We all recognize the stereotypical “redneck” in movies and novels, the working class guy. You know, the guy who comes up to the protagonist in the bar and, for no apparent reason, starts spouting racial slurs and being an asshole to women. He’s definitely a racist and probably a rapist, and we know him right away. He’s a bad person.

He’ll be beefy and ruddy-faced in his checkered shirt and jeans and have bad teeth. Or, he’ll be fat and pasty-faced in his checkered shirt and jeans and have bad teeth. Or, he’ll be skinny and balding and weak-looking, but you get it, he’s a bad guy.

And, of course, he’ll sound dumb as hell, misusing words, saying “ain’t” and “youz,” he’ll frown and scratch his head at the protagonist’s witty putdowns, and be generally incapable of stringing a sentence together. That’s the cherry on the cake of being a bad guy—poor grammar.

In the world of movies and in many novels, bad grammar associates with being uneducated, which associates with being stupid, and that associates with being a bad person.

Of all the classist tropes today, this is possibly the one I hate the most. I find it offensive, in part because it’s so hatefully inaccurate. Most of the working class people I know—family, friends, co-workers—regularly make grammatical errors and they are not bad people. Neither are they stupid, regardless of their lack of college degrees. Stupid and uneducated are not the same thing. 

My own father, “unskilled labourer” though he was, was one of the smartest people I ever knew. He could drive anything, load anything, build anything, fix anything, and learn anything. He was self-taught on guitar and a wonderful singer. He had a million stories.

He was also, however, often grammatically incorrect. He used to say he “already done that” or that he “brung” something home with him, he’d tell you that he “borrowed” his buddy the sawhorses and who he “seen” uptown. 

As a teenager, I loved to help with his many chores and projects, but sometimes, let’s face it, I just didn’t know my ass from a hole in the ground. He’d chuckle, head shaking, and tease me, “Can’t learn ya nothin!” before showing me again.
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Often, he would say this with a toothpick at the corner of his mouth or sucking at his teeth because a dentist for dad was one of the many things we just couldn’t afford.

In writing A Seven Year Ache, I was not unaware of the function, often at an unconscious level, of bad grammar as a signal of stupidity and bad character. But I knew that Rosie’s story was powerful and I knew the truth. That good people, especially if they’re poor, often have bad grammar.

In part because I recognized these insulting and untrue stereotypes of working class people, I made a conscious decision to stick to the voices I knew and be accurate in portraying them. My aunts and uncles born in the 1910s and 20s had little or no education and they did not speak standard English. And all my main characters’ lives were based on theirs.

So I wanted to show that these characters, whom I had portrayed as interesting and complex people, worthy of respect though flawed in various ways, also made grammatical errors. Rosie begins her story with the striking statement, “My Momma ain’t no girlie-woman,” telling the tale of the time Momma rescued Poppa from a rampaging bull, even though the men thought there “weren’t nothin’ nobody could do about it.”

One of Rosie’s many characteristic errors is to substitute the present tense verb when speaking about an event in the past.  For example, in describing their first encounter with the bear, she says that it was in their second year on the homestead “when me and my little sister Carleen first come upon the big animal.” This is a convention of our oral storytelling that establishes immediacy and involvement.

Although readers can find Rosie’s grammar a little confusing at first, many have shared that, captivated by her rapidly unfolding story, they usually accommodate very quickly to Rosie’s voice, truly enjoying her engaging way of putting things. Her voice, like her imperfect character, does not diminish her worth, or their experience of her story.

But I went a little further because I wanted to turn the stereotype on its head; the one that says good and decent people speak correct English and bad people have bad grammar. I gave all the good characters, even those who would have had more education, a tendency to sometimes follow the grammatical patterns of the poor.

For instance, after the death of Eileen in chapter three, when Constable John Elliott is trying to stop Kenny and the boys from killing Ed Welsh, he says “You would have justice for a day. But then what? All of yuz in big trouble! And yur mother losing more childern” (page 92). And in dismissing the men afterwards, he says, “This here is alright. This is all took care of now” (page 94).
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Likewise, when Old Albert is diagnosed with throat cancer, Doc True tells the family, “If a person had money, you could take the train to Winnipeg and get the tumour cut out. But it wouldn’t make no difference. Cancer is cancer” (page 109).

This act by professionals of taking on some of the expressions and grammatical structures of the poor was not meant as patronizing or talking down. Rather, as with many of the teachers and business people of my youth, it was perceived in the spirit of the interaction, as their way of being courteous and agreeable.

Perhaps this is why, after the council by the fire in Welshes’ yard, Rosie says of Doc, “Apart from that faded bow tie and the battered old black medical bag he’s never without, you would think Doc was just a regular fellow. He never puts on airs” (p. 94).

So, in A Seven Year Ache, I flipped the social class stereotype of bad grammar as signalling bad character. In fact, the only people in the novel who speak impeccably are the truly bad. The pompous eugenicist Mrs. Murphy has a stunning vocabulary and speaks with precision and eloquence. Her leering, sexist husband, the Major, also speaks perfect English. As does the racist, child-molesting, union