Talking Appalachian: Voice, Identity, and Community

Jane Hicks

209 A Matter of Perception Jane Hicks “I reckon poor old Tyler Farrar expected a better day. They’re crashing everywhere, the whole field is blocked.” On paper, this sounds like Darrell Waltrip commentary on a NASCAR race. On television, uttered with a British accent, it becomes quite something else. These are the words of Phil Liggett MBE (as in Sir Phil Liggett) in a commentary on Le Tour de France. Sir Phil, former professional bicycle racer, is the premier English-speaking commentator and broadcaster of the tour. For a number of years, I have kept a notebook of Sir Phil’s familiar expressions that would get me laughed out of any nonAppalachian company if I used them. Among his regular repertoire are: “I reckon,” “poor old,” and such familiar expressions as “running like a scalded cat” and “bless his heart.” Sir Phil hails from Wirral, Merseyside, England. Many of my ancestors came from that region. It only stands to reason that we have remnants of the expressions of our ancestral speech. I grew up in extreme northeast Tennessee, only a mile or so from Virginia , up where folks think of Knoxville as middle Tennessee. Some of my classmates’ backyards were on the state line, where we sometimes amused ourselves jumping from one state to another. Our house stood at the end of the street, the last house in the outer suburbs of a small city. On the one hand, we roamed the neighborhood; on the other, we roamed the ridges, the woods, and the banks of the Holston River. To call us town kids would have been a stretch. We spent as much time on our maternal grandparents’ farm as we did at home. I 210 Jane Hicks could tie a hand of tobacco as well as I played the trumpet in my high school band. At my blue-collar high school, we were expected to follow our parents into the workforce at one of the three large plants in town, where jobs were plentiful and secure. Teachers and counselors (a new thing when I was in school) implicitly and, sometimes, explicitly steered academically promising students away from “here.” I never understood this mind-set until VISTA workers visited my school during the War on Poverty days. It was then I found out I was Appalachian . I had always thought of Appalachia in terms of heartrending magazine pictures and tragic stories seen on the nightly news. For the first time, I faced being stereotyped and was told that to be successful I needed to leave the region. It was a strange meeting. I was dressed in my best Bobbie Brooks preppie attire (bought on layaway), complete with kneesocks and saddle oxfords. The VISTA workers looked like many college kids looked in the late 1960s—hippies. One had on tattered bib overalls my grandfather wouldn’t have worn to the fields. One of my classmates and I were National Merit semifinalists. The VISTA workers advised us to go anywhere but “here” to college and to get rid of our accents. Neither my friend nor I was impressed with the advice. We both started at the University of Tennessee that fall. She continued on to grad school. I transferred to Virginia Tech. It was there that I met the next group of people who judged me by my accent and I became aware of the astounding varieties of Appalachian Englishes. My fiancé grew up in extreme southwest Virginia, about forty miles from me. He and his family had accents with remnants of a Scotch burr. My classmates from other parts of southwest Virginia sounded different. Besides Scotch-Irish, many Italians, Poles, and other nationalities immigrated to and worked in the coalfields of southwest Virginia, leaving subtle marks on each locale. My first public-speaking class proved frustrating. Students from Maryland and eastern Virginia often made fun of our accents, invariably complaining that they didn’t understand us. When my time for an impromptu speech came, I said, “The students from southwest Virginia do A Matter of Perception 211 not have accents. We live here. If you do not live here, you have the accent, not us.” The rest of the natives applauded. We moved to Minnesota when my then-husband graduated and took a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I worked in a four-star restaurant because no one else would hire me with my accent...