Full Interview with Sassafras LA - 6

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AN: And we’re not afraid to go out in public looking as whatever you want to call it –

CG: We don’t really walk around in our shrimp boots –

RC: I do –

CG: Well, Ronnie, but -- 

RC: I’ve got mine in my truck, actually. 

AN: I actually had an argument because – I had an argument because, in my video in Alaska, they were, y’all’s are brown, you know, and ours are white. –

RC: Mine’s spray painted green --

AN: And I was coined several times saying, how, well, we use a lot of white ones, different kinds, but I was saying how our shrimp boots are a lot sexier than the Xtra Tuffs.  And there was a big argument between the Alaska people and on and on.

It’s just, we go in camouflage. Actually my dad told me this story of this gentleman that came down as a contractor for John Deere and was doing some training and he says, “I want to thank you guys,” he was in a class a few days ago, “for not wearing camouflage today to work.”  “Why?” “Just because everywhere I’ve been down here, for like the past month, everywhere I go I see camouflage in every setting I’m in.  This is the first place that I’ve been in with at least more than twenty people that, you know, doesn’t have camouflage.”  That’s just the way it, like, I love camouflage, it matches with anything you want to wear, it matches.

RC: This is my dress attire: winter, it’s camouflage, summer it’s khaki shorts and a fishing shirt.   And in between it’s the camouflage pants with a fishing shirt.  That’s the in between one. The bow-fishing months is a combination of the two, converting, from season to season. 

OB: And then down here, we talk with our hands. It’s really hard to get things, like, I love it when like somebody will talk with their hands and mom will like point them out, or something, or they do this to me all the time: I’ll start talking and my hands go crazy and then they’re like, “Olivia, sit on your hands,” and then I set on my hands and then you stop talking because it’s impossible.

CG: It’s hard to get your point across down here without using your hands.

RC: The best is when you’re talking on the phone and you [gestures with hands].

AN: You can tell somebody’s conversation, and the accent is the best part.  I like the accent.  Because there’s people, you know, north, a few miles north --

CG: There’s people fifteen minutes north of us who do not speak like us.

RC: Above the Intracoastal Canal.

CG: I don’t know that happened.  How did it happen that people five minutes up the road do not have Cajun accents?  I don’t know.

AN: It’s kind of an interesting idea for a project.

OB: I’d like to hear what I sound like compared to other people because I don’t think I have an accent, but everybody else thinks I have an accent. 

AN: I’ve learned to cover up mine with the traveling I do, and different things, I want to sound professional –

OB: I don’t want to cover up mine.

AN: So, I’ll slowly, people are like “well, talk in your accent,” so if you get me in a conversation –

CG: When you get us together, it’s coming out.  That’s it.

AN: Or if I’m talking with my buddies, it’ll come out.

CG: I feel it, I hear it, too.

RC: But, my girlfriends’ brother was working for my dad this summer and they live in Houma, and my dad goes, says something and he calls him a Northerner, and he says, “What’s your definition of a Northerner?” And he’s like, “Well, above the Intracoastal [canal].”  [Laughs]

OB: Or if you get some of the older people here, they don’t say the “t-h” sound and it’s like “Sout Lafourche” and “da” instead of “the.”

CG: But --

AN: So we get coached by her mom the English teacher all the time.

CG: But, just to clear that up, just we say “dat” and “dere” because the “t-h” sound does not exist in the French language. Just to clear that up. We’re not stupid or ignorant.  That sound does not exist.

OB: But when they learned to talk, it was, they had no “t-h” sound so when they were taught English, they couldn’t say the “t-h” sound so they kind of carried down a little. 

RC: I know, we hung out with a guy in Mississippi and he always rags on us and we kept say other, well “udder”

CG: Udder.  [Laughs]

RC: “That udder one over dere.”  “Shot dat goose ova dere.”  He’s like, “it’s OVER and it’s not udder, an udder is on a cow. It’s other.”

AN: And people get me for “zink.”  You know, like, wash your hands.  They always tease me because I think it sounds the same, to me, I’m saying “sink, sink” as in, wash your hands.  Actually, this summer I was with them fishing and they had some zinc annodes you put on the bottom of the boat.  Well, they was saying, “We’ve got to install this zinc.”  The whole time, for like the week, I was like, “Why do you need a zink on the boat?” And I come up to Ronnie on the side and I was like, “Ronnie, why do you need to install a sinks, zinks, or sinks?” And he was like, “What?” And of course, he couldn’t keep it on the DL, Ronnie’s like, “Listen to Naquin what he’s saying, he says.” [Laughs]. And I was like, “Thanks Ronnie.”  So then, I finally came to find out that I say it very similar, there’s a lot of things that I get teased about, but I’m proud of it.

CG: A few people say “zink” on the bayou though.

AN: I say, “I’m going to go wash my hands in the zink” in chemistry last semester, they thought I was talking about the stuff –

CG: The zinc.

AN: I was like, “No, in the lab, the zink” [makes hand washing gesture]. They were like, “We don’t have any zinc.”  I was like [throws hands in air].  Just certain things like that, you know.