The all of “y’all”: On finally embracing my voice, country twang and everythingThe all of “y’all”: On finally embracing my voice, country twang and everything

  Write an analytical essay (900-1200 words) in which you analyse Justin Quarry’s essay
“The all of “y’all”: On finally embracing my voice, country twang and everything” and
discuss the connection between identity and language.
Part of your essay must focus on the writer’s use of personal experience. In addition your
essay must include an analysis of the style of writing in lines 9-23.
Justin Quarry
The all of “y’all”: On finally embracing my voice,
country twang and everything
The summer I was 12, my mother and I moved from a tiny Arkansas farm town to a university city,
Jonesboro — home of Arkansas State — and from the first minute of the first day of seventh grade,
when I uttered my affirmative to the roll call of homeroom, my unrefined Southern accent
unwittingly marked me to my new classmates as “country.” Though I had never thought of myself as
5 such, I’d spent nearly all my life up until that August 40 miles away in Walnut Ridge, a
fundamentalist agrarian community my mother and I had left to escape the blowback of her divorce
of my father, where the vast majority of my family had worked as sharecroppers for as long as
anyone could remember. And so to that extent, it was true. I was country.
But apparently that wasn’t my only oratory fault. When I corrected teachers all morning and
10 afternoon on my last name — my paternal family doesn’t pronounce “Quarry” the primary way, but
the far less common tertiary one, rhyming with “scary” — some of my peers conspiratorially took
note that it sounded not unlike the adjectival form of a homophobic epithet (a word that actually
does not exist, but one that junior high schoolers were delighted to invent for torment). This, plus
my status as an outsider, convinced them I was the worst thing they, or I, could imagine: gay.
15 Though I had never thought of myself as that either, it, too, I would discover, was true, however not
until college, when I came to care so much for a gay classmate that I finally launched from the
depths of my shame and, as I soared in my affection for him with abandon, didn’t care to admit that,
wrong as my former persecutors had been in my treatment, they’d been right in my sexual
identification.
20 But in the ten years leading up to college, I spent much of my young and anxious life trying to flatten
and deepen my speech into a complete collection of sounds that to my peers — to most Americans, I
was already absorbing — registered as neither deviant nor dumb. Into a steady pattern of talk that
read as nothing beyond the norm, that spoke only to worthiness of belonging.
Indeed, recent studies have discovered that Americans with Southern accents, like me, have lower
25 incomes and job attainment outcomes than those who speak with the Standard American English
accent. However, for many Southerners — for many people from any part of rural America, I daresay
— such statistics only confirm what we’ve always known: that our regional identity is a queerness, a
foreignness in its own rite, conjuring for our listeners imaginings of the most garish stereotypes.
Long before we’re employable, many rural Southerners learn, just as I did, the cost of the very
30 sounds of our words — forget their content — even in the South itself.
Justin Quarry is a writer and a teacher. In this essay, he describes his relationship with his accent
and how it has evolved.
2
Ultimately, I failed in my decade-long efforts to remake myself for the aural approval of others. For
one thing, the ubiquitous Standard American English accent I observed on “General Hospital” and
“The Young & the Restless”1 was all I could ever hear when I spoke. Also I excelled in my accelerated
English classes. I knew my grammar was near, if not entirely, perfect. I loved rules, such as those of
35 syntax, and clung to them. I took pride in my practice of them, both as a means of stabilizing myself
amidst my parents’ still-frequent feuds and attracting positive attention from adults. I thrived as a
perennial “pleasure to have in class.” If someone had issued me specific instructions to make my
vocal expression, or any other aspect of myself, more palatable to people with whom I wished to
gain favor, or at the very least acceptance, my 12-year-old-self would have strived to master them.
40 Years before, as a child, I’d recorded on a brown Fisher-Price tape player the most guttural and raspy
death threats I could muster, replaying them to myself as I sat alone in dark and suffocating closets,
in attempts to terrify myself. I had never succeeded. But one day in the fall of seventh grade, I
recorded and replayed my plain voice for myself to try to detect my apparent flaws so I could correct
them. I was mortified by what I heard. There it was, undeniable, like the aural equivalent of a cheese
45 grater or sandpaper: my rough-edged, backwoods accent, […]
I detested what I heard on my boombox that day. I never recorded myself again in all of my efforts
to renovate my speech. Puberty would deepen my voice soon enough, I prayed — and it finally did, I
realized, when calling customer service representatives stopped referring to me as “ma’am” or, most
alarming, “the lady of the house.” Until then, when I spoke in class, I squashed my tone in such a way
50 that must have made me sound like an android.
What I did instead was simply made certain to enunciate the -g on all my participles — I was never
“communicatin’” and always “communicatingG” — and I rooted from my tongue the most telltale
word in the Southern lexicon: “y’all.” In its place came “you guys,” the most stereotypically Northern
phrase I knew. “Y’all,” as I began to understand it, put a target on my chest, identified me as outcast;
55 “you guys” obscured me, added a layer of armor to my heart.
And so as I ultimately made friends, it was “you guys” I asked to see “Goldeneye” and “Romeo +
Juliet” and “Never Been Kissed” and “Titanic”2 with me. “You guys” with whom I compared taste in
music, “you guys” whom I told I would meet at the mall in front of Sam Goody3
’s. “You guys” with
whom I condemned the mobs of rednecks, as we classified them, who trekked to Jonesboro — from
60 places like where I once lived — on Friday and Saturday nights to cruise one of our city’s
thoroughfares in a creeping clog.
