Southern Accents

There's a southern accent, where I come from
The young'uns call it country.
The Yankees call it dumb
I got my own way of talkin'
But everything is done with a southern accent
Where I come from-

The song “Southern Accents” is one of my favorite Tom Petty recordings. In his wonderful memoir, Heartbreaker, Mike Campbell, lead guitarist for the Heartbreakers, calls the song “a masterpiece. . . a standard that was universal and deeply personal at the same time.”

The song is on Tom Petty’s sixth studio album, also titled “Southern Accents” and recorded in 1985. It was supposed to be a concept album about the South. Mike Campbell remembers that the idea was to depict “the life of one troubled young man among thousands, dragging the deadweight of the South’s mythology into a bleak uncertain future.”

But that concept got a bit muddied when English musician and producer Dave Stewart (of Eurythmics fame) started working with Tom and the band kept tapping out endless lines of cocaine. During one frustrating recording session, Petty infamously smashed his left hand against a wall.

The album may have failed as a solid Southern concept record, but Petty certainly stuck to the idea for the tour. He used his personal Confederate Flag on the tour book and on the interior of the original album, lit up a giant electric Confederate Battle Flag behind the band during performances, constructed plantation like marble columns for the stage, and wore a topcoat lined with a Confederate flag.

Tom Petty was a white boy who grew up in the white South. As Michael Washburn said in an interview in the LA Review of Books, “Petty’s South, however unconsciously it might have been, was deeply indebted to the sociologically sophisticated theory of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.”

By 2015, Petty had changed his tune slightly. But the Confederate flag is actually racist, and Tom really should have gone around the fence a lot sooner and taken a better look.

Speaking of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, last week, I paid eight dollars for a copy of this 1937 Pulitzer Prize winner at the new used bookstore in Huntington Beach. The novel has some interesting mold specks, but is in otherwise good condition, all 1,037 pages of it.

I didn’t intend to read the book. I thought it would be a prop for future social media posts about my new “southern accented” novel. Gone With the Wind is the favorite book of the protagonist’s mother in my new novel. She names her daughter after Olivia de Havilland, who played the tragic Melanie Wilkes in the movie version.

GWTW’s author, Margaret Mitchell, was born in 1900 and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She was ten years old before she learned that the Confederates lost the Civil War. Scarlett O’Hara, like my protagonist, Olivia, is seventeen years old when the novel begins.

I’ve written my fair share of “unlikeable characters”, but Scarlett O’Hara is the poster child for selfish, clueless, naive, privileged behavior.

And then there’s the rampant racism laced through every page, the countless derogatory ways to refer to people of color, the incessant revision of history, and the dedication to the mythology that “enslaved people loved their enslavers and never really wanted to be freed.”

Particularly horrifying these days, considering that this is the way our current administration wants to rewrite our country’s history.

Southerners love their mythologies, particularly their silverware mythologies. Most Southern families have narratives that include someone hiding the silver from the dreaded Yankees. My mother claimed that the Yankees left her family’s silver behind because her great grandmother played Dixie on the piano.

There’s no evidence this is true, but I always loved this silver berry spoon. I think my mother inherited it from her mother, but I’m not sure and there’s no one left to ask. I found the matching pickle fork on eBay.

This is the repoussé pattern, one of the twelve patterns of the “Southern silverware zodiac,” according to Maryln Schwartz, author of A Southern Belle Primer. Schwartz says Southerners look at silver selection as closely as some might study horoscopes.

The backs of the two pieces above are engraved “S. Kirk and Son—Sterling.” In 1815, Samuel Kirk was a silversmith in Baltimore, Maryland. He’s credited with introducing repoussé—a technique of forming patterns in relief by beating or pressing from the reverse side—to America around 1828.

So . . .pre-Civil War—right? But Kirk made coin silver with his two sons until 1914, when he switched to sterling, and then he made sterling silver with only one son after 1932, which means these pieces were forged well after the Civil War.

Another Southern myth bites the dust.

I’m also reading They Stole A City by Lauren Collins, which retells a dark story of a massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina that eliminated a prosperous Black community of lawyers, educators, elected government officials and entrepreneurs.

On November 10, 1898, white Wilmington supremists issued a “White Declaration of Independence, gunned down scores of Black men, chased their families into hiding, marched to City Hall, and overthrew the democratically elected, multiracial local government at gunpoint.

Collins traces the impact of this massacre and military coup through the generations and legacies of four Wilmington families whose diverse descendants include Lara Trump and Michael Jordan. Kirkus Reviews called the book “An urgent work of reportage and historical research that lays bare structural racism past and present.”

Collins’ book is not an easy summer read, but then, neither is Gone with the Wind.

Something to look forward to as this summer ends: LibroMobile’s upcoming Weekend Litfest. The entire weekend is terrific and I’m especially excited about the panel on Saturday afternoon featuring my friend Lisa Alvarez and the VIP reception Saturday night featuring my handsome hubby.

Gracias to all of the sponsors, especially the Sadlers.

The Weekend Litfest is August 21st through the 23rd at LibroMobile, 1150 S. Bristol St., #A3, Santa Ana, CA 92704. Tickets on sale here.

Be there! And buy some books. It’s fundraiser.

Purchase The Lockhart Women

Purchase Those People Behind Us