Column by Ralph Gordon
I was seventeen years old before I learned that beaverdam and Yankee were two different words. You just gotta love Yankees. My mama’s sister married a Yankee, a great American he was. Never a dull moment with Uncle John Andrews around. When a Yankee moves south, he requires a certain amount of orientation. He can’t just move in and blend into the culture. It’s too much of a shock. There really should be a special class for displaced Yankees, but unfortunately, it’s an on-the-job-training situation. Most of the time it is a lifetime event. A work in progress you might say.
We pretty much had him converted except for a couple of issues. He never could learn to speak the Southern language. I have never known a Yankee who ever learned how to talk properly. No matter how long they live here, they all retain a certain amount of their Yankee accent. One of the most difficult tasks for a Yankee is to learn how to properly use the word,
“y’all.” But you guys” keeps coming out of his mouth in-stead of y’all. Everybody in the South knows that y’all is plural for you. All y’all is plural for y’all and everyone of all y’all is plural for all y’all. What could be complicated about that?
Uncle John was not just your garden variety Yankee, but Connecticut Yankee, the Yankee’est of all the Yankee accents. Perhaps the saddest thing of all about Uncle John was, he never learned to like cornbread. Bless his heart.
Imagine that. How could someone, anyone, not like cornbread? It’s beyond this ole rebel’s comprehension. Image sitting down to a plate of turnip greens or peas and cornbread without the cornbread. It gives new meaning to the word, “enigma.” It’s like Lester Flat and Earl Scruggs without Earl Scruggs. Possum and taters without the taters. To Uncle John’s credit, he did like the Statler Brothers and Blue Plate Mayonnaise. But then, who doesn’t.
Probably the strangest thing to me about Yankees is, they think we speak with an accent. How so? Our way of talking sounds perfectly normal to me. It’s the Yanks who have the accent. Not us. Don’t think for a heartbeat that Yankees are bunch of wimps. Uncle John was one of the toughest people who ever walked, even if cornbread did scratch his throat. If you have ever even walked past a blackberry bush, you know how hazardous they can be. If you ever picked blackberries, you know how miserable and downright dangerous that can be. The vines are one solid briar. The stickers are so sharp that even the hogs won’t go near them. The redbugs that make their homes in black-berry vines are big enough to swallow a small kid. Didn’t bother my Uncle John. He could wade off into a black-berry patch, snakes, redbugs briars and all, and come out with a gallon of berries be-fore that old copperhead had time to bite him. Probably a good thing for the snake. If he bit into John Andrews, he would be looking for a snake dentist pretty quickly. Not to pick on my uncle, it’s just that he was the first Yankee I ever knew, and I knew him better than I knew any other Yankee.
Some Yankees just don’t get it. They move south and the first thing they try to do is show us dumb rednecks how they did it up north, or worse. California! If up-north and California are so great and we have is back-ward, what are they doing here? We have so much to offer here in God’s country. We have relatively warm winters, and plenty of blackberries, the world’s finest people, and plenty of corn bread. Eventually this cate-gory of Yankees, either figure it out and become a part of our great Southern culture or move back north or to back to California. Most Yankees are no different from us when it comes down to it, but there is always that one.
One of the most interesting displays of Yankees snobbery involves my wife, the Lovely and Gracious Pat. She was flying home from Washington DC some few years ago. Seated next to a nice Yankee lady, the two soon struck up a con-versation. They talked about their jobs, their grandchildren, and recipes. The usual stuff women talk about. As the plane was about to land in Jackson, they bid each other farewell, and buckle for the landing. Pat has a BS degree in Business Administration from Delta State University where she was an honor student. She served Newton County Schools in several capacities for thirty-eight years. Most of those years she served as business manager. She created the budget for the school system where millions of dollars were in-volved. State auditors praised her work every year. Point?! She ain’t no dummy. Anyway, as the two women waited for the signal light to deplane, the last thing the Yankee lady said to Pat was, “You might be Southern, but you don’t seem to be back-ward.” Pat being the gracious steel magnolia that she is, took the faux compliment in stride and made her way to the exit gate where I was anxiously waiting for her.
It is sad when stuff like that happens. Can’t blame it on the individual Yankee. He or she have been indoctrinated by the media, un-scrupulous politicians, and the entertainment industry since the day they were born. In the immortal words of the late Brother Dave Gardner, “You never heard of anybody retiring to move north.”
