The Big Man from the Holler

I don’t know what age I was when I discovered that my dad was the big man around the county. I think I was around six or seven when he was promoted to management, and it was a few years later that he was promoted to senior manager of his division. He had hundreds of people, who made very good money, working for him, and hundreds more waiting in line for the opportunity to be one of his employees. Needless to say, people showed him a tremendous amount of respect.

At least to his face, but I’ll get into that later.

In this section of the book, I write about my dad’s manner of speech. I have to confess, and some may disagree, but I think that by the time I came around, he’d lost most of his North Carolina accent.  To my ear, there were only a few words that gave away his origins.  My mom was a different story; she never did lose her accent, and there was no mistaking it. I’m certain her choice of words and her pronunciation remained the same her entire life. To her, we were the ones that talked funny.

One of my favorite words that they used frequently was Hollow. But that’s not how they pronounced it.

Excerpt from A Life Well Stolen

Chapter One, continued

I knew from any early age that my dad was different from my friends’ dads, and it wasn’t that he had more money than them. It was the way people around there treated him.  They spoke to him with a level of respect that others didn’t seem to receive. I heard the word “sir” frequently, and when they addressed him it was rarely by his first name. It was always Mr. Byrnes. It made me proud to walk alongside him and be introduced as his son.  I didn’t know then that a big reason why he received that treatment was because he was one of the top managers at the largest and highest paying employer in the county, and many of those contacts I witnessed were from his employees or people who wanted to be his employees.

But that wasn’t the only way my dad was different. He also seemed to talk unlike any of my friends’ dads. For example, he did a lot of reckoning and fixing, such as “I reckon I’ll fix the fence today,” or “I'm fixing to go to the store.” None of my friends’ dads talked that way, nor did they say “out yonder” like my dad did when he really meant “over there.” They also didn’t call animals, ding-a-lings, like my dad did frequently. And when my friends’ dads got upset, they cussed and swore like any hell bound normal person around there would do. My dad yelled things like, “Ah, Foot!” or “Dad-Jim-it!

He was different, and I figured out after a while that it had a lot to do with where he was from.  He’d grown up in the hills of North Carolina, in a place he affectionately called Byrnes Hollow. But that’s not how he said it. When he pronounced “Hollow” it came out as “Holler.”

            “Why did they call it that?” I asked him, finding the name curious. “Why ‘Holler’?”

When he explained it to me, I noticed how his face brightened and how the corners of his mouth pulled up, as if the telling of it amused him despite his attempt to hide it. “All of the Byrnes families lived on the same hill,” he said. “There were no phones back then, so if you needed to talk to one of us, you just went out to the yard and hollered.  Everyone who lived in those parts could hear the Byrnes hollering for each other so often that it eventually just came to be known as Byrnes Holler.”

That was how my dad told it. Of course, I’ve since learned that they actually lived in a hollow, not a “holler”, as many people from that area of the country pronounce the word. Funny thing is, my dad never admitted to the joke.