Not From Around Here
03.12.09
As I was browsing the mythology section at McKay’s Used Books, a woman in her mid-thirties in the aisle with me looked up from where she was kneeling by the stacks and asked me, “Are you Jewish?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, what are you, then?” she said.
“Pennsylvanian,” I said.
I’ve lived in the Chattanooga area most of my life, thirty-seven years now, but I still think of home as Pennsylvania. For a long time, I thought I had lost my Dutch accent. Then about ten years ago, a motorist with a flat tire pulled into my driveway in Ooltewah. I talked to him for awhile, and he said, “You’re from Pennsylvania, aren’t you?” The accent was still there. Sometimes, I’ll hear a recording of myself on the phone, and the voice reminds me of my father’s or one of my brothers’.
A few years ago, I was in a laundromat in Cleveland, TN. Another patron was on his cell phone, and the longer he talked, the more I heard home in his voice. After he finished his phone call, I asked him if he was from PA. “No,” he said, “Michigan.”
“I thought I heard a bit of a Pennsylvania Dutch accent,” I said.
“I did live in Glen Rock, PA, for several years,” he said.
I explained that Glen Rock was just a few miles from where I had grown up.
In the South, people define themselves first and foremost as Southern. I suppose if asked to define ourselves regionally where I grew up, we’d say, Mid-Easterner or Mid-Atlantic, but the question would seem odd. Most of my neighbors were Pennsylvania Dutch, with names ending in -er. Stifler, Olewiler, Bortner, Frutinger, Dellinger, Stover, Kaltreider. And those whose names didn’t end in -er mostly sounded German. Rexroth, Leiphart, Ludwig, Dagenhart, Parr. There were a few generic names, Taylor, Miller, and Robinson, but not many.
When the VW bug appeared in the ‘60’s, the older people at church called it a “Wolksvagen,” falling naturally into the German pronunciation. Even as a child, their voices always had an accent to my ear. And when old fashioned Sunday was celebrated at Windsor Church of God, a member of a Winebrennerian denomination split from the old German Brethren, the song service was in German, my mother, a Methodist from just over the border in Maryland, stumbling over some of the words and surprised at the fluency of my father, who seldom attended church, but had learned the songs as a boy as an Evangelical United Brethren. A few years ago, when my mother was visiting, someone asked her what our background was, and she answered, “Mennonite,” which wasn’t strictly accurate but was a clearer answer than many to my friends in the South who were largely unaware of the rich religious tradition inherited from the German states.
While I seldom eat pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s, or feast on Lebanon bologna, or routinely use words like “nebby” or “doppy” or “fressen,” at heart, I’m still Pennsylvania Dutch. When I think of home, I think of the rolling hills of the piedmont along the Susquehanna River, of cornfields, tobacco fields, cow manure, and dairy farms, of apple orchards and well water, the cluck cluck of pheasant in fall and the foggy breath of deer on a cold November morning.
Much of that world has disappeared in the years I have lived in the South. The pheasant are gone along with the tobacco fields and many of the farms. Clusters of condominiums sit where once were open pastures. The old Dutch farmers have been replaced by commuters from Baltimore and others who like the benefits of open country coupled with easy access to the major cities of the Mid-Atlantic.
But there are still those of us who remember. You’ll find us scattered around these United States, not from around here, sounding like home.
© Bill Stifler, 2009
Published in Being Home: An Anthology, Sam Pickering and Bob Kunzinger, editors. Madville Publishing, 2021, pp. 214-216.
Used by permission of the author
Tags: Chattanooga, dialect, Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Dutch