were no cars there. It was a Saturday morning when my brother and I got the news that, the night before, my father had been thrown from the golf cart that he and my mother and their friends were riding in as it took a sharp curve, hitting his head on a concrete footpath. He was thirty-seven, in a coma. There was blood on his brain. Later, at Sunday school, one of my classmates—a miniature town crier in khaki pants and a blue blazer, lips ringed with doughnut powder—circulated a rumor that he had had too much to drink.
He had been the adventurer in our household, to the extent that there was one. In the summer of 1966 he had traveled to Madrid as part of a delegation from his Catholic boys’ high school. One day he and a friend ditched their coats and ties and ran off to Gibraltar, where they hopped a boat to Tangier. The expedition yielded a sheepskin rug and twenty-one demerits, one more triggering automatic expulsion in the coming academic year.
The Marianist brothers of the Jericho Turnpike did not succeed, however, in stifling his curiosity about the world. He kept a list of every bird he had ever seen, dating from his days as a preadolescent twitcher, stalking the marshes of Alley Pond Park in Queens. Never mind that my father had been outside of America but once: he knew the capital of every country, the name of every river, which sea abutted what strait, how many countries were completely surrounded by other countries (three: Lesotho, San Marino, and Vatican City), why Chicago O’Hare’s abbreviation was ORD (it used to be called Orchard Field).
By the time I’d started school, he was half of a two-man law firm that occupied a three-bedroom cottage a few blocks from the county courthouse. His office was my first foreign country: the wooden shingle hanging from the front porch, as though to mark a border crossing; the smell of cigarettes and correction fluid and shirt starch; the gold pens; the yellow pads; the zinging typewriter; the kitchenette drawers full of Toast Chees and Captain’s Wafers and Nekot cookies; the sign behind the desk of Teresa, his all-powerful secretary, that read “I Go from Zero to Bitch in 3.5 Seconds.” (Teresa was my first bureaucrat.) One of my father’s clients, Marshgrass, paid him in grouper and bluefish. A judge named Napoleon Bonaparte Barefoot presided over district court. The language was crisp, formal, aspirated (affidavit, docket, retainer), and then demotic and slurry (a “dooey” was a Driving Under the Influence charge).
Each morning I helped my father pick out a tie, begging him, as we debated dots or stripes, to walk me through the day’s cases. When friends came over for slumber parties, I’d insist that we try our Barbies for prostitution. As I understood it, prostitution entailed sleeping with someone to whom you weren’t married. We often declared mistrials, in the knowledge that, having shared a bed, we were probably prostitutes ourselves.
At night I ran to the door, as eager as a sports fan to hear which cases my father had won, which he’d lost, how the bailiff had yelled at a defendant to get a belt. I often asked him to tell the story of one of his first trials, which concerned a man who had had the misfortune to be urinating in an alleyway where someone had recently broken into a car. A police officer approached and told him he was under arrest.
“What the fuck?” he said.
The police arrested him and took him to the station, where they put him in front of a witness, who said that the guy in front of him was definitely not the guy he’d just seen running away from the scene of the crime. The police charged my father’s client anyhow, with disorderly conduct.
My father, just out of law school, spent a week in the library, trying to ensure that his client wouldn’t end up with a criminal record on account of a single curse.
When the trial date arrived, the state presented its case. My father then rose and asked to approach the judge. Permission granted, he trudged toward the bench, carrying a leather-bound volume in which he had carefully marked the relevant law. Disorderly conduct, the book explained, had been committed only by a person who had said or done something that was “plainly likely to provoke violent retaliation,” not by one who had merely spouted off a profanity without the expectation of a fight.
“I’d ask that you consider this statute—,” my father began.
The judge took one look at the book and cut him off.
“That’s Raleigh law, boy,” he boomed, churning each syllable around in his mouth as though he were whipping cream.
My father retreated and, for lack of a better option, put his client on the stand.
“How many beers did you have?” the state’s attorney asked.
“Nine,” my father’s client replied.
The judge banged the gavel, a woodpecker drilling bark.
“Case dismissed! That’s the only person who’s told the truth in this courtroom all day long.”
My father spun the tale beguilingly, transforming Wilmington into a low-stakes Maycomb, bandying between voices as though he were keeping rhythm for a crowd shucking corn. Now, after two decades in North Carolina, he sounded more or less like a southerner—an affectation, or an adaptation, that troubled my mother’s conscience. “Your father’s a chameleon,” she would say, upon hearing him drop a g or leave an o hanging open like a garden gate. Changing the way you spoke, or simply permitting it to be changed by circumstance, constituted, in her view, a moral failing. It was weird, like wearing someone else’s socks.
Her prejudice was an ancient one. To assume a foreign voice is to arrogate supernatural powers. In Greece, oracles prophesied fates and gastromancers channeled the dead, summoning monologues from deep within their bellies. In Hindu mythology, akashvani—“sky voices”—conducted messages from the gods. The book of Acts describes the visitation of the Holy Spirit as an effusion of chatter: “And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.”
In Paul’s first letter, he tries to discourage the Corinthians from speaking in tongues, saying that it’s better to speak five intelligible words than ten thousand in a language no one can understand. (In 2006, a study of the effects of glossolalia on the brain showed decreased activity in speakers’ frontal lobes and language centers. “The amazing thing was how the images supported people’s interpretation of what was happening,” the doctor who led the study said. “The way they describe it, and what they believe, is that God is talking through them.”) Muzzling charismatics, the early church established itself as the exclusive font of marvelous voices. By the Middle Ages, the ventriloquist was considered the mouthpiece of the devil. Like my father, he inspired fears of fraudulence. A sound-shifter, speaking from the stomach, not the heart, he might forget who he was.
Still, my parents schooled us in southern etiquette as well as they could, figuring that my brother and I had to grow where they had planted us. We said “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma’am” to adults, even the ones who’d conceived us. My mother suppressed her cringes when the hairdresser called me Miss Priss. But she was proud of her northern upbringing and her Quaker education: she wasn’t going to say that stuff herself. When my father traded “you guys” for “y’all,” she saw an impersonator—a man with a puppet on his knee.
In 1954 Alan Ross, a professor of linguistics at Birmingham University, published a paper entitled “Upper Class English Usage” in the Bulletin de la Societé Neophilologique de Helsinki—a Finnish linguistics journal, borrowing prestige from French. In it, he cataloged U (upper-class) and non-U (middle-class) vocabularies, a taxonomy that Nancy Mitford went on to popularize in her essay “The English Aristocracy,” asserting, “It is solely by their language nowadays that
