If you think that I am intelligent and ambitious and reasoned and formidable, if you think one good thing about me at all, then I insist that you reconcile that with me just being regular black-black. My mother once paid for a coach to help me lose my southern accent. I can still do it, if I think about it hard enough. You basically wake up your tongue; by nature southern tongues are lazy, like our summers. You get the tongue to stand up straight and you flatten the back of the mouth just a bit. That will take out about 60 to 70 percent of your southernness. The rest is about syntax and meter.
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