By the time I left Arkansas as a first-generation college and then graduate student, I’d internalized all
the negative assumptions of people who speak with Southern accents, and in particular the coarser
incarnations like mine: their probable lack of education and sophistication, their poverty and their
65 naiveté and their xenophobia. The same assumptions that indeed lead many managerial Americans,
even fellow Southerners, to pay such speakers smaller salaries, to hire them less frequently. The
assumptions that, in me, had festered and warped into self-loathing of my regional and sexual
identities — assumptions that led me to assess anyone who reminded me of me, be they ostensibly
country or gay, as less worthy.
70 Once the belief that my voice might inadvertently signal my inadequacy had become second nature,
I policed it on high alert well into adulthood. After all, though in both my post-secondary educations
I remained in the South, in each case I emerged into a larger, wealthier, far more cosmopolitan city
1
“General Hospital” and “The Young & the Restless”: American soap operas
2
“Goldeneye” and “Romeo + Juliet” and “Never Been Kissed” and “Titanic”: Movies from the 1990’s
3
Sam Goody: Chain of now defunct stores that sold CDs and DVDs
3
than Jonesboro, into the elite institutions of Vanderbilt and the University of Virginia, where most of
my peers had no idea that sharecropping, in which a number of my family continued to labor, still
75 existed, believing it to have ended along with either slavery or Jim Crow.
Socially, I thrived among greater diversity and its unlimited buffet of accents, in which mine was but
one of many. I took others’ occasional labeling of me as “country” — if not “damn country,” if not
“goddamn country” — with the playfulness my designators now meant it. To some, my accent was
even an object of fascination. But I still overenunciated my participles — “enunciatINGGG.” And by
80 habit I still asked “you guys” what borough of New York City they were from, if they’d seen our
dormmate drain his microwavable macaroni and cheese water directly onto the hallway carpet, if
they’d heard about the labyrinth of secret tunnels supposedly under campus. In graduate school I
asked: what are “you guys” writing, who are “you guys” reading?
Far more problematically, in the classroom, rather than continue trying to pronounce my words as
85 dialectically neutral as I could, most often, I chose not to speak at all. Rather than make myself
vulnerable in such public, cultured discourse, not only with my ideas, but also the mere sound of
them, I chose the invulnerability — the intellectual and emotional isolation — of silence.
[…]
Nonetheless, I still never fully shook self-consciousness of my speech in what I perceived to be high90 stakes settings until I switched roles from student to professor. Then, given how ultimately affirming
and transformative the classroom had been for my life, the sacred duty I felt to impart the best of
myself to my own students […]. I strive to shake the connotations I carry of the sound of myself, of
the sound of “country” — not only from my own mouth, but in the rare instance it shows up in the
form of one of my university students, or when I hear it with regularity just outside Nashville, where
95 I now live.
And yet “you guys” remains a staple of my vocabulary.
[…]
Most recently, though, after 15 years of teaching — and now that I give little thought to, nor do I
have little care about, how I sound — I’ve come to realize the gendered way my old habit of saying
100 “you guys” — which, in my association of it with the North, I once glamorized as urbane, perhaps
even chic — in fact excludes at least half the world. And in one of the most ironic insights of my life, I
realized the most obvious and inclusive solution was, in fact, to start using again the word I’d once
believed to be its inferior, the one I’d once identified as my most obvious, most isolating problem.
Y’all.
105 In the last months I’ve tried to sow “y’all” back into the landscape of my speech, often with the
awkwardness of self-correction, similar to the aftermath of having called a student or colleague or
friend by the wrong pronoun or name. “Excuse me” or “sorry,” I’ll say—”y’all.”
That single word, often freighted and fraught with the worst racist horrors of a whole region when it
comes out of a white Southern mouth. Its class implications, too: the highest rates of poverty and
110 illiteracy and obesity and teen pregnancy in the country.
And yet, “y’all” is a word that in and of itself integrates rather than segregates. In this so-called New
South, in this new century, it holds the potential to acknowledge and accept the entirety of a
population, both rural and urban, in one of the most rapidly diversifying regions in the nation, and
beyond.
4
115 Y’all. A word that, for me, in my renewed usage of it, both honors the difficulty of my familial and
personal histories, and expresses hope in the complexity of my region’s present and future. […]
Y’all.
I don’t know how to describe what I sound like anymore. I only know that no one in Arkansas thinks I
sound like I’m from Arkansas, nor does anyone in Nashville think I sound like I’m from Nashville. […]
120 I don’t know what I sound like anymore because, still, I shiver to think of repeating my self-recording
experiment of seventh grade. But I do know that, now, if I had a choice, I might well opt to sound
more, not less, country, in order to elevate the sound of “country” from the pits of stereotypes to
the influential fronts of elite classrooms, where I now often stand. […]
When asking my students ice-breaking questions at the beginning of each semester, I always answer
125 each first myself — after all, if I’m asking students to make themselves vulnerable, however
minutely, it only seems fair for me to make myself vulnerable as well. For years, when sharing with
them my single-word autobiography, I said “anxious.” In subsequent years, I admitted that while in
truth my story was still probably “anxious,” I was, at least, working on revising it to “open-hearted.”
But now if I ask myself what one word encapsulates me, encapsulates both of those sentiments,
130 what one word dramatizes my thus-far journey? “Y’all,” I might well say.
“Y’all,” I am permitting myself to say.
“Y’all,” I am working and working to say.
From: “The all of “y’all”: On finally embracing my voice, country twang and everything”, Justin
Quarry. Salon.com, February 6th 2021