“Tell me ya didn’t turn money down?” Eli groans. Neither one of us bothers to dignify the question with an answer.
Before us, the lab’s high walls are covered from floor to ceiling in acoustic slat panels. A row of computers, each with its own set of noise-canceling headphones and recording-grade microphones, display some sort of sound spectrum and wavelength analysis. All other available space is occupied by sound meters, mixers, and equalizers.
“He’s coming,” Holly adds in a whisper, brushing down her hair again. I wonder if she knows how badly she needs a haircut, and maybe some layers, too. But, I remind myself, we’re not here to make Holly over; we’re here to make Eli into someone Griggs Caldecott Johnson III will trust, and quickly.
I glance behind Holly, expecting an old white guy in a tweed blazer and elbow pads, horn-rimmed glasses framing his face. But seeing him, my head tilts sideways in confusion.Is this the world-renowned Professor Pridmore?He looks like a graduate student doing a semester abroad.
“Welcome, friends,” he says, shaking our hands. “We won’t have time for everything today, but we can dive right into phonetics. And if we’re lucky, we might have time to get started with morphology and a little bit of syntax?”
I gotta hand it to Holly, this Pridmore guy is kinda cute—until he opens his mouth and sounds like some sort of genteel British nerd.
Holly steps forward. “Absolutely,” she chirps.
Eli and I nod, then make a concerted effort to smile politely.
We discuss Eli’s burgeoning acting career as Pridmore directs us to a small conference table by one of the large windows. Holly takes the chair closest to him, engrossed with every scholarly word that comes out of his mouth. Once again, I’m impressed by her questions and depth of understanding. She told me last night that she had been relying on Google University todo some linguistics research because she didn’t want to seem dumb. Holly, I’ve realized, is really fucking smart. I don’t get why she doesn’t wear her brain on her sleeve more often.
Eli, meanwhile, seems as stiff as the acoustic boards behind him. The muscles around his jaw are rigid, and even though he’s casually resting his elbows on the armrest, his shoulder blades seem uncomfortably taut.
“Tell me about yourself,” Pridmore says, turning to face Eli directly.
“Not much to tell.” Eli shrugs, his voice plunging hard into a default North Georgia twang, which wasn’t there a minute ago.
“Tell me about your family, your upbringing,” Pridmore prods, leaning forward. From what I learned about linguistics, dialects, and elocution (because I’ve also done my research at Google University), I gather he’s listening for cues in Eli’s speech, watching the movements of his mouth.
Eli rubs his palms hard over his thighs. He shrugs again, eyes quickly cutting to me, then back to Pridmore. “Family’s from Westlake. Just me and my lil’ sister left. Moved around a lot when we were kids.” He licks his lower lip, then pauses, and takes a breath. “Like I said, not much to tell.”
“What about your parents? What are their backgrounds?” Pridmore asks, as I begin to wonder if the linguistics doctor—like so many intellectuals—is oblivious to nonverbal cues.
“Why do y’all need to get up in my business?” Eli says, turning to me as if I’m the one interrogating him. “How’s this gonna help?”
Pridmore offers a gracious smile, relaxing back into his chair. Something tells me he’s heard all this before. “I’m trying to gauge your levels of exposure to other accents and dialects,” he explains patiently. “Childhood exposure to a language shapes the brain’s ability to recognize its sounds, structures, and patterns, making it easier to understand or even gain fluency later in life.”
Eli nods, loosening a little, seemingly satisfied with the academic spiel.
“Can you tell me about some of the places you lived as a child?” Pridmore asks, his voice more cautious this time.
Eli winces slightly as he says, “We lived in every state below the Mason-Dixon Line. Like I said, we moved around a bit.”
“Did that include Mississippi? The Delta, possibly?” Pridmore asks.
Eli nods, his cheeks coloring a little. “I was a kid, though,” Eli repeats. “Don’t remember much.”
Pridmore claps his hands excitedly. “Fantastic,” he exclaims.
“How exactly is this fantastic?” I ask impatiently, and to my surprise, also slightly defensive. Because it doesn’t take a genius to interpret what Eli is saying: He grew up in a transient family. And given his apprehension, he probably went through some heavy shit. Did he go to bed hungry? Or spend nights at a shelter? Or, even worse, did someone abuse him? My chest tightens at the thought of a child-aged Eli surviving under those conditions. “He said he doesn’t remember,” I add. “Maybe we need to move on.”
But the professor remains undeterred by my sharp tongue or resting bitch face. “Part of the reason Eli can reproduce Atlanta dialect so well is his exposure to it,” he explains breezily. “Somewhere in the back of his brain, there’s a bank of memories layered with a rural Mississippi dialect. We just need to tap into it.” He raps one finger on the table for emphasis, then gestures to Eli with open palms. “And to our great advantage, Eli is a proficient code-switcher.”
I grip the armrest on my chair as an icy tingle spreads down my spine. I think I’ve known on a subconscious level that Eli—like me—is a master code-switcher. But acknowledging it would mean that he and I actually have something in common. And not justanysomething, but a whole language born out of necessity and oppression. That all-too-familiar feeling of panic squeezes my lungs. I have to quietly remind myself to take measured breaths, to keep a clear and rational head on my shoulders.
Pridmore manages to elicit a few more childhood memories from Eli’s brain, but I’m barely listening to the content. Instead, I’m narrowly tuning in to the nuances of his pronunciation, the cadence of his voice, the shifts in his inflection. It dawns on me that he leans on his North Georgia twang when he’s nervous,tired, or irritated, turning it on and off at will. Not much different from me and my Puerto Rican Spanish accent.
I wonder if, like me, he had to teach himself to code-switch just to avoid the bullshit of people in power, or to fit in with his own people. Or—as I’ve been guilty of numerous times—to get people to trust him simply because he sounds like them. Deceitful? Yes. Necessary? Probably.
It never occurred to me that a guy like Eli—Southern, straight, white—would have to employ similar tactics to survive.Wait, he is straight, isn’t he?
I’m so deep in my own musings that I’ve lost track of the conversation. Holly is now talking about her own childhood in Jackson, which apparently Pridmore was able to identify within fifteen minutes of meeting her. “Can you tell where Luisa is from?” Holly asks, like a kid asking a birthday magician to pull a rabbit from a top hat.
