The Other, Other Light Meat

Patrick, he wants to be called. Patrick, who is a very private person and yet gave permission for me to write about him. Patrick, who told me the other night that he wanted “light meat and vegetables” for dinner. I asked him to please define “light meat”, and received a lengthy voice memo about the health of his adorable dog, which contained precisely no information about what the boundaries of “light meat” were.

So I ordered a bunch of vegetables and some, you know, basically cold cuts. I’m sure there’s some technical name for things like prosciutto that makes them sound classier. But, at the end of the day, they are fancy cold cuts. Left to my own devices, I thought thin slices of cold meat fit the definition of light.

Cut to Patrick and I sitting on the couch after dinner, while I tried to discern what exactly he had meant by light meat, since it certainly wasn’t cold cuts. Apparently, light meat is things like chicken or turkey. I said “If it ain’t red, it ain’t meat”, to which he replied “tell me you’re from the south without telling me you’re from the south.” Obviously “ain’t”, like “y’all”, does a lot of the heavy lifting there, but also yes, meat is meat and birds are birds and fish are fish. Tofu is another substance altogether and is something my southern grandmother would have been highly suspicious of.

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It was really important to my mother (born and raised in the north) that I speak “properly”. She rode my ass about pronunciation. The “t”s, the “d”s, enunciated clearly. The vowels only as long as they ought to be. She didn’t want me to sound like a redneck. She didn’t want me to sound like our neighbors, or the majority of my family. She wanted me to be able to comport myself well in the society she came from. As near as I can tell, she imagined this particular manner of speech would take me anywhere I wanted to go in the world.

She might have been right. Would my words and perspectives been taken as seriously if I’d delivered them with a drawl? In the elite NYC media circles that encouraged my writing career, I really can’t say.

I can tell you that it’s weird to have no static natural voice. Without the constant pressure of other native English speakers—specifically those native to the north—my constant vigilance against soft consonants and multi-syllable vowels slips. The majority of the Serbs who hear it find it cute, charming, endearing. It’s a bit exotic for them. My friends know it’s a tell—I’m either drunk, emotionally worked up, or tired. Maybe some combination.

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Patrick again, this time with a meme. Some girl on Instagram (or maybe originally from TikTok), speaking with a variety of English accents as she recounts her ESL journey and the cast of characters she learned the language from. For her this is another opportunity for humor, presumably her stock in trade.

I started using “y’all” intentionally as it is, in my opinion, English’s best gender-neutral plural. It started out innocently. A contraction, much like “you’re” or “it’s” or “wasn’t”. But, as I spent less time in New York, the “a” became round and lazy. The un-written “w” began to appear. The Southern crept through the recently cracked door. Even my American accent in Serbian began to take on a certain tinge. Cormac McCarthy’s transliterations come to mind, in no small part because Serbian is an extremely phonetic language.

Where standard, purportedly accent-less English remains easy to access, pronouncing Serbian words closely enough to correct to be understood requires a bit of warm up. This causes many situations where my “dobar dan”, meaning “good day” and being the standard greeting, sounds a lot more like “dowber daan.” This brings Lydia immense joy, even as she works to correct my speech so I sound as much like a proper Belgrader as possible.

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Over twenty five years and a whole ocean between myself and North Carolina. And yet, when I forget to control my voice, when I’m exposed to other southern accents, and when I simply relax, you can hear exactly where I’m from. A place where meat is red. Where people speak slowly. Which I used to call home.