My Uncle Perley and Hillary's Drawl

Drudge says Hillary talks with a drawl; the megamedia fall into line, but Greg Sargent is not amused (link). I didn’t hear her, but the kerfuffle did bring back fond memories of my Uncle Perley.

Perley was a great guy, cheerful, good-natured, a bit loud, but friendly as all get-out. His son-in-law said he should just hand out questionnaires to everyone he met: he cared that much about you, and learned that much about you, that fast.

Perley started life as an agricultural extension agent back in New Hampshire, where he grew up. But in time, he drifted off to the Southern Appalachians where he did various jobs that might be described (though inadequately) as “social work.”

I remember being with Perley among the locals outside Richmond, Kentucky (I was about 19, he, around 60). He talked Appalachian. Rather, he talked New England to me (and even more to my father, a lifelong New Englander). But when he turned to his friends and neighbors, he talked Appalachian, switching, if necessary, in mid-sentence.

I told him he did it and he responded with a dismissive chuckle. I have no idea whether he was shy about the whole business, or whether he simply wasn’t conscious of what he was doing, and didn’t care.

This was all new to me as a kid, although I’ve seen it often enough later. I particularly remember a student, a black woman from Los Angeles. For school room purposes, she had made herself a master of Standard English. I went to visit her once at work as a public defender in South Central LA: I listened to her talk to her clients in effortless Blackspeak.

And I remember the late Ned Breathitt, running for governor of Kentucky in 1963—as a reporter for the old Louisville Times, I spent a lot of time with him that spring. Ned was actually pretty good on race issues. But he was born and bred out in Hopkinsville, where they still said—well, not quite “the N word,” but something that sounded like “Nigra.” I remember Ned lying on a couch in the candidate suite of some country hotel, trying to explain himself to me. “Now, what the Nigra wants is…” “Negro, Ned,” his handler would interrupt, “Negro, Nee-gro.” —“Right, what the Nigra wants is…”

Come to think of it, I once knew an east-end London communist street organizer, who liked to boast that he had learned Standard English so he could get an upmarket academic job. Oh, I could go on and on…

I don’t have a quick one-liner moral here, unless it is this: these language issues are trickier than they look. There is a fine line between sympathy and sycophancy—a fine line between warm-hearted understanding and naked manipulation, between trying to appreciate someone and just sucking up. Politicians are great natural mimics—have you ever noticed how funny they can be with the voices after a few drinks at a party, particularly when they are sending up their opponents? If there’s an issue with Hillary, it can’t be that she does it—if this is the charge, you’d need a stadium for a lockup. It could only be that she’s not good at it, that she’s artificial, wooden, like Michael Dukakis in a tank.

Like I say, I didn’t hear her, so I have no right to vote. Tell you what though: I did hear Obama, and man, there was an accent. Funny thing is, it didn’t sound like Southern Black to me, sounded more like Cracker. Just who is he pitching to, anyway?