A Hick Versus Harvard

FOR 18 years I lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and had a Southern accent. Mine wasn't Applachian hillbilly-country music Southern, nor was it the soft-petalled Junior League variety. It was just a home-grown Mississippi River vintage '53 drawl. I liked it. Felt comfortable with it. Then I came to Harvard, and grudgingly, but inevitably, surrendered my natural speech.

Freshmen women in general have a tough time being taken seriously, but an underclass woman with a Southern accent is in real trouble. Many people consider her to be stupid, per se. The assumption is that she was admitted only to satisfy Radcliffe's desire for diversity and geographical distribution. Honeyed tones and high IQs don't mix.

All freshman year I struggled to prove that the two were compatible. But maybe they aren't. Clipped consonants and brassy vowels being the mark of the intelligentsia, my polysyllabic pronunciation of single vowels had to change. In order to be accepted as an intellectual equal, Southern women must learn to enunciate as quickly and sharply as their Northern counterparts. Southernisms such as "Are ya'll goin' to the show?" must become "Are you guys going to the movies?" In social situations, Southern women with thick or even moderate accents are victims of good-natured bantering, but the assumptions underlying the bantering aren't so kind. As a Confederate compatriot of mine remarked during our freshmen week, "As soon as I started talkin' I felt funny. It was at the Union and every guy at the table started to stare at me. I wanted to talk to them, but they just wanted me to talk. They thought it was cute."

Academic situations also provide victimization. My first year here, professors often singled me out for especially delicate, polite treatment. Intrinsic to this gentle handling was a condescending attitude. I appreciated the individual concern but abhorred what it represented: I was inferior because I talked differently. As a Southern woman I needed kidglove treatment because I couldn't take the real stuff.

Harvard waged a diabolical war on my dialect and speech patterns that was both morally and aesthetically wrong. I had to choose between being a Southern girl who was somehow a Cliffie and being a Radcliffe Eliza Dolittle who felt terribly out of place and uncomfortable. It was either a "dyahlemmah" or a "dulimma" but I lost either way.

That was two years ago. Now I have conscientiously weeded most Southernisms out of my speech: my roommate can still tell when I call home because I suddenly switch back into a modified drawl.

I resent what happened to me and other women like me because we spoke more slowly and pronounced words differently. I really liked my Southern accent. I'm sorry to see it go.