A Waffle House Down Home
In 2001 my son accompanied me with my Frog, a children's carnival ride, on my circuit of the state fairs in the Midwest. Bud was born in Florida and grew up entirely in the South but somehow had developed a disdain for southern speech, thinking of it as indicative of ignorance and what he thought of as a redneck outlook. He said the accents in Illinois were so much more "educated" sounding. I thought that a bit ironic as the northern folks experienced at the fair in DuQuoin, Illinois, the only truly Northern show we did, had seemed to me to be inbred and generally lower on the IQ scale than in other places, not stupid, mind you, just not particularly smart and no standouts. And Bo had picked up attitudes toward Negroes that were typical of the South a generation ago.
After the season's last fair in Tulsa we headed home to Florida and did not stop at any motel and had to minimize the time spent out of sight of the Frog. It was what the Law calls an attractive nuisance. It drew children to play on it and teenagers to vandalize it.
In southern Mississippi I felt I really had to stop for breakfast and coffee but we drove a long ways without seeing a place that was open at 3:30 AM and had parking space for my rig. Bo saw the Waffle House first and told me to stop. It was a standard Waffle House, that descendant of and replacement for the classic roadside diners of yore, and it sat next to the large empty parking lot of a shopping mall so I pulled in and we parked it.
We were the only customers in the place and the waitress brought us coffee as we sat down. Then she went back to the counter for menus. Both of us were tired and Bud was just a tad irritable but at least we were off the road for a few minutes.
Tonya was black, perhaps 20 years old and quite pretty. She set the menus down in front of us and then, with pencil poised above her ticket pad, said in the finest honeyed
Mississippi tone, "Are yall ready for breakfast, sugar?" in the soft and utterly alluring tones of the rural deep south.
The effect on Bud was immediate. He slumped down a little with a half smile on his face.
We ordered and Tonya went back to see to the preparation of breakfast. Bud, still smiling, said, "Daddy, I think we're home." The irritability had all washed away with the soft comfort of Tonya's
voice.
Bud never again had anything contrary to say about southern accents and never disparaged black folks again either..
My own view is that there are certain accents in English that do for the language what is natural to Vietnamese, Northern or Southern and in between (I have been there in that war). Vietnamese is a language that was surely created by God for women's voices and men's ears. For English that effect seems to come with the voices heard in a portion of Mississippi, part of Alabama, and in Ireland.
In 2001 my son accompanied me with my Frog, a children's carnival ride, on my circuit of the state fairs in the Midwest. Bud was born in Florida and grew up entirely in the South but somehow had developed a disdain for southern speech, thinking of it as indicative of ignorance and what he thought of as a redneck outlook. He said the accents in Illinois were so much more "educated" sounding. I thought that a bit ironic as the northern folks experienced at the fair in DuQuoin, Illinois, the only truly Northern show we did, had seemed to me to be inbred and generally lower on the IQ scale than in other places, not stupid, mind you, just not particularly smart and no standouts. And Bo had picked up attitudes toward Negroes that were typical of the South a generation ago.
After the season's last fair in Tulsa we headed home to Florida and did not stop at any motel and had to minimize the time spent out of sight of the Frog. It was what the Law calls an attractive nuisance. It drew children to play on it and teenagers to vandalize it.
In southern Mississippi I felt I really had to stop for breakfast and coffee but we drove a long ways without seeing a place that was open at 3:30 AM and had parking space for my rig. Bo saw the Waffle House first and told me to stop. It was a standard Waffle House, that descendant of and replacement for the classic roadside diners of yore, and it sat next to the large empty parking lot of a shopping mall so I pulled in and we parked it.
We were the only customers in the place and the waitress brought us coffee as we sat down. Then she went back to the counter for menus. Both of us were tired and Bud was just a tad irritable but at least we were off the road for a few minutes.
Tonya was black, perhaps 20 years old and quite pretty. She set the menus down in front of us and then, with pencil poised above her ticket pad, said in the finest honeyed
Mississippi tone, "Are yall ready for breakfast, sugar?" in the soft and utterly alluring tones of the rural deep south.
The effect on Bud was immediate. He slumped down a little with a half smile on his face.
We ordered and Tonya went back to see to the preparation of breakfast. Bud, still smiling, said, "Daddy, I think we're home." The irritability had all washed away with the soft comfort of Tonya's
voice.
Bud never again had anything contrary to say about southern accents and never disparaged black folks again either..
My own view is that there are certain accents in English that do for the language what is natural to Vietnamese, Northern or Southern and in between (I have been there in that war). Vietnamese is a language that was surely created by God for women's voices and men's ears. For English that effect seems to come with the voices heard in a portion of Mississippi, part of Alabama, and in Ireland.
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