CA Update - Susan Dlugach

Susan Dlugach was a reporter for the Las Vegas Daily Optic in New Mexico before turning to a career teaching English in New Mexico and California. These days she spends her time folk dancing, doing yoga, and dreaming up stories.

The Sounds of Them Places

I wrote a short fictional piece recently where the narrator speaks bad grammar, i.e., “it gets mighty lonely in them places …” It’s a language I heard most of my life, an amalgam of my dad’s way of talking along with the way my mom’s folks, country people in northern Louisiana, spoke. It’s probably my first language.

I don’t have recordings of me talking when I was a kid, but I’m sure I learned to speak the way the adults around me spoke, that I spoke in that southern dialect of folks who dropped out of school early to help out on the farm or the one who started running away from home in fifth grade and lived a lot of his young life in the streets.

Though patches of my childhood were spent in rural Louisiana with my grandparents, I lived the major part of those years in Port Arthur, the Cajun capital of Texas. Cajun speak was in the airwaves my mom listened to on the radio. One DJ opened his program with a hearty, “How y’all are?” Many of the kids I went to school with were of Mexican heritage and came from Spanish speaking homes, so I often heard language spoken with a south-of-the-border lilt.

And though I grew up during segregation and separated from the African American community until my mid-teens, the dialect was also in the air … on the blues radio station my mom sometimes listened to as well as the times our paths crossed when our “White” world obtained services from the “Black" world. To my ear, the African American dialect I heard was similar to the way many of my Louisiana folks spoke, but with deference during conversations with members of the “White” community.

My dad’s mother, my bubbie, was an immigrant from the old country, then referred to as Russia, but is likely Belarus these days. She called her first language Jewish, but we call it Yiddish. She was never in a classroom to learn proper English and she never lost that thick accent.

She learned the dominant language of this land by working, raising children and shopping here. I kept a letter she wrote to me while I was in college in which she told me she as going to spend “a week at the bitch” with my aunt and uncle. She spelled almost the way she spoke. She seemed to have a reasonable handle on phonics.

I went to Baptist churches with my cousins in Louisiana and to synagogue in Texas. I heard gospel and sang Hebrew hymns. I can drawl out words like honey and cough out guttural sounds from Torah.

When did my own way of speaking change? How did it evolve? People still detect that I’m not from “here,” wherever “here” is, unless I’m back yonder where I was spawned. However, it’s only a slight accent they hear. I no longer conjugate verbs the way I did as a child. I hardly even use the expressions that so richly flavor that down-home language.

My evolution probably began when I was seven and started first grade at Drew Elementary in Calhoun, Louisiana, learning to read Dick and Jane. Such a boring way to introduce kids to reading. Though it worked for me, I was happy to get my hands on those Little Golden Books like The Bunny Book and Rin Tin Tin and Rusty.

As more proper English became my language, somehow it never occurred to me to correct the adults around me, at least not until my teenage, know-it-all years when I might occasionally try to enlighten my mom. But not much. She was a reader, too, and had a better grasp of proper grammar than her parents.

Growing up surrounded by various dialects was priceless. When I saw Sling Blade, a movie that came out in 1996, I heard my granddaddy’s particular dialect when Billy Bob Thornton’s character, Carl Childers, uttered something to do with shutting off the light. Or was it that he needed to get shed of something? I don’t remember which phrase, but it warmed the cockles of my heart to hear my granddaddy’s storytelling voice again.

I grew up amid a variety of sounds, dialects and languages. Maybe that’s one reason I find the assortment of languages and cultures here in California so comforting. My spirit has been immeasurably enriched by the diversity that I was born into and has surrounded me all my life.

~ Susan Dlugach