Long Time Leaving (20 page)

To a relatively epicene sensibility such as mine, the tang of this language is almost too sharp, like skunk smell or the lands and grooves of fingertips wet with kerosene. But some of it is familiar from rootsy popular music (“mess around,” “take a notion”), sports commentary (“snakebit”), western movies (“that-away,” “varmint,” “vittles”), biker or hippie slang (“old lady,” “old man”), politics (“that dog won't hunt”), and quaintsy gift shops (“gee-haw whimmy diddle”). My middle-class Atlanta-area parents—born in the Deep South just before World War I with close kin still on the farm—used many of these expressions, sometimes
with implicit quotation marks around them but never condescendingly, for which I am as thankful as I am that I took three years of Latin. “Store-bought,” “frolic,” “feist,” “stob,” “I swanny,” “tromp,” “ask the blessing,” “barefooted,” “ain't no,” “all-fired,” “a many a time,” “right porely,” “pickalilly,” “piddling,” “shirt-tail boy,” “didn't say pea-turkey,” “pully bone,” “snake in the grass,” “poor as Job's turkey”—some of these, as I look at them written down now, do seem dated, but current discourse is the more spindling for that.

A dictionary of vernacular terms can be as grim an overload as a slew (great many) of jokes off the Internet. The M
ME
is eminently readable. We get more and fuller examples of people's talk than are called for, lexicographically, because the authors love the quotes. For instance, under “sight”:

“I've studied about it a sight to figure out why the Lord made so much ivy and laurel, and I used to hate it in my young days, and then I just thought maybe hit wa'nt for no purpose but to be beautiful and that would have to be enough.”

You could say the same thing about why Americans have made so much language. The reason to hate mountain laurel would be that it's such a chore to get through and to clear away. Readers who hate, and dismiss, genuine dialect for its difficulty miss out on some beauty.

The dictionary includes a photograph of Hall looking undemonstratively sociable in the field. It is easy to imagine him chuckling drily along with people who told him things like “…the roughest country I was in. It was so steep the people had to look up the chimley to see if the cows was still in the pasture.”

Terror slips in under “awful to”:

“My daddy was an awful man to drink by spells, and I know once when the chimney hadn't got no further than your shoulder and no floor laid but enough for the bed to stand on, he went off and didn't come back when night come.”

Some of the expressions Hall brought back are poetically difficult, for instance, this double double-negative under “without”: “I never seen nary 'thout that wasn't one” (Literally, “I've never seen none, unless that wasn't one,” meaning “If that wasn't one, then I've never seen one.”)

And some of the characters in this book are as set in their ways as Duffin-Ward. For instance, the schoolchild who told the teacher, “Well, Miss Emily, here you're teaching us to say set and sit and sat…. At home we don't say nary one of 'em. Miss Emily, we just say sot. Hit don't matter if we're going to sot now or sot directly or sot an hour ago, still just sot.”

What a marvel regional speech is, for those who can get into it. People in Greeneville, Tennessee, assured me that there are still plenty of folks farther up in the hills, and even there in town, who speak Smoky English. But Southern talk doesn't have to be as rich as all that to be interesting. In Greenville's Sav-a-lot supermarket one afternoon, I was involved in a four-part conversation, of maybe three seconds’ duration, that illustrated the meanings of “y'all” and “all y'all.”

I was waiting to pay for pimiento cheese (something you can't get in the North) and soda crackers. In line ahead of me, a man was just reaching the register with what looked like a week's groceries for a big family. Behind me were two people holding as few items as I was: a young woman with a ring in her navel and a man wearing a housepaint-spattered T-shirt that said “The Savior: Stronger Than Nails.”

An employee showed up to open a second line. To the three of us holding few items, he said, “Couple y'all come over here.”

Partly out of politeness as to who would go first, and partly by way of time-and-motion assessment, we exchanged entirely sufficient glances and vocables without wasting a single syllable.

“Fact…,” I said.

“Time he's…,” said the T-shirt man.

“N’ more'n we've…,” said the pierced woman.

We were all three moving already as the new register man said, “Yeah, all y'all.”

L
et's see if I can re-create my train of thought. I was reading a reminiscence of the late poet James Merrill, by Richard

And I was thinking that, although I couldn't feature myself saying “my dear” to anybody, there must be a lot of fun in being a gay poet.
La camaraderie.
And then I thought how careful I would have to be, if I ever put such a sentiment in writing, to make it clear—given the loutishness of many people whose senses of humor overlap considerably with mine-that I did not mean to be at all deprecatory toward gay poets. (Possibly the
most personable,
and therefore one of the riskiest, of mid-twentieth-century poems is the late Frank O'Hara's “Autobiographia Literaria.” Check it out.)

And then I thought, what is my own tightest affinity group, when it comes to sense of humor? The more I thought about it, the more reprehensible this question became; surely every American should aspire to jokes so inclusive yet so multidirectional
(e pluribus, y'all)
as to leave no one entirely cold and no one wholly cozy. I believe in mixed company.

But if for the sake of argument I could isolate an ideal interactive audience, it would be…

If you snicker, this is not going to go well.

