My Southern Accent, Lost and Found

For years, I denied this part of myself, until I realized what I was missing

- Becca Andrews

BEFORE I THOUGHT I needed to shed my Southernness, I was proud of my heritage. As a child, I dreamed of raising Black Angus cattle the way my Uncle Ted did, scratching out a big vegetable bed, making a home on an acre or two of grass for barefoot children to run across until their soles itched.

There was no sound I loved more than my grandmother's accent: thick, sweet, warm, unencumbered.

When the phone rang, she answered with a throaty "mmmyyehllo?" My own voice reflected my family's past and present part northern Mississippi, part Tennessee delta, all southern.

As my childhood receded, I began to realize that outside of our region, southerners were often dismissed as uncultured and uneducated, ignorant and narrow-minded. I was ready to leave behind my tiny town in West Tennessee and start a new life in some far-off metropolis.

In that awkward space between teenager and adult, my accent was a symbol of everything I thought I hated about my life in the rural South. My conflation of vowels connoted ignorance. My elongation of final consonants gave away a rougharound-the-edges nature that I feared would disqualify me from being a lauded magazine writer.

My voice screamed out my class status. I thought I would have to talk less country. So I killed a piece of myself. I am ashamed of it, but I am more ashamed that I tried to kill that part of someone else.

I met Emily in college at Middle Tennessee State University, a school known for its affordability and its proximity to Nashville. She was determined to work for the student newspaper, which is where I spent most of my waking hours, and she decided we should be friends, and so we were.

She, unlike me, embraced her roots.