Caterpillars Crawl

The music I write teaches me astonishing things about myself. Most of the time the lessons it teaches me are delightful, offering me new and interesting ways of looking at the world. But in the case of Caterpillars Crawl, the lesson held a surprising amount of pain.

I originally wrote Caterpillars Crawl just for fun. When I sang it to myself, strumming along on my guitar, it made me happy. It always reminded me that I was absolutely okay even when I didn’t feel particularly popular or talented or smart.

One day I got the delicious idea to make a children’s choir arrangement of Caterpillars Crawl. I was so excited to share this song with the world! A few days after it was finished I was happily playing it at the piano when I suddenly realized something that stopped me in my tracks: the most important rhyming words in my song didn’t actually rhyme! I felt so ashamed that I started to cry.

Unless you’ve lived in Appalachia or the South, you may have no idea what I’m talking about. It all has to do with different ways of pronouncing vowels. Where I grew up, words like “them” and “stem” have the same vowel sound as words like “slim,” “limb,” and “interim.” When I went to graduate school in the Northeast, my fellow students noticed right away that I said “rint” instead of “rent,” “pin” instead of “pen,” and “mimmo” instead of “memo.” Even some of my professors made fun of me, joking that I was a “hillbilly” or a “Southern belle.”

There is a strong stereotype that people who speak in a Southern dialect are uneducated and stupid, and I sure didn’t want anyone thinking I was uneducated or stupid, so I worked hard to change. Some changes were not too hard to make, like avoiding using the word “y’all.” But changing certain vowel sounds required a lot more practice. I finally thought I had stamped out all traces of my accent, and yet it was clear I had failed. Any sophisticated musician who heard Caterpillars Crawl would instantly know I was still a dumb hick.

Of course, I was not a dumb hick. You would think I’d know this by the time I was a thirty-year-old woman with an doctoral degree in music composition from an Ivy League university, but self-doubt is a brutal foe. It can be powerfully hard to believe in your own beauty when the folks around you don’t see it. It took me many years to truly believe, deep inside, that my “down home” dialect was not inferior. In fact, I finally came to understand that it’s an exquisite and expressive way of talking, with its own poetry and grace.

One day I realized I was ready to claim my heritage and, like the caterpillars, “go out on a limb.” I officially changed my professional biography to read: “Elizabeth Alexander grew up in the Carolinas and Appalachian Ohio.” That same day, I added a new composition to my music catalog: Caterpillars Crawl — a song that always reminds me that I am absolutely okay even when I don’t feel particularly popular or talented or smart.

-Elizabeth Alexander