by
My mama's an Okie. She was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma in 1946, moved to the town of Stillwater as a baby, and then to California when she was 10. She's proud of her okieness; she talks about it all the time. She's proud of the twang she sometimes finds in her voice, amidst California straight-talk and school-teachery pronunciation. A few years ago, some kids in her class, kids from the California hill country, found out she was from Oklahoma and they said to her, "You's an Okie? Them's dangerous!!"
My mom was proud.
My mother's parents were both from old Oklahoma families, families that had "made the run," as they said then, racing wagons to claim land. It was important to grandpa and grandma to try to lose their accents. An Okie accent meant they were uneducated country hicks, especially once they had moved to Long Beach, California, where my grandpa was a professor at California State University. With a Ph.D. in stage lighting, my grandpa spoke in a commanding voice, a forced theatrical tenor. "Let us all sit down to dinner now," he would say. And we would. I think maybe his accent found its way into our own speech, the way my sisters and I over-enunciate certain words.
My Grandma Gene lost her accent, too. My mother never heard her speak the way her aunts and grandparents spoke, with a soft southern lilt. If she did, my mother was too young to hear it. My grandma was a sweet woman. She would bake rhubarb pie and chocolate chip cookies. She never spoke about Oklahoma much. The only thing left in her way of speech were her sayings, which live on through my mother. When it's cold on the Northern California coast, my mom will say, "It's colder than a witch's tit." But my mom grew up with the loss, the feeling that her parents had deliberately lost their accents, forgotten who they were.
But I understand why they might want to lose their accents. When I was 16, I spent a year in Veracruz, Mexico as an exchange student. One of my main goals was to learn to speak Spanish. To learn to speak Spanish without an accent. I spent hours trying to learn to speak the same way everyone else did. I labored in my room over pronunciation, reading out loud to myself in Spanish, and saying again and again my host-brother's name Gerardo. Ge rar- do, I would say. Ge. Ra. Ge.Ra. Gerardo.
Eventually, I got it. So much so that when I moved to Mexico City later on, people would say to me, "You speak like you're from Veracruz. Today, people sometimes assume I'm Latina just because of the way I speak. And it's flattering, yet, the truth is I'm gringa.
And the truth is, my grandma was an Okie. When I was ten or eleven, she was diagnosed with leukemia. She had chemotherapy, and her hair fell out. Finally, she went to the hospital. My mother would call her every couple days. And one day, my mom called her and she heard a voice that said,
"Hee-llo-o?" (she said with an accent).
"Hello, this is Judy Stavely," my mother said. "I'd like to speak with my mom. Her name is Gene Green."
There was a pause.
"Ah-I-m your mah-um," my grandma said. A few days later she died. And with her went that old Oklahoma accent that had come back from her childhood.
When I grow old, I don't know where I'll be living. I don't know if I'l be in Mexico City or New York, in rural California or a farm in Chihuahua. My fiance is from Mexico, and we speak to each other mostly in Spanish. We plan to speak both languages to our kids.
There's a part of me that knows that my real accent, my true accent is a gringo accent from California. I don't want to admit that just yet. But maybe, when I'm really old, when I'm dying, I'll wake up one day only able to speak English, with my northern California mumbling and the faint whisper of a grandmother who only knew to say Heellooo??