This was down by Chesapeake Virginia in the Tidewater Region. I was down their visiting with some relatives at a shore home, my grandmother and a bunch of people, swimming, fishing, crabbing. They had friends and neighbors from the area and I noticed how strong the difference in the accent and the dialect was. Also, how they ate crabs, was different. We would steam the crabs with seasoning. They would boil the crabs and eat them with vinegar and saltines, which was very good. They were nice, country people. But with the accents, after everybody got drunk enough nobody could understand one another.
The people from out of state I’ve met comment that I have a weird accent. A lot of people I meet in places like Vegas or New York think I’m from North Carolina or West Virginia.
As noted in Big Ron’s construction stories, many West Virginians have made a living in construction in the Baltimore area. most of these folks have remained living in West Virginia. However, the CSX railroad that cuts across Baltimore city halfway between the inner Harbor and the County Line, to service the East Baltimore industry and Southeast Baltimore ports, have attracted many West Virginia migrants over the course of the early and mid-1900s. These people and their descendants settled primarily in Old South Baltimore, maintaining a stable white, working-class enclave which enabled South Baltimore to become the initial and most successful gentrification project in the city. However, with housing values soaring from 20k to 400k, property taxes have forced these elderly folks and their descendants to sell their homes and move to Ann Arundel County. The presence of these working people, with the backbone to defend their ancestral home, rather than scurry into suburbia, was the every aspect of Baltimore that enabled its only truly successful gentrification initiative, for which these people were rewarded by being driven out by a predatory tax code. May the hoodrat hordes swarm in their teaming masses across the Hanover Street Bridge, the Ostend Street Bridge and up Light Street, to cleanse this peninsula of its sissy usurpers. Big Ron and I would love to observe this from the cab of his pickup truck.
White in the Savage Night: A Politically Incorrect Life In Words: 2016
link › jameslafond.blogspot.com
