Losing My Southern Accent and Searching for a Link to My Past

The most beautiful accent in the world belonged to my grandmother.

Pat was born in 1933 in Thomasville, North Carolina, a town once famous for its furniture industry and now largely unknown. She used words like yonder and supper, and she pronounced potatoes like puh-TAY-tuhs and and kitchen like keetchun, and on like own. She cut the h off the word humble. In her mouth, the word scuppernong became scuppernine, and if you don’t know what that is I bet you’re not from where I’m from.

I called her Nanny. She was soft and genteel, prone to stoicism. Despite her deep, inherent warmth, she possessed an ice-cold 100-yard stare. Nanny stewed squash, baked red velvet cake, and fried okra. It was from her that I learned how to shuck corn and shell peas. She always looked put-together, with her milky white hair in a bun. She left the door to the house unlocked. In all her ninety-one years, she never lived anywhere but Thomasville, the same place her family had lived for many generations.

I dreamed of her not long ago. I am standing in the hall bathroom in my grandparents’ home, brushing my teeth, using the Aim toothpaste she buys because I like the taste. The opening credits to a M*A*S*H rerun plays in the living room where my brother has settled in front of the TV. I can tell from the recent noise in the kitchen that he has a bottle of Mountain Dew and a box of saltine crackers open on the table beside the sofa.

I don’t have a southern accent. At least, I don’t have one now.

My grandmother comes out of her bedroom. She’s dressed in a soft nightgown and a bed jacket, and I can smell the Ivory soap on her skin. She kisses my cheek and tells me not to stay up too long.

Given the textures of the dream—the toothpaste, the TV, the soda, her appearance—I can’t be more than 10 years old. In fact, I’m sure this is closer to a memory than a dream. But when she kisses my cheek, I notice we are the same height. I must be grown. I have traveled back to see her. When she died last year, I was sick with Covid and stranded hours away. Since, I have been having dreams like this—sleeping and waking—reaching out to touch her, to hear her voice.

I don’t have a southern accent. At least, I don’t have one now. This was pointed out to me several years ago when a stranger remarked that I sound like I’m “from nowhere.”

I was raised just 30 minutes away from Thomasville, in Winston-Salem, a town once famous for its tobacco industry and now mostly known for its college basketball.

I was determined, in college, to suppress any accent I had. As far as I could tell, in the classroom, having a southern accent was not a charming feature, but signaled a lack of education and a tendency to date one’s own cousin.

Lest I be mistaken for someone whose corncob pipe could bob winsomely in the space where my two front teeth should be, around the age of 18 I stopped fixin’ to do things and began preparing to do them. I no longer reckoned, I supposed. I had no interest in y’all, but was very eager to spend time with you guys. I was an exemplar of elocution. What started as a habit became an inexorable behavior, so mundane that I forgot what I had done.

I hardly thought about it until, more than a decade later, over lunch with an old friend from home, he laughed at how precisely I enunciated each word. Where in the world did that come from? he said.

There is no single moment when I realized that my accent was a liability. No teasing, no bullying. It was a conclusion that revealed itself slowly, perhaps by exposure to classmates and teachers from elsewhere, whose accents, wherever they came from, had been trained out of them already, all of us eventually washed with the same shade of verbal beige.

Whatever remains is vestigial, showing itself in occasional non-standard pronunciation or unusual turns of phrase that, after more than a decade into our relationship, still confound my Californian husband. I say December like I say Detroit, by leaning hard on the first syllable. DEE-cember, DEE-troit. Monroe is the same. Monroe Park, in Richmond, Virginia, where I live now, is MON-roe park. 

I’m not the first southerner to feel conflicted about the way they speak. For those not from the south, the accent is an object of both affection and derision.

My southernness is perhaps most evident in other ways: My ability to identify bugs and birds and trees, a skill my in-laws consider charming and I consider sensible. It shows up in my work ethic and hardheadedness, in the things I like to eat or cook (okra, chess pie, collards), in my affinity for humidity, in my dichotomous nature to be both wary of outsiders and eager to welcome them, and in that I still address anyone more than 20 years my senior by sir and ma’am. I once thanked a porter in London this way. Sirs have been knighted, dear, he said. I carry your bags.

I’m not the first southerner to feel conflicted about the way they speak. For those not from the south, the accent is an object of both affection and derision. On one hand, how charming that you sound like a bean farmer! And on the other, how disturbing you’ve never left the bean farm!

It is a defining feature and, regrettably, an invitation for others (from within and without) to make assumptions about our beliefs, prejudices, lifestyle, or intelligence, and, as a result, a great many of us have rooted out its markers, or at least remain very aware of our surroundings.

I have an audio recording of my grandparents, made not long before they died only months apart, and I play it often. I like to hear their voices.

I like to remember the room in their house where it was made. I could look out their back window and watch winter cardinals alighting on the bare trees. There, in the woods behind their house, was the treehouse my grandfather had built when I was a child.

On the tape I hear my own voice too, entirely neutral and unaccented, at times contrived, asking questions to keep them talking about growing up with no electricity up among horse-and-buggies and biscuits in warming cabinets over wood stoves. I made the recording anticipating exactly this—a time when I would miss hearing their voices.

I sit down to transcribe their words phonetically, to parse their accents for this essay. My grandfather’s, especially, proves difficult, so I call my cousin Kelley for help. She sends me a voicemail he left years ago, that we decide ends with something like, Kelleh, cawl me bayk when you geet a chaynce. We giggle at how undeniable it is. Why had I never noticed it?

