COLUMN: The importance of knowing where you’re from

I vividly remember my first day at the Telegraph: March 2, 2020. I’d just moved 850 miles away from all the family and friends I knew to take a job in a city I’d only visited once. 

I didn’t know that in a few weeks the reality of a global pandemic would change our world. I didn’t know I would spend almost two years working remotely. And I didn’t know that, in time, I’d discover family and friends here in Middle Georgia.

That first week, as I met a new city and new coworkers, I remember a conversation I had with Joe Kovac Jr., when he delivered an all-time great line. An editor mentioned that Nancy Grace was doing something in the area, and that we might want to look into it, because she’s a Bibb County native.

“Nancy Grace is from Macon?” I queried.

“Everyone is from somewhere,” Joe replied. 

*****

It intrigues me how where you’re from is hardly static. Highways, airplanes and the world wide web have shrunk distances, erased regional dialects and smoothed out many of our unique wrinkles. Folks remake themselves every day.

There are some things, however, that you can’t fake. Place names are a great litmus test. My hometown of Greenville, Texas isn’t pronounced like Greenville, South Carolina. It’s “Green-vuhl.” Nearby Cooper is “Cupper.” 

When I lived in Oklahoma, I learned about Alex (Elik) and Chickasha (famously mispronounced by Tina Fey’s character in the Hulu TV show “Only Murders in the Building”). I spent most of 2019 living in the city of El Dorado, Arkansas. Affixed to the inside of an elevator in a local music venue was a helpful sign for touring musicians: “Eldorado rhymes with tornado,” it read.

We’ve got plenty of unique ways with words here in the Peach State. Whether intentionally designed to quickly identify the outsiders, places like Houston County, Cairo, DeKalb and Vidalia do the trick. 

I’ve learned where these place are and how to pronounce them, thanks to an enormous, vertical map that hangs in the newsroom and the tireless patience of Joe Kovac Jr. and Grant Blankenship, who are always willing to “go to the map” to trace the snaking patterns of rivers and roads until they converge on little out of the way places.

*****

Joe’s pithy observation notwithstanding, I like to collect tidbits about people who called Macon and Middle Georgia home, mostly from books. Folks like Merritt Patrick “Sugar” Cain, a baseball player born in Macon who won 13 games for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1933 and 15 more in 1936 pitching for the St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox. Or John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, a National Baseball Hall-of-Famer who played second base for the semi-pro Macon Acmes in 1905 before embarking on a distinguished Negro league career. 

Or author and former NPR commentator Lauretta Hannon, who grew up in Warner Robins and whose autobiography “The Cracker Queen” I checked out from Washington Memorial Library (inscribed with a note from Lauretta herself, dedicated to a friend in honor of their “ever-expanding Southern vocabulary”).

Ilyon Woo’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book “Master Slave Husband Wife” arrived in my mailbox this week and I can’t wait to finish it. Woo tells the incredible true story of Ellen and William Craft, a young enslaved couple from Macon who escaped to Philadelphia and eventually to Europe.

At Bear’s Books (my favorite place to grab new books, located at 835 Forsyth St. just down the block from H&H), I purchased Bob Beatty’s “Play All Night,” the story of Duane Allman and ABB’s “At Fillmore East” live album. It rests nicely between two books about the Allman Brothers Band by Alan Paul (“One Way Out,” which I bought from Kirk West’s downtown gallery and “Brothers and Sisters,” which Paul autographed for me at Capricorn Records last August), Bill Connell and John Lynskey’s book about The Allman Joys and Gregg Allman’s autobiography “My Cross to Bear.”

The list goes on and on: did you know Secretary of State William Henry Seward — the most powerful man in Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet now mostly remembered for pushing for the U.S. to purchase Alaska — once taught at a school in Eatonton? Or that renowned science fiction and fantasy author Ursula K. Le Guin (whose “The Wizard of Earthsea” absolutely enthralled me after I picked it up at E. Shaver, Bookseller in Savannah) taught French at Mercer in the mid-1950s?

If you’re from Macon, you probably did. 

Don’t mind me, I’m just trying to catch up.

Caleb Slinkard is the managing editor of The Macon Melody. Email him at [email protected].