A Manner Of Speaking
Though a sixth generation
Vermonter herself, my mother was often puzzled and amused
by what she regarded as the northern Yankees disinclination
to answer in the direct affirmative or negative. She liked
to recall a time when she and her mother and her youngest
sister Anna were canning green beans. My mother was holding
the funnel over the Ball jars, Gram was pouring in the boiling
water to sterilize them, and it was Annas job to say
when to stop pouring because the jar was full. Is it
up to the top yet? Gram asked, and Anna answered, If
its not quite, it is almost. One day when I came
in from the berry patch behind our house and my wife asked
if there was any evidence yet of the cooler weather which
had been forecast, I said, Not as far as I can tell.
Whatever was wrong with no, on both those occasions,
was also wrong with yes at a cookout a few years
ago when my cousin was asked whether he thought the chicken
ought to be turned over once more on the grill. It
probably wouldnt hurt it any was his way of saying
that he thought it should.
Its not just
in my family that this indefinite, indirect answer is preferred.
Expressions of this sort are and have always been so much
a matter of common parlance in northern New England that theyre
simply taken for granted until we become aware of their singularity
and begin to listen for them. Along with certain inflections
including the sound of the sentence that rises to crescendo
in the middle and, having made its assertion, falls off at
the end to a quiet emphasis, (Well, Ill tell you,
mister man, that that horse had his own idea about the situation.),
such a manner of speaking is part of what makes me feel, when
I have been away from Vermont for a time and have just returned,
that Im home again. Its as native to Vermont,
as are the high pastures and stonewalls and the taste of pure
maple syrup and the blaze of color from the hillsides in October.
This habit of speech, which, it seems to
me, somewhat qualifies the northern New Englanders reputation
as a man of few words, is much easier to hear than it is to
explain. Perhaps it has something to do with life as it is
lived in unpredictable extremes of weather and climate which
can make solstice and equinox little more than dates on the
calendar. That the subject of the weather inspires those speculative,
conjectural habits of thought and response in which we Yankees
seem to reside most comfortably can be verified early any
morning among the men who begin their day at the back of the
Teago General Store in South Pomfret, Vermont. Sitting there
in March or April next to the coffee machine with its sign
saying Were probably going to raise our coffee
to 50 cents someday (even the store owner, a New Jersey
native, has succumbed to the local idiom), even the most definite
opinions about whether we have finally come to the end of
winter are always cheerfully undercut and concluded with the
consensus, But you never can tell. On Teagos
front steps one cold, overcast November morning, I thought
I smelled snow in the air and asked Wayne, the woodsman, if
snow was coming. He answered in a string of qualifiers that,
to an outsider, would sound more like the beginning than the
end of a conversation, "It almost seems as if it might
be," and headed for his pickup.
But if to dwell in
northern New England is to be subject to whims of climate
and weather, it is also to bear witness to the ways in which
the natural world adapts to all sorts of extremes and to learn
that to bend is not to break. The key seems to be a kind of
suppleness in nature that we somehow would be failing to acknowledge
were we to take our stand in a definite yes or
no in which there is no room to hedge our bets.
Indeed, the happiest and safest position to occupy in the
face of contingencies of weather and fortune is that of a
thoughtful uncertainty, a position honored by Robert Frost,
Vermonts first poet laureate, at the end of his On
Looking Up By Chance at the Constellations. Speculating
on what even the most dedicated stargazer might gain from
his hours of vigilance, Frost declares that
it
wouldnt reward the watcher to stay awake/In hopes of
seeing the calm of heaven break/On his particular time and
personal sight. Then, as though hearing a little too
much unjustified authority and assurance there, he backs up
and concludes the thought and the poem in the true Yankee
idiom, in which, even in the cosmic scheme of things, possibility
is the only certainty: That calm seems certainly safe
to last tonight.
If the Yankees
preference for the conjectural over the definite means that
they are less likely to be caught unprepared, it also enables
them to respond with a sort of graciousness and at the same
time to maintain a measure of their proverbial independence.