I called him Papaw. He too, spent his life in Thomasville. He was often difficult to get along with, but easy to love. With his own hands, he built houses, furniture, and clocks. He delivered mail. He was generous beyond reason. He said DOW-er instead of door, SIGH-reen instead of siren. 

Kelley uses the same lovely accent, in a milder flavor, and I ask her why. “I think it’s because I never left,” she says. For Kelley, who has always lived the same 10-mile radius where she was raised, Nanny and Papaw were always a short drive away. While I’ve spent my adult life living in cities full of transplants (Raleigh, Richmond), I, too, have never left the south. When we end the call, and she says BIH instead of bye, I envy her for a moment.

Mine does appear, however fleetingly, and without my permission. A friend of mine, who was raised in Maryland, pointed it out. In response to a recent voice memo I sent, she replied, “sometimes you adopt this country twang. Maybe it’s deep in your soul or deep in your roots. Maybe you try to suppress it.”

I slept poorly that night. My grandfather had died, and I had long cut a tether to my family.

At dinner with friends one night, I ask the table about accents. No one else there is from the south. Two come from Long Island and both put the kaibosh on their accents long ago. “It’s not a very pleasant accent,” one says. “I don’t really miss it.” The reply: “Not even a little bit?” No. She doesn’t like her family’s political leanings or worldview or philosophy. Hers is an upbringing she meant to leave behind.

One tells this story: Her boss is from Whiteville, North Carolina. WATT-vull, if you’re from there. “I’ve watched people dismiss him outright, and it’s no doubt because of the way he speaks,” she says. “But when he really starts talking, it’s clear that this guy is brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and people don’t know what to do with him.”

When my grandfather lay dying in March of 2024, my family gathered to sit vigil. Relatives and friends ebbed and flowed from the house for days, bringing food, making food, sitting to visit, helping with the chores of a household in grief: the funeral, the estate, the clothes in the closet. It was a sea of North Carolina accents, fluid, mellifluous, and soft. Even the hospice nurses sounded like music. And when the man from the funeral home, the same that had buried generations of my family already, arrived to collect the body at one o’clock in the morning, he stood on the front porch in his suit and tie, with one hand folded over the other, he offered his condolences and called me ma’am.

Later, when we lay in bed and I struggled to sleep, I asked my husband: Do I have a southern accent? “Not really,” he said. “It comes out sometimes. I hear it when you talk to your parents, I hear it when we visit your family.”

I slept poorly that night. My grandfather had died, and I had long cut a tether to my family.

Where I come from, children are admonished: Don’t get above your raising. A warning not against self-betterment, but self-denial. Don’t forget where you come from, don’t abandon your morals, don’t deny your people.

I’ve read that the American southern accent is disappearing, and the explanations vary: migration into the South, TV, social media, bias against southern people. I wondered which of those I fit into.

I went home that summer to visit my grandmother. Nanny lived alone in the house now and had taken up sketching. We sat in the shade of the carport while she drank from a glass of tea and I turned pages in her sketchbook. Pencil and paper portraits of faces she said came from her mind. They might have been people she had known, but she couldn’t say, really. Ninety-one years can collect you a lot of faces to remember. She talked about my grandfather, using the subjunctive mood. Saying, he would do this or he would do that, to describe things in the past. But I wonder if she meant these are the things he would be doing now, if he were here. I was happy to sit and listen to her stories.

The voice that answered was distorted, slurred. It was a horrible and shocking noise, and bore no resemblance to the beautiful one I love.

The last time I heard my grandmother speak, she was dying in a hospital. I was sick with Covid and unable to get out of bed. My father texted me several times that day. Do you want to speak to her? I can put the phone up to her ear. I know she wants to hear your voice. Like anyone in denial, I did not reply.

To protect me from regret, he called that night. I’m going to put the phone up to her ear, he said. I won’t listen. No one can hear you but her. I told her I love her, I told her that I’m sorry I can’t be there. I told her that again and again and again. The voice that answered was distorted, slurred. It was a horrible and shocking noise, and bore no resemblance to the beautiful one I love.

A year has gone by since my grandfather passed, months since my grandmother, and I’m standing on a rocky outcropping at Skernaghan Point in Brown’s Bay. I’m the first McCrary to return to Islandmagee, a spit of a peninsula in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, in 275 years. I’ve spent 12 months now looking back in time. I’ve worked hard on the family tree. I’ve collected marriage licenses and death certificates and found the land they farmed in North Carolina. I’ve visited graves and gone looking for children no one talked about. And here I am, as far back as I can go.

It’s midday in late March. The other side of the bay is a green slip of land bounded by silver sea and sky. Yellow gorse trim the edges of every slope. My husband asks if I feel anything. The truth is I don’t. I expected to touch this earth and breathe this air and feel a kind of kinship, or at least something magnetic. I pick up two small stones on the beach, for my nephew, who is the eleventh generation in North Carolina.

So, I come home to write, and to keep groping for that tether to my family that I want so badly. I call my cousin Kelley. She’s in the car, on the way back from a Willie Nelson concert in Charlotte. Right away, I can feel a change in my own accent. “Do you feel any kind of way about having a southern accent?”

“Like, good or bad?” she asks.

“Either. Or somewhere in between.”

“I’ve never felt bad about it. I do have to change the way I speak at work sometimes,” she says. Kelley works at a university. For instance, the word prime has to be over-enunciated, or people will think she’s saying prom. “I would never want to lose it.”

“Why?” I ask.

There’s a long silence, and then I hear her crying on the other end.

“Does it have to do with Nanny and Papaw?”

“Yeah.” I wait. “It attaches me to them. If they didn’t have one.” Her voice quavers when she says this. “I just don’t think it would be important.”