I realized in that moment that all of these phrases I use, and the things I say to my daughter, are the ways my mom spoke to me. She had gotten them directly from her dad. From the South. And all of them are alive in me. I can hear her saying, “Get over here, goddamn it, and give me some sugar!” She mothers my daughter through me. Whenever I go to the South and hear the Memphis accent, I feel a longing, a nostalgia for something I never lived. I’ve never lived in Memphis. But something inside of me has.