As the answer to an offer or an invitation, their negative
is the gentlest of nos which both lets you
hope that it may turn to an affirmative and leaves them with
room to change their mind. When it came time for dessert in
our home and my mother would ask my father if he would like
a piece of apple pie, his answer of not right now, maybe
later was a way of both announcing that he was full
and avoiding any sort of implied distrust of her baking skills
that no might have suggested. Harder to interpret
but in the same spirit of courtesy is my uncles and
my brother-in-laws response of I dont care
to the same sort of offer. Far from meaning that he did not
care for any or from expressing apathy or indifference, as
it might seem to be doing to the untrained ear, it is perhaps
best understood as something like, well, if there is
enough to go around, that is, if there is some left over after
everyone has been served, Id be happy to oblige you.
The apparent intention is not to let ones own wish infringe
upon the wishes of others. Thus is the indirect affirmative
as deferential as the indirect negative.
When conversation
turns to discussion, if the northern Yankee doesnt agree
with you about something, he sounds as though he doesnt
exactly disagree with you either; instead, he politely lets
you know that you might be right and, by so doing, keeps the
matter open. Not that continued discussion will ever reveal
precisely what he truly thinks, for that is his affair just
as what you are thinking is your affair, two separate domains
which may overlap, but only consensually. The implied affirmative
or negative, then, can take care of what is often the need
to let people know that what they have just asked is none
of their business without anyones having to be rude
by saying so in so many words. Thus potentially polemical
situations are diffused, and the boundaries so necessary to
social harmony are maintained by a kind of discourse of implication
and appeasement. One long winter in my parents later
years, my father developed the habit of pacing inside their
small house. I suppose his repeated circuit of kitchen, front
hall, living room, dining room, kitchen, etc. was a combination
of restlessness and a way of getting the sort of exercise
he needed to keep his circulation going until the weather
was warm enough and the ice sufficiently melted to enable
him to resume his constitutionals outdoors. My mother, trying
to rest on the couch and feeling her nerves increasingly frayed
and the house to be shrinking with each of his measured, successive
orbitings, finally registered her exasperation by asking him,
Have you met anyone on these walks of yours, Wally?
To which he answered, in passing, Not yet. In
those two words, the right of the inquiry was honored, the
sarcasm both acknowledged and deflected, and the necessary
margin restored to the lives of each. Moreover, as my mother
recalled it, the tension was suddenly exploded in shared laughter
which included their appreciation of the idiom that had so
spontaneously and effectively served the moment.
Ironically, the indirect
answer is an example of that restraint by which some of the
most cherished Yankee values are acknowledged and protected,
as the lexicographer Noah Webster recognized in 1789. Struck
by the very different manners of speech in the north and the
south, he found much to admire in the former:
In New England, where there are few slaves and servants
the
people are accustomed to address each other with that diffidence
or attention to the opinion of others, which marks a state
of equality. Instead of commanding, they advise; instead of
saying, with an air of decision, you must; they ask with an
air of doubtfulness, is it not best? or give their opinions
with an indecisive tone; you had better, I believe.
Thus it is no wonder that a famous twentieth century visitor
to New England from the deep south, William Faulkner, was
at first baffled by the Yankee reluctance to give a full and
direct response. With an ear adapted to the southerners
conversational norm of both candor and disclosure and to what
Webster calls a habit of expressing themselves with
a tone of authority and decision, Faulkner was struck
by what he considered to be the indifference, if not the downright
distrust and hostility, of Yankee speech. But he eventually
came to hear and to admire the same egalitarian spirit that
Webster noted, and, realizing that this seeming evasiveness
was the very essence of these northern people, he spoke with
the deepest respect of
the men and women themselves
so individual, who hold individual integration and privacy
as dear as they do liberty and freedom; holding these so high
that they take it for granted that all other men and women
are individuals, too, and treat them as such,
with
absolute dignity and courtesy.
What is the comparative
worth of authority, precision and directness next to such
values as these? And the initiated can hear them expressed
today in even the most casual of exchanges, such as one I
overheard some years ago in the Cumberland Farms store in
Woodstock, Vermont, the town where I grew up. The son of the
woman who was working there as cashier had stopped in at the
end of the day to pick up a six-pack and some groceries and
exchange a few words with his mother. As she rang up his purchases,
she asked him, You headed home now, are you? And
I heard him reply in a classic Yankee sentence which allowed
for all sorts of unforeseen possibilities and circumstances
and changes of heart and at the same time courteously honored
the privacy and preserved the freedom of both of them to think
what they would: Oh, I dont know, probably more
or less I guess.
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