“Hey, Slick! She’s a Hick!”

My parents were from a small Alabama town, they moved to a larger town in Georgia when I was two and then back to their home town when I was 15. What that basically meant for me was that I moved from a freshman class of 900 and a high school with one-way halls due to overcrowding into a high school where my Senior class had a little over 200 and where one of my new friend’s moms actually said to me, “You aren’t from around here, are you?”  It was then that the notion of “perverted Mayberry” entered my mind, WHERE had we moved to? And, was it actually in the contiguous 50 states?

It took a while but eventually I grew to consider it as my home as well.  There were 25,000 people in the whole town on the day I graduated from high school.

I’ve lived lots of places since then but there is one thing that I carry with me everywhere that I go, one thing that never lets me forget where I come from, it gets better whenever I’m gone for a while but it comes raging back the minute that I spend any time at home- my accent (if you could hear that word inside my head as I type these words it would sound like “ack-cee-int.”)

I was up above LA (yes, the one in Southern California) at a playground with Middle Child when he was about a year old. I’d been chasing him around the playground equipment when I noticed this little girl watching us intently.
We gradually drifted closer to her and, finally, she looked up at me and asked, 
“Are you a cowgirl?”
Her question caught me off guard and I smiled down at her,
“No, I’m not.”
Her dark brown eyes grew confused and then I figured out what she meant,
“Oh! I talk funny, don’t I?”
She nodded her head, “Aren’t you from Texas?”
“No honey, I’m from Alabama.”
She stared at me for a beat and a half. 
“Well,” she asked, “can you ride a horse?”
I giggled at her logic and because she’d caught me, <giggle> "Yeah, I can.”
Her little chin bobbed in victory, “Well then, you’re a cowgirl!”

Now, we all know what that accent says to outsiders. I mean, we may play dumb but we ain’t. That accent says, “Dumb Hick.“  I commented on this at one of my poetry meetings, there, in So Cal one night. I said, 

“I know that I have a strong accent. And, I know that my IQ automatically drops 10 points    

the minute that I open my mouth.” 

A whole group of people who knew me and liked me, laughed out loud ‘cause it was the truth and we all knew it. They loved my poetry, they’d given me awards for it, they didn’t think of me as a “dumb hick,” but it was a hurdle that I’d had to get past before they’d take me seriously.

My own theory -and some etymologist or linguist (OOOOOOOO! Those are BIG ole’ words for a hick!) may have much better explanations- has to do with weather. I figure if you are THAT hot and THAT wet from humidity then it just takes too much energy to enunciate your words.

“Honey, can you grab me some sweet ice tea?”

Yes, it SHOULD take a month of Sundays to drawl that out.