I love the way we talk. Mainers, I mean. When I hear people speaking with the types of voices I remember from when I was growing up, I sometimes get a little teary. I am so thankful, like the Maine way with words is a language all its own, and one I am afraid is dying out.
I’m just here to listen, I thought. I half closed my eyes. The voices of townspeople filled the room where the select board meeting was held. I welcomed hearing these half-remembered ways of saying things as much as the concerns they expressed. Vowels rose and fell where consonants might be. The cadence of vocal inflection was succinct yet trailing off in places where assumptions might be used instead. How did I know how to fill in those blanks?
The rhythm of words both spoken and unsaid carried me backwards in time.
That’s how people talked when I was growing up, people in my family, people everywhere it seemed. I’m talking about the “Maine accent,” but it was more than a collection of sounds.
Wrapped up in the way words were said was also a way of being, an orientation to the world. I don’t want to generalize too broadly, but there’s a certain amount of matter-of-fact resignation in Maine speech best summed up with “ahdunno,” which frequently comes at the end of any conversation. It’s a verbal shrug that could mean this or it could mean that, but nothing personal.
“Whatever,” as people say today.
I want to be clear that the Maine accent I am talking about is not the bumper sticker one popularized by comedians, even E.B. White.
In fact, all the “ayuhs,” “wicked pissahs,” and “can’t get theyah from heyahs” were a little offensive when I was young in the way that you laugh along because you want to be in on the joke, but afterward, you think, hey wait a minute, in my case, my mother talks like that, and if I follow the logic of the humor, is she a half-wit?
My mother was the business manager of a private boarding school. She worked with people who came from all over the country. Sometimes they told her, “You sound just like a Mainer.”
She would say to me later, “I just talk. Ahdunno.”
And because I was a know-it-all teenager at the time, I might point out that a word like “horse,” sounded like “huss” when she said it.
“Mum, say ‘car.’”
“Cah-er,” she would reply, like she was sounding out a word from a foreign language textbook.
“See?”
Once my mother came home from work and shared a story of how she stood in her well-appointed office, in a former mansion no less, with some parents from away who gave her words to say “like a Mainer.”
“That sounds humiliating,” I recall saying. I felt protective of my mother in that moment. It was one thing for me to tease her about how she talked, but quite another to think of people giving my mother words to say like she was some kind of roadside attraction, a vocal epitome of place.
“You know, I think it was,” she said, but shrugged it off.
I’ve spent my whole life trying to sound like anything else.
I am not sure I am alone. Maybe my whole – specifically Maine – generation was encouraged to do better, be better, at the very least sound better than our parents and grandparents.
I have one (in hindsight) confusing memory of an uncle saying to me in my late teens, “You gut ta go ta college. You know, ya dun wanna be like them othah ignorant people.”
Like who?
I’m a mid- to late-20th-century Maine woman. The double helix of my DNA spirals with 13 generations of hardscrabble Scotch-Irish, French Canadian grit. My ancestors carved farms out of ledges, dragged fish from unforgiving waters, and worked hand over fist in the shipyard, never venturing far from home.
“Tougher than a sack of hammers,” my Downeast husband would say, an axiom picked up working in his father’s boat shop on Mount Desert Island.
That’s us.
Yet the last thing my family wanted for me was to be the next generation of brute force labor, or paycheck-to-paycheck piecemeal. Maybe they couldn’t show me the way – never having been there themselves – but I understood that blank space left in our conversations could be filled with anything as long as it was nothing like them.
Is that me? I have a couple degrees and a bunch of certifications, a well-qualified white collar professional resume, a mortgage, a car payment, three kids.
Am I there yet?
Because all I want to do is go back. Yet I know quite literally you cannot get there from here.
The closest I’ve come is the select board meetings I covered in Lincoln County in January, where I had the privilege of covering a town’s news.
I followed along with agendas and took notes.
When I asked questions, I found myself speaking the way I did to my mother, in my family, like they spoke to each other, like we spoke to the world.
I spoke like a “Mainer,” even though I’m not crazy about referring to it that way, layered as it is with stereotypes and low-key shame you’d be hard pressed to find anyone willing to talk about.
As a born and raised Mainer, I’ve been doing this sort of code switching my whole life. Code switching is a linguistic phrase that describes what someone does when they combine two or more languages in a conversation.
Code switching can also be cultural, which I believe is closer to what I did, since we were all speaking the same language.
Cultural code switching happens when you change the way you speak, your accent or dialect, to match the group you’re with. It’s not a fake move to fit in or anything. You have to know the code, every nuance of it, to do it successfully.
I fell into that old speech pattern effortlessly like it was my native tongue. Because it is.
I don’t know how long I’ll be covering select board meetings, but as long as I do, even if just for a moment, I’ll close my eyes and let myself be carried back by these voices from the past.
(“The Way Back” is a monthly column of reflections and revelations as editor Raye S. Leonard crisscrosses back roads and byways. Email her at rleonard@lcnme.com.)
