Beware of Limbo Dancers: A Correspondent’s Adventures with the New York Times

9. Learning to Speak Times Talk

CHAPTER 9 Learning to Speak Times Talk I spent all of  and  on the Southern beat before moving to Washington to help cover the White House. A large part of those two years was spent on normal political coverage. Stump speakings were becoming rare in South Carolina.Orval Faubus missed the filing deadline for a seventh term in , signaling his retirement from the governor ’s office in Arkansas. The Democrats of Tennessee were split between friends of President Lyndon B. Johnson and those of his least favorite politician, Senator Robert F. Kennedy. In Louisiana, one of the last of Huey P. Long’s political associates, Senator Allen J. Ellender, was running for a sixth term. My story mentioned that Ellender had been presiding over a session of the state House of Representatives in Baton Rouge when Long was assassinated in a nearby corridor on September , . His challenger in  was Camille Gravel, a suave, well-spoken man who was known as a friend of the late President Kennedy and, not coincidentally, of Huey’s younger brother Earl.Earl’s man came in second.Both Longs were still revered, but Huey carried the mantle of martyrdom. The civil rights story began to shift during my Southern tenure. Although we were barely aware of it at the time, our stories began to tell of African American victories along with the stubborn and often violent white resistance.With the political victories came the inevitable stories of petty corruption among some of the new black mayors, legislators , and county officials. I saw my old editor and friend Harry Ashmore not long after the new guys started showing their venality. “It’s like I’ve been telling people,” he said. “They’re just like us, and we’re no damned good.”  Meanwhile, the job with the Times changed me. I realized sometime during my first year that I was becoming bilingual. I was starting to speak a form of standard American English. I had to learn the new tongue in my daily telephone conversations with my colleagues and bosses in New York. Claude Sitton and I spoke more or less the same language, but almost everyone else on and around the national desk spoke another tongue, the Northern version of English, the one that had been the national standard for many years. I spoke the new language with the same difficulty that anyone encounters when he studies a foreign language. I reckon my accent gave me away in spite of my efforts to sound all my syllables and make myself understood. My daily encounters with the recording room in the newsroom, where three or four New Yorkers took phoned-in stories from around the world, were studies in comedy. The rule was that one of them monitored dictation from all the correspondents to make sure they understood all the words clearly. If he doubted a word, or was puzzled by a pronunciation, he interrupted and asked us to repeat it. I could count on half a dozen such requests during the dictation of every story of seven hundred words or more. (We had to get permission from the desk to exceed seven hundred words,the length of a standard column of type.) One day I dictated a story about a river, and one line referred to “shooting rapids in a kayak.” It came out in print, unchallenged by anyone from the recording room to the phalanx of copy editors, as “shooting rabbits in a kayak.” Somehow, the mental image of rabbits riding a kayak was terrifically funny to my newsroom colleagues, and they took turns gibing me about it. In a less serious newspaper, the story would have been accompanied by a line drawing of a rabbit in a kayak looking nervously over his shoulder. Speaking Southern was not just a matter of drawl or twang; it meant a different way of framing thoughts. South-speak is a mental and emotional posture. Many words are different. I used the word “reckon” earlier. Southerners, especially older ones, use the word in the same way Northerners use “think”: “I reckon I’ll get ready and go to town.”“Proud” often means “glad” or “happy,” as in “We’re proud you could stop by.” My grandfather Meredith was on his deathbed in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Hot Springs with a cancer killing him. He was  LEARNING TO SPEAK TIMES TALK in agony. My aunt Lola, who...