Every new person I meet in my life tells me that I have an accent. Apparently my speech as a young woman of Italian descent is not very subtle. I disagree. But if I had been told this more often when I was little girl, I probably would have been outraged. As a young adult, I now embrace the ambiguous remarks concerning my so-called accent. And it’s all thanks to the incredible woman I call, “Ma.”
I admit that speaking has never been my forte. I express myself much more thoroughly through the written word.
I was born in Brooklyn, but my family moved to New Jersey when I was just three-years-old. Deep down, I will always consider myself a Jersey girl, which seems to baffle my mother. She was a New Yorker to the core, born in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn. The New York in her will never die, and it shouldn’t because it makes my mother who she is. Her accent, however, has always seemed to take on a life of its own. Truthfully, the complexity yet unintentional simplicity of her New York accent never ceased to amaze me.
In her essay, “Mother Tongue,” author Amy Tan discusses the way her mother spoke English. She mentions her mother’s strong Asian accent, and the embarrassment she would feel when others heard her mother speak. She writes, “I was ashamed of her English. I believed that her English reflected the quality of what she had to say.” I can relate to Tan’s feelings of shame. When I was a child, I would sometimes cringe when my mother spoke to people. I only felt this way because I believed they were paying more attention to her accent than the content of what she was actually saying. They would interrupt her speaking and say, “I’m sorry; your accent is very strong. Are you from New York?” My mother would happily reply, “Yep … Brooklyn. Canarsie, to be exact!” The worst was overhearing my mother talk on the phone to my doctor when I was home sick from school. “Hi Docta Brennan! This is Deborah Cascio and I’m cawlin’ in regods to my faw-yea-old dawta, Jennifa. Yea, I ‘dink she’s got ‘da flu or ‘da crupe ‘cuz she’s got ‘dis pasistent cawf that won’t go away, and she’s even got a feva now.” For my mother, the accent barrier was certainly the hardest part of moving from Brooklyn to the New Jersey suburbs in the 1980’s. When I entered elementary school, I was placed in a speech class to help with a slight impediment. My teacher advised my mother not to help me with my speech homework because she might “hinder” my learning experience. She advised my mother to have my older sister help me if I needed it instead. My mother initially took offense to this, and she began to believe that her accent would not benefit me in the years to come. She was aware of her strong accent, but she knew she couldn’t do anything about it.
Growing up, I started to meet new people and make more friends by playing soccer. At these soccer games, I would glance over at the sidelines and see my mother talking with other parents. She would flail her arms and talk a mile-a-minute with her hands while telling a story. If you tied her hands down, she would never be able to speak. To me, it always looked like the other parents were laughing at my mother’s accent. But little did I know, they were laughing at the content of her story because simply put, my mother’s a funny lady.
What I really admire most is the fact that “Ma,” as I always call her, embraced her accent. The more pride she showed for being a New Yorker, the more I grew to idolize her. People always had an opinion about her accent, but she never changed who she was to satisfy them. She was proud of her identity and where she had come from.
