide and well laid out, many of the houses relatively elegant, and there was a certain sophistication in the town temperament that to say the least doesn\u2019t usually mark smallish Southern towns. My mother taught highschool English in Etowah and had stories about her students from the sticks. One of them was obsessed with Napoleon Bonaparte. Once he arrived in class full of enthusiasm and declared to her: \u201cYou know, Miz Johnson, they ain\u2019t no flies on that Napoleon.\u201d<\/p>\n (I just looked up \u201cnatal\u201d to see if I used it correctly above and was startled to learn that, according to my computer thesaurus, the adjective can mean either \u201cof birth\u201d or \u201cof buttocks.\u201d You\u2019ve got to be careful with that one.)<\/p>\n Two final accounts of Southern volubility. Some years back my brother and I were visiting Chattanooga and having lunch at a BBQ place. A family sat down behind us. After a heavy silence, the grandmother spoke: \u201cYou know, if thar\u2019s one thang ah don\u2019t lahk, <\/em>it\u2019s apple pie<\/em>.\u201d Thoughtful silence. \u201cAh just don\u2019t lahk<\/em> it.\u201d More contemplation. \u201cSeems lahk everbody lahks it, but ah don\u2019t<\/em>. Mah husband<\/em> likes it. Mah brother Frank<\/em> likes it. But ah don\u2019t lahk<\/em> it.\u201d The family were clearing their throats. \u201cSome people put a piece \u2018o cheese<\/em> on it. Covers up the whooole top<\/em>! But Ah. Don\u2019t. Lahk <\/em>it.\u201d This went on, but you get the idea.<\/p>\n I told this story to my soprano friend Wanda, who used to work in Louisiana, and she responded with a story from a master class she gave at, I think, LSU. A girl got up to sing and Wanda asked her what the song was about. Crooned the girl: \u201cAh\u2019m fixin to sing a song about a swan<\/em> that\u2019s fixin to die.\u201d Wanda made the suggestion that perhaps she could phrase her introduction more elegantly. The aspiring soprano looked puzzled. \u201cOkay,\u201d she said, \u201cI\u2019m gonna sing a song about a swan that\u2019s fixin to die.\u201d<\/p>\n Back to Etowah. My paternal grandfather left his prosperous lumber business on the railroad to my father rather than to his brother. It turned out a poor decision. As my mother learned only some time later, good old dad lost the lumber business playing poker. This I think influenced her decision to throw him the hell out. On the other hand, as my brother once observed, if dad had not perpetrated that, my brother and I might have ended our days sitting in the office beside the railroad in Etowah growling to each other on the order of, \u201cThere\u2019s another load \u2018o two-by-fours comin\u2019 in and don\u2019t overpay it this time, you son of a bitch.\u201d<\/p>\n I digress. About 25 years ago I went with my brother and mother and cousin John Bowers and his wife to the Edgemon Family Reunion in Tullahoma, Tennessee. It was held in the old and extensive family graveyard, which as I remember was landscaped mostly in red dirt. This was my grandfather\u2019s family on his mother\u2019s side\u2014she was Kizzy Edgemon, if I remember right. (There\u2019s an Edgemon Ave. in Tullahoma.)<\/p>\n At the cemetery we found a tent under which sat a large woman before a large book. They were the Edgemon family archive and archivist. I introduced myself. \u201cSo you\u2019re Jan, Lucille\u2019s son and Lawrence\u2019s grandson and Kizzy\u2019s great-grandson. Let\u2019s see.\u201d She licked her thumb and turned to my page. \u201cAll righty,\u201d she said, \u201clast thing it says here is you went to Harvard. What have you been doing since then?\u201d The school information would have come from Lawrence. She noted down my later history. Cousin John\u2019s wife, who was of Russian-Jewish extraction, told us this was all exotic to her. She had no idea of her genealogy beyond two generations back, in the old country.<\/p>\n My ancestors, in other words, were pretty much rednecks. The only distinguished person I know of in my family to date was my maternal grandmother Beulah\u2019s father, Gray by name, who was a medical doctor and a dentist. At the height of his career he invested every penny he had building a new office in Riceville. Beulah said he supplied it with twelve sheets of gold to use for fillings. The office burned to the ground the day before it opened. In the next years great-grandfather Gray gave up medicine for a position as town drunk. It\u2019s easier and the hours are good.