Ma Da Go Cafone: The Secret Language of the South

When I was in junior high school in Berkeley, an African-American friend named Gwen, took a trip down south to visit some relatives.

"Damn," she said when she returned, "I couldn't understand hardly anything they said."

"Like what?" I asked, stuffing my clothes into the gym locker next to hers.

"Like Ma Da Go Cafone." She said.

"What?"

"Ma Da Go Cafone," she repeated. "It means 'my daughter went to California."

I thought Ma Da Go Cafone was so cool that I used it as a powerful mantra to torture my younger brother, repeating it over and over and telling h im I wouldn't let him know what it meant until he turned 13. I kept my word, but he was probably disappointed.

White or black, people here in the South talk differently than I do.

A pale skinny guy on the Greyhound bus from Alabama to Tennessee began to make conversation with me while I was trying to catch up on my writing.

"Ahm gon ta Paduca tagit me a truck." he said.

Oh lord, I thought, some redneck that has nothing better to do than make conversation that I don't understand.

"Hmm," I said, staring intently at my writing pad. Scribble, scribble.

Eventually he began to make so many semi-intelligible comments that I was forced to put down my pen and listen.

And I found that the guy had a lot to teach me. About what it's like to be a truck driver in Alabama, for instance, when all the small and middle sized trucking companies are folding because of the price of gas, and the big companies are cutting back on salaries and benefits.

"Everythang's gon corporate, " he said. "We're losin that human touch, we're just numbers ta them."

Well, I thought, this is a language that a lot of people in this country seem to be speaking.

I learned about his passion for genealogy--something we share--and about how to speak Southern.

"Yont." he said. "Mayonaisse."

"What?" I asked politely, wondering if he might be trying to tell me about his daughter going to California.

"Yont ta come with me ta Paduca? Mayonaisse a lotta people on this bus!"

He laughed, then admitted that he had stolen a lot of his lines from a famous Southern comedian who makes jokes about rednecks.

But it was new to me, so I laughed too.

"When ah wuz up North, "he said, "ev'body loved the way ah talked. They jus kept asking me over and over to say something, anything."

The countryside we were passing was green, with rolling hills. Alabama was much more beautiful than I expected.

"That's my town," he said, "just over that hill. Not much to look at, just simple country living, but it's where I'm from. I love it. Wouldn't want to live anywhere else. "

I had put my writing pad down. He was actually a pretty interesting and good hearted guy.

At Nashville, the bus stopped, and I got off, wishing him goodbye and good luck.

He said something in response that sounded like a mouthful of cornbread, but which I now recognized as the secret language of the South.

Southern Discomfort

Coming into "The South" for a northerner (or better said, a Westerner) like myself, has felt like visiting a foreign country.

I have, quite frankly, approached Alabama and Mississippi with more trepidation than when I travelled into the Amazon jungle.
The names of the cities here are not just city names to me--they are syllables that evoke particular images from my childhood: Birmingham, Montgomery, Hattiesburg translate for me into "rabid white crowds, dogs, hoses, George Wallace, lynchings." As we walk through these cities, walkers and locals say: "This is where two black men were lynched," or "this is where a rabbi was murdered."

Is there really a New South? I have asked people along the way.

The response has depended on who is speaking. "Well, you know, the old-timers, they have a hard time changing," says one.
One of these 'old-timers', a white guy in his sixties who was a police officer during the Civil Rights demonstrations, says he thinks there is more racism now, exacerbated by affirmative action programs which are resented by whites. He is one of those people who thinks the country will collapse to the point where everyone will be protecting their own with big guns.

A black woman in a tiny country store in Mississippi, when asked if the KKK is still around, says "Oh yeah, they still around."

The cheerleading squads on the University campus in Hattiesburg are practicing when the Long Walkers walk onto the campus..they seem neatly divided into white and black. Professors on campus say that progress is still slow, though most of the young generation doesn't seem to suffer from the blatant racism that their elders have.

What amazes me is when a couple of different professors--at two different universities--tell me that many of their students come into their classes with no knowledge of the history of the Civil Rights movement here in the Sixties. One prof, after having shown a documentary on that era, was asked by his students: "Why weren't we told about this sooner?"

Trail of Tears? For most young people, it's also not in the history books. Unless you are one of the many people around here who want to rediscover their Cherokee roots.

I did go on a couple of Plantation Tours... an interesting way to learn about the colorful people who lived in these Southern plantations, and some of the history of the area. My friend Melinda, who writes a column on old plantations here in Tennessee under the name "Auntie Bellum" says she has only been on one tour that described the life of the slaves on these plantations.

There definitely seems to be a kind of Southern Discomfort going on with southerners and their history.

And with me. I am both fascinated and repelled by the South, which after all is a big chunk of our own American history,despite their efforts to secede. I have ancestors who fought and died for the Confederacy--some who may have lived in those big plantation houses and some who themselves picked cotton.

In Alabama, a carfull of teenage yahoos (no not the internet yahoo) drove around and into our camp yelling stuff about 'hippies' and 'little bitches'. We managed to chase them away, but not before one of the male walkers whispered, "It's the Klan" and a young woman admitted she was scared to death.

And yet, on the Longest Walk, we have met some incredible people here in the South--warm, hospitable, generous, thoughtful people, white, black, Native and all the combinations thereof.

(photo caption: One of the warm, generous and progressive people we met on the journey was this professor from the University of Montavalo in Alabama, (right), shown here speaking to two people from the Longest Walk. She traded the mask to the guy in the middle for his t-shirt, because the mask was originally from his people in Mexico.)

The Longest Walk, Mississippi and Alabama

Dancing at a Choctaw Pow-wow.
























































The hardworking trash crew, picking up trash and other elements along the way.