A Manner Of Speaking

Though a sixth generation Vermonter herself, my mother was often puzzled and amused by what she regarded as the northern Yankee’s 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 Anna’s 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 it’s 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 wouldn’t hurt it any” was his way of saying that he thought it should.

It’s 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 they’re 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, I’ll 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 I’m home again. It’s 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 Englander’s 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 “We’re 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 Teago’s 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, Vermont’s 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 wouldn’t 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 “no’s” 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 uncle’s and my brother-in-law’s response of “I don’t 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, I’d be happy to oblige you.” The apparent intention is not to let one’s 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 doesn’t agree with you about something, he sounds as though he doesn’t 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 anyone’s 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 don’t know, probably more or less I guess.”