<\/p>\n Accents. One of the things I appreciate about William Faulkner is that he conveys a range of Mississippi dialects, from poor whites and blacks to tradesmen and the middle class, and he does it more with rhythm and phrasing than with the convoluted spellings that some (like me and Mark Twain) resort to. He can also add resonances with a representation of a phrase. In one novel a woman keeps saying about her hapless and penniless husband: \u201cHe aint got no more despair.\u201d (Hmmm. I recall Faulkner saying in an interview that in his early years the best employment offer he ever had was to be manager of a whorehouse. He said it\u2019s a pretty soft job. You just have to keep track of what the ladies are up to, get the trash out, and pay off the police now and then. It leaves your mornings free, which is the best time for writing, and in the evenings you don\u2019t have to go out to enjoy a social life. He may have been exaggerating. On another occasion Faulkner told an interviewer he was the offspring of a negro slave and an alligator, both of them named Gladys Rock. I\u2019m not making this up.)<\/p>\n I digress again. Besides redneck, my family are also mongrels\u2014English, Scottish, and I don\u2019t know what-all. But the Edgemon part is Dutch, a corruption of Egmont. This is, of course, a legendary family in Holland. As I tell people, I\u2019m related to a play by Goethe and an overture and incidental music by Beethoven.<\/p>\n An erratic mixture of redneck and educated I think marks my family and me too, in my way. My mother Lucille and her brother Larry both went to college, small denominational ones in Tennessee, she majoring as I remember in English and Psychology, Larry majoring mainly in girls. Mother became a highschool English teacher noted for her vigorous promotion of literature, her histrionic poetry readings, her teaching of grammar by having students write poems and short stories. As she said, she was teaching not just grammar but creativity. I was probably foreordained–maybe doomed is the better word–to some sort of creative endeavor. Mother was not happy about my going into music because she had some idea of what a lousy job it is, but she supported me in it all the way. Trying to be helpful, she advised me to compose disco on the side. When I started writing prose she urged me to produce a naughty novel, under a pseudonym of course.<\/p>\n For all her devotion to literature on the job, at home we never knew Mother to read a book. Meanwhile she could stand in the middle of a museum gallery and name most of the famous painters at a distance. At home she had in the living room two prints, one Las Meninas<\/em> by Velasquez, sometimes called the greatest of all paintings, and the other a tacky tourist rendering of a barn in a field. She didn\u2019t really know the difference between the two. Mother was a Southern Baptist Republican who in my childhood would kneel down every night by the bed and pray. With her highschool literary magazine staff she would dress up in fancy pajamas, burn incense, and read them Beat poetry. Her heroes were Alan Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, though she regretted their use of dirty words. Many of her students thought she herself was a Beatnik, but she was generally appreciated and a bit marveled at. She was a star of the faculty. I like to think that I\u2019ve reached a more sophisticated stage in the arts and letters and career and so on. But I think I\u2019ve still got traces of the family mix of sophistication here and cluelessness there. Ask my ex-bosses, my ex-spouses, etc.<\/p>\n As soon as I can get to it I\u2019m going to post a memoir about my mother\u2019s brother, my Uncle Larry, one of those orphan stretches of prose I don\u2019t have much to do with but put in the blog. Also a memoir about my Southern boyhood, which in Chattanooga was largely boring and barely middle class, in Riceville more peculiar and interesting.<\/p>\n P.S. Actually I\u2019ve had some ideas about the naughty novel Mother wanted me to write. It would be structured in a sort of algebraic logic. The four characters I call A B C and D. The outer ones are male, the inner ones female. The couplings, as well as the tensions in the plot and denouement, would proceed logically: A + B; B + C; C + D; A + B + C; B + C + D; and for a grand final whizbang, A through D inclusively. Haven\u2019t gotten around to it, but you never know.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was delighted recently to hear from a distant Swafford relative about some of her forebears, to whom I\u2019m even more distantly related: \u201cStingy Jim\u201d Swafford of Sequatchie Valley, Tennessee, and his wife Mary Polly Nail. The latter is a splendid moniker. 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