Grandma’s Accent

You don’t hear your grandma’s accent until you move away from the place she called home the better part of her life. You don’t recognize her accent until you come back, your ears attuned to new accents, other dialects, different patterns of speaking. Only then does her accent appeal to your ear, ring true, full-fledged, undeniable. Nobody on the planet says New York quite like a New Yorker. Nobody pronounces Harlem like a Harlemite, like my grandma did. It wasn’t slick talk. My grandma didn’t do slick talk. She is sure to have endured her share of slick-talkers, spent a lifetime dodging folks with their slick talking ways. But it was never my grandma’s aim to slick talk her way through. She lived her life straight-ahead, shoulders square. This is just the way she learned to speak. An accent she grew to embody as part of a new way of living in her adopted home. Then she’d drop a phrase - 'don’t make me no nevermind,' and her Savannah roots would come sliding through. That was my Grandma Marguerite: Georgia born, NYC raised, Harlem to the core. <a href="https://medium.com/@jedah.mayberry/grandmas-accent-c7e969627f72">Visit Now</a>