Southern Girl in a Yankee Kitchen

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­I never thought of my southern accent as defining me. I never thought of it as something unique or distinctive about myself. Growing up in Milledgeville, Georgia, we all spoke the same. I was taught in grade school that “ya’ll” was correct grammar when speaking, and that vowels should be drawn out as much as possible. In the land of peaches and peanuts, my accent was the norm.

I never thought either, that by moving from Georgia to South Carolina, I’d be moving out of the South. But when I moved to Hilton Head Island, I learned that a southern girl was something of an oddity. Settled by retirees from the North (with many also from the Midwest), Hilton Head is a northern town in a southern state. Southerners are the minority. Ironically, Hilton Head was occupied by the Union during the Civil War; it seems as if they never left.

North met south when I walked into a particular Italian restaurant on the island to apply for a job.

The restaurant was small and run by two guys, Tommy and Denny, who were both chefs and owners. Everyone thought they were brothers, but they weren’t. And everyone assumed that they were Italian, but they were actually Irish and they were from Long Island. The first day I worked for them as a waitress, I couldn’t understand a word either one of them said.

“We’re from Lawn Guyland, Noo Yawk.” Denny told me. “Where use from?”

It’s no wonder Southerners are stereotyped as slow—Northerners talk too fast for us to understand. Denny spoke so fast, it took me a moment to respond— my brain couldn’t translate fast enough. Lawn Guyland? I thought for a moment before realizing that he was saying Long Island, New York.

“I’m from Georgia,” I told Denny, speaking proudly in my perfect Southern dialect.

“Jawjah!” Denny exclaimed, mimicking my pronunciation of my home state. Then he added, “We’ve neveah had a southern gal work heah!” Thus my new job began. I was the only southern girl in a Yankee kitchen.

Truthfully, besides Tommy and Denny, the other guys in the kitchen were from Mexico. When I opened my mouth and started speaking, the guys from Mexico were thoroughly confused about the English language. They’d learned Long Island English from Tommy and Denny so my Southernese made no sense to them. I’d get blank stares when I asked them questions in English and confused looks when I mumbled the few phrases I knew in Spanish. (A southern accent doesn’t carry over well into other languages.)