Your compiler supposes virtually every American over about the age of ten has heard of Nelle Harper Lee (1926-2016), that one-novel wonder from Monroeville, Alabama, whose attitude-shifting masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, was first published in 1960. After the book’s record-breaking success, Miss Lee shrank from public life and was only rarely seen or heard from until her death more than a half-century later.
Because she agreed to be interviewed only a few times very early in her book’s amazing run, generations have grown up knowing her writing voice intimately but having little or no idea what her spoken voice sounded like. Your compiler recommends that the reader Google Youtube.com/watch?v=EfsFeMRF7CU and hear what is perhaps the only surviving recorded interview with Miss Lee, thus learning the spoken voice behind the masterful written one. Hear the liquidity and beauty of her well-bred, pre-TV, pre-Northerner-influx, small-town Southern way of speaking. (Should the reader wish to hear a comparable male Southern accent of the same period, Googling “Shelby Foote” (1916-2005) should fit the bill.)
Your compiler has read everything he could reasonably get his hands on about Miss Lee over many years and recalls a story from one such book, The Mockingbird Next Door, by Marja Mills, a Northern writer who lived next door to the Lee sisters in Monroeville for a time and became their friend. The story speaks to the theme of this article: what our voices sound like to other ears.
What specifically happened in this instance was that Miss Mills wrote an article for publication in a Chicago paper on the sisters and gave it to the Lees before it was published for their critique. In it, Miss Mills had explained that Alice Finch Lee (1911-2014) pronounced her younger sister’s name as “Nail Hah-puh.” Miss Mills reports this was Harper Lee’s only complaint about the article; “You dropped Alice two social classes with one syllable,” the world-famous author declared with a soupçon of disgust.
Even so, your compiler must concede that when he enunciates “Nelle Harper,” it comes out awfully close to sounding, at least to his own ear, as “Nail Hah-puh,” and he came along in 1962, well after the advent of television and relocating Northerners. But he, too, would object to that particular rendering of the vernacular pronunciation of Miss Lee’s first name, for it somehow seems demeaning and ignorant.
The rendering should be more like “Ney-ell,” but even that is not correct: he does not really use two syllables in pronouncing “Nelle” – there is simply a bit of a slurring in saying the name that to some ears might come close to turning it into two syllables. There, in a nutshell, is the extreme difficulty – nay, impossibility – of precisely catching the lilt, liquidity, and cadence of the cultured Southern way of speaking. It is just plain impossible to nail it precisely, the pun with Miss Lee’s much-analyzed first name being fully intended.
Another example of this phenomenon involved your compiler’s late father, who was a successful business owner in Atlanta. One day in the early 1980s, a new secretary who had grown up in Wisconsin brought him a pink phone message sheet (remember those??) with a name and number that began with “599” on it. (This was before we had to dial ten digits in the Atlanta area, and 599 was the exchange for Senoia and Brooks.)
She had a puzzled look on her face as she handed it to him and said, “A lady from Brooks named Kathryn Lightfoot wants you to call her – she said she’s your mother.” Rather obviously, she had understood the way we pronounce “Langford” as “Lightfoot.”
No one else has ever suggested that your compiler’s family surname sounds like the middle appellation of a Virginia-born signer of the Declaration of Independence, but on second thought, your compiler realizes that he is rather often asked to spell it after having said it.
“L-A-N-G-F-O-R-D,” he will intone. A rather surprised “OH!” is the typical response, so the Lord only knows what folks think he is saying. But there is nothing about his appearance or ambulation that could be described as being light of step, so it would be the height of irony if folks think he is saying, “Lightfoot.”
