Photo of Services at the Pentecostal Church of God. Lejunior, Harlan County, Kentucky in September 1946

(This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official dutiesunder the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code.)

by Ann H. Gabhart

Have you ever had somebody tell you that you speak with an accent? Maybe they even guessed where you were from by the way you talked. I’ve had that happen to me when I don’t think I have that much of an accent. Certainly not the Southern drawl you hear farther south in Mississippi or to the west in Texas or the very different accent you might hear from a Bostonian. But I suppose I do talk Kentucky country. One of the definitions of accent in the Merriam Webster dictionary is “a way of speaking typical of a particular group of people and especially of the natives or residents of a region.”

When I decided to write a story set in the Kentucky Appalachian Mountains, I knew for sure the people there had a distinctive accent, but until I started researching the area, I didn’t know they had so many colorful expressions or different ways to describe common things. I was fortunate to already have in my possession The Wolfpen Notebooks, A Record of Appalachian Life by James Still. While Still didn’t grow up in the mountains, he came to the mountains as a young man and spent over fifty years there listening to and celebrating the mountain people in his stories. He jotted down anything he overheard that seemed unique to the region and eventually compiled those sayings into the book I bought from him at a book fair. So, all these years later, after he and many of the speakers he recorded have passed on, I got to eavesdrop on the mountain people talking to one another and get a feel for the mountain vernacular as I began getting to know my mountain characters in These Healing Hills.

To add color to my story and make my Appalachian characters come to life, I let them use many unusual expressions you might have heard in the hills back in 1945, the time period of my story. My mountain people spoke of the “edge of dark” when talking about night falling. If they wanted to get out and start early on a job or to go someplace, they needed to get a “soon start.” If they had no horse available and had to walk somewhere, they went “shanks-mare.” Their vegetable gardens were “sass patches” and the vegetables “sass.” Perhaps one of the more unusual expressions was to say someone was “killed” when they were only wounded. That last oftentimes had a way of confusing the Frontier Nurse midwives when someone would show up at their clinics asking them to hurry to treat someone who had been “killed.” If the nurse said they couldn’t help, then the person fetching them would say they didn’t mean the person was “killed dead.”

When I brought my character, Fran Howard, to the mountains from the city to go to the Frontier Nursing Midwifery School in Hyden, Kentucky, I let her appreciate the mountain vernacular and the mountain ways. Of course, to the mountain folk, she was the one with an accent and different ways. City ways. One of the first unique expressions she heard was that she was one of Mary Breckinridge’s “brought-in” women there to learn to “catch babies.” Mary Breckinridge was the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service and she did bring in nurse midwives from all over with many of the early midwives from England before she established the midwifery school in Hyden in 1939. You can imagine what the Kentucky mountaineers thought about the nurses’ English accents.

We all like to hear what people say and how they say it. That is true in our everyday lives, and just as true when we’re reading a novel. How a character talks and what he or she says is especially important in helping a fictional person spring to life off the pages of a book and become real in the imagination of a reader. So finding a character’s distinctive voice can add richness to a story.

Salting the mountain speak throughout my story helped add a little extra seasoning to the atmosphere of the story and the dialogue of my characters. Fran found the language of the mountain folks poetic and I hope readers will feel the same while reading These Healing Hills.

 

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