BEFORE I THOUGHT I needed to shed my Southernness, I was proud of my heritage. As a child, I dreamed of raising Black Angus cattle the way my Uncle Ted did, scratching out a big vegetable bed, making a home on an acre or two of grass for barefoot children to run across until their soles itched.
There was no sound I loved more than my grandmother's accent: thick, sweet, warm, unencumbered.
When the phone rang, she answered with a throaty "mmmyyehllo?" My own voice reflected my family's past and present part northern Mississippi, part Tennessee delta, all southern.
As my childhood receded, I began to realize that outside of our region, southerners were often dismissed as uncultured and uneducated, ignorant and narrow-minded. I was ready to leave behind my tiny town in West Tennessee and start a new life in some far-off metropolis.
In that awkward space between teenager and adult, my accent was a symbol of everything I thought I hated about my life in the rural South. My conflation of vowels connoted ignorance. My elongation of final consonants gave away a rougharound-the-edges nature that I feared would disqualify me from being a lauded magazine writer.
My voice screamed out my class status. I thought I would have to talk less country. So I killed a piece of myself. I am ashamed of it, but I am more ashamed that I tried to kill that part of someone else.
I met Emily in college at Middle Tennessee State University, a school known for its affordability and its proximity to Nashville. She was determined to work for the student newspaper, which is where I spent most of my waking hours, and she decided we should be friends, and so we were.
She, unlike me, embraced her roots.
Esta historia es de la edición September 2022 de Reader's Digest US.
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Esta historia es de la edición September 2022 de Reader's Digest US.
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