Lost in Translation on Jekyll Island, Georgia
All vowels, no consonants. Add extra syllables, but wander off before you get to the end of words, like you lost your train of thought, or just couldn’t be bothered. Sound the way a jellyfish swims – a drifting pulsing rhythm, a heartbeat without hurry, journey with no destination. Speak as from your deathbed, expiring in the ubiquitous oppressive heat and humidity, as we surely are, and you’ve got pretty close.
There are no awards for diction. Honors go to the most elaborate expressions for the simplest things, so surplus phonemes are thrown in for good measure. Here the shade tree mechanic patching your leaky tire (in a wrecked rural town well off the interstate, cicadas throbbing the air like a migraine) will point at the tiny hole he found and not call it tiny. He will instead proudly gesticulate to it with the nub of a missing finger, tip back his ballcap, and share with you his sincere wonder that miracles still astound us every day, if you but have eyes to see. Like a king tapping with his ceremonial sword the shoulder of a new knight, he will pronounce the hole “minuscule.” And still, he will draw out those three syllables closer to five.
This is how you speak Southern.
Doug grew up in NJ and was educated in the King’s English – trained, tested, and ranked. He made a living by speaking and writing very clearly to explain medical and bureaucratic arcana to those not inducted into their mysteries. And he was good at it. So it came as quite a surprise that he needed a native Southerner like me to be his interpreter in the Lowcountry. “We ARE still in the US, right?”
From Plum Orchard on Cumberland, it’s an easy half day to Jekyll Island. We up anchor at 10. Rather than head out the way we came in, we continue to weave our way down the Brickhill River. It’s narrow but deep, and innocent of channel markers or any other sign of human hands. Really lovely.
By noon we dogleg across the inlet of Saint Andrews Sound, then up Jekyll Creek to a slip at Jekyll Harbor. It’s a welcome stopover. A laid-back marina under the live oaks, with a pool, laundry, and a casual restaurant overlooking the river. We start some laundry, take a dip in the pool, and get the first hot showers in days. Fresh clothes in time for a cold beer and late lunch on the veranda in the shade where there’s a breeze.
This is where the fun starts.
Our waitress is a no nonsense sorta gal. By her accent I can tell she’s local. The natural vocal flavor of the Lowcountry is a rich southern roux spiced with notes of Gullah and a Cajun patois, blended together for a tangy sonic gumbo. I ask her about the beers on tap. She rattles off options, but it’s the sound of it that makes me smile and I must seem distracted, because she shoots a look that says, “Don’t even think about asking me to repeat myself. I ain’t got NO time for none of your BS.” So I asked about the special (seared crab cake sandwich) and also the “vegetable of the day” just to hear her talk (Okra stewed with tomatoes. I have truly died and gone to heaven.).
“Oh, wonderful. I’ll have the special and the okra.”
As she’s writing that down, I see Doug’s mouth is open. He’s flush with a look of confusion and mild panic.
To avoid a good thrashing, I say “Give us just a minute, we’ll be ready when you get back with the beer.” She harrumphs and is gone.
Doug looks over his shoulder to be sure she’s out of earshot, turns to me and says, “I have NO IDEA what she just said. Did you understand that?”
I could not answer for laughing so hard. There may have been beer coming out my nose. Though nominally English, the accent was so unfamiliar to him as to be completely unintelligible.
“Fear not good sir. For a reasonable fee I will be your faithful interpreter.”
What makes this so funny to me is empathy mixed with irony. I, too, have been in his shoes – unable to understand our own American dialects – but the other way around, and in a situation with more dire consequences.
Back in 1979, I landed a summer job in France. Room and board was paid for, but I had to arrange my own flight. Younger folks will be surprised to learn that back then you couldn’t just whip out your pocket computer to find and book an overseas flight with a few flicks of a thumb. No. You had to find a travel agent to do all the research and reservations for you, for a fee. OR, you could open the Yellow Pages and find individual 800 numbers for each airline, call each one, and ask what was available and for how much, time tables and connections, etc.. It was an all day affair. But I was a bright lad, and quickly figured out that I needed to get from Carolina to Kennedy Airport in New York to catch the flight to Europe.
Now, mind you, I had spent my whole life in the South. In fact, had never been north of the Mason-Dixon Line. And I was just 18 years old. My knowledge of the world was somewhat more primitive than it is today. So it never occurred to me that those tricky Yankees were still finding ways to punish with absolute perfidy the transgressions of my forefathers. Only Yankees would go so far as to build TWO major American cities side by side, cheek to jowl, and give them names so similar as to be perfectly indistinguishable in the ears of their more innocent rural brethren. The woman on the phone with a thick Brooklyn accent gave no hint of sarcasm, no slip to reveal the ruse. She simply repeated herself twice to confirm my intent, then took my money, and mailed me the tickets.
It wasn’t until I was on that first connecting flight and about to land, sinking below the belly of low greasy rain clouds (me in bell bottom jeans, cowboy boots, flannel shirt, toting a backpack) that I realized something was terribly amiss. Out through the gray rain I saw not the gleaming city on the hill I had heard so much of, no OZ, but a vast wasteland of hellish nightmares. Broken industrial machinery from the last century stood over muddy meadowlands like corpses of rusting dinosaurs. Flames of gas jets belched from chimney pipes scattered to the horizon. Bulldozers plowed a Sisyphean mountain of garbage, harassed by a plague of carrion birds. As the grim urban landscape drew closer I saw marauding gangs chase each other over piles of rubble in streets between abandoned warehouses.
It was a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. And like the damned, doomed to see a future they could not reach as they descended into Hell, in the dim distance I could just make out the dim skyline of paradise and the monumental obelisk of the Empire State Building.
In a panic, I turned to the young woman across the aisle (fashionably dressed all in black with a keffiyeh piled high from her shoulders to her chin) and asked, “Is this New York? I’m supposed to be landing in New York.”
“No, this is not New York. This is Newark. In New Jersey.”
Wait, there’s a separate city named “Newark?” Oh the deceitful treachery! These Yankees gave their world famous city the exact same name as the state where they put it. That was confusing enough. But they put ANOTHER city, a black sheep of a second sister, right next to it, and gave it a homonym for a name, so similar that when spoken with a Brooklyn accent to anyone NOT FROM ANYWHERE WITHIN 100 MILES OF BROOKLYN will sound EXACTLY THE SAME! Indeed. My destination was across a river in another state, with no direct way to get from one to the other!
So, I could sympathize with Doug. (I did manage to find my way to France, but that’s a whole nother story for another time.)
As I said, Doug grew up in New Jersey. I lived in Savannah, and spent many years stewing in this steamy Lowcountry broth. What to him was a babble of unintelligible syllables, was to me like the words of a childhood lullaby.
“Will I need you to translate for the rest of the trip? Maybe I can get by without speaking. I can READ the language just fine.”
I had the crab cakes and okra, which were sublime. We spent the rest of the meal taking bets on which of our sailing friends would eat okra, confirming with them via that miracle of instant communication we take for granted now. Opinions were decidedly mixed on whether okra is actually edible, but no opinions were mild.
I loved it.
Two young girls in Barcelona went to the airport. They asked for tickets “to Nice.”
After a few hours flying over the Mediterranean one of the girls asked the attendant, “we thought this flight was an hour, when will we land?”
The attendant replied “we are landing in Tunis in twenty minutes.”
Ha! Obviously, I empathize.