Southern accent

By Ed Piper

Something that fascinates me is who has a Southern accent, and who doesn't.

On our recent trip South, I was very aware of when a person I encountered voiced things similar to the way I do, in a "generic" American accent, or sounded like the stereotypical rural Southerner.

Now, this went across racial lines: Antoinette, the middle school teacher with whom I conversed at the Visitors Center at Vicksburg National Military Park, didn't have an accent--either Southern or black. The gentleman at Taco Bell in Natchez who claimed the Civil War wasn't over slavery, but the oppression by the North of the South through tariffs and other measures, didn't have an accent, in the way I'm defining it. He was white.

A delightful man who we interacted with and enjoyed it a lot was the state staff member at Grand Gulf, a tiny, insignificant Civil War battle site in Mississippi, an hour or so's drive south of Vicksburg. I don't know his name, but his Southern drawl became part of his enjoyable informative discussion of the site of Grand Gulf in the war. He was enthusiastic and full of background on the history of the place. Here was a backwater of the Civil War, yet his manner made our hour-and-a-half stop there a big part of our trip.

The accent doesn't have to do with having an education, or lack of it. The Mississippi state employee at Grand Gulf is educated, smart, the whole deal, and he had a thick accent.

Another gentleman, this one a retired engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers, working at the Lower Mississippi River Museum in Vicksburg, was highly educated and highly accented. Related to my previous entry, he was a Southern white who claims the Confederacy didn't secede over slavery (an argument which I said I'm not buying).

A fellow staffer at the Lower Mississippi museum, who happened to be African-American, was articulate while having no "Southern" or "black" accent, to my hearing.

You couldn't predict who had an accent and who didn't, black or white, before talking to individuals on our recent trip.