It would be literate Southerners.

Okay?

Readers, that is, who would appreciate a joke (of course, now that I say this, I won't be able to think of one) involving Kafka and a palmetto bug.
^*
Or let's say Proust and a hush puppy. Such a person wouldn't have to have
read
Proust; I haven't, for example; but he or she would have to know
(a)
that—as I understand it—Proust bit into a madeleine and started remembering things and
(b)
that a madeleine is a baked good of some sort. Come to think of it, a hush puppy is a fried good, but there must be some sense in which a hush puppy and a madeleine are analogous. They're both made of batter.

But I'm off on another train of thought. What I want to get into here is what occurred to me
next,
after I finished toying with the notion of boiling my peer group of merriment down to a hard core. It occurred to me how careful I would have to be, if I were to pursue that notion in print, to make it clear that I did not mean the term
literate Southerners
to be intrinsically amusing.

There are people who would assume it to be. I once set an entire dinner party of New Yorkers atitter by citing the title of a thoughtful, in fact, scholarly, book:
Cracker Culture.
“Street-punk culture” or “mall-rat culture” would not have made them blink, but they were so heavily accul-turated to think of crackers as having no culture that they thought I must be pulling their leg. They laughed all the harder as I flew into what evidently struck them as a mock rage. People find it hard to take a humorist seriously when he is trying to get them to wipe smiles off their faces. I thought I was going to have to bite one of them to prove that I wasn't being tongue in cheek. At length they concluded that there was a gap in my sense of humor.

Another time I had the same kind of experience with a bunch of people in a New York restaurant, when I mentioned that I had written an indignant letter to the editor of
The New York Times Book Review.
Here is the letter I had written:

I didn't have a copy of this letter with me in the restaurant, but I did state the gist of my complaint, and I did end up reading out those members of the company who persisted in laughing it off. Finally, reluctantly, they yielded to my ill humor. One of them handed me his card and suggested that I call him so we could talk this out over lunch. I hope he's not holding his breath.

I don't like coming off as touchy. On another recent dinner occasion, with a friend of mine in the movie business and a director friend of his, the director felt called upon to tell me, out of the blue, in an earnestly congenial tone, “A lot of people have disdain for Southerners, but I was in the army with some, and I don't.” And I didn't say, “Well, kiss my foot
if that
ain't broad-minded.” I just said, “Mm” and went on talking about movies. He is a marginal director—I say that approvingly—and he meant well.

But I do want to be able to say “literate Southerners” and not have whoever may be listening regard it as an oxymoron—or a reference to Southerners who merely
can
read. I mean Southerners who
have
read and
do
read a good deal. I don't even regard the category as limited. Come to think of it, I would narrow my aforementioned peer group down further, to literate Southerners who have always recognized Little Richard as more trustworthy than Ronald Reagan.

But here's a confession:

I never mailed that letter. I've never felt particularly Southern or un-Southern around the then-incumbent editor of the
Times Book Review,
Chip McGrath. He's good people; I don't want to be addressing a stiff letter to him. And although, or because, I spent a lot of time over that letter,
I never felt sure that it hit the right note. Furthermore, it left a lot to be said, about exactly what I found grating about the mush-mouth way LBJ presented himself to the public—and about how irritating it is, in light of the former Miss Bouvier's aspersion, that historians tend to be so condescending about LBJ's apparent cultural insecurity vis-à-vis the Kennedy circle. It's hard to avoid cultural insecurity, not to mention mush-mouthedness, when Camelot folks are making heavy-handed cutting remarks about you and your wife that presumably literate representatives of posterity will find “delightful.”

Johnson was the second television president. He had the terrible luck to follow the first one, who still stands as the most telegenic. Partly because Johnson's chops (like Bob Dole's) were legislative rather than executive, but also because he had built them up in Texas rather than at Harvard, he sounded bogus telling the nation, “Come, let us reason together.” His chops wanted to say, “We got to quit running through the briars in all directions hollering ‘Rabbit rabbit rabbit!’ and settle on a rabbit we can git.” But that would not have been deemed presidential.

Also this matter of
cornpone
as a derogatory term needs to be deconstructed. Cornpone is gritty, tasty, and filling, and as someone once said to Mark Twain, “You tell me where a man gets his cornpone, and I'll tell you where he gets his opinions.”

There might even be something in the tone of my letter that would indirectly lead readers to believe that deep down inside I wish there were a lot more literate Southerners and that I were a tad more literate myself. Which I do, but that's not something I care to get into around people whose delights are as dim as Ms. MacFarquhar's.

And the truth is, there's not a lot of fun in being a Southerner who's sensitive about it. There
is
a lot of fun in boiling things down to the lowest common denominator (another term that shouldn't be automatically pejorative). My friend Greg Jaynes, who has covered Africa and New York City for the
Times,
e-mailed me a while back from northwest Alabama, where he was visiting his folks:

“My momma has sold her house here (she did it while my father was in Memphis last week) and now she is having a yard sale. She has already made $49. My father just came through the kitchen. My mother has just sold his wheelbarrow, for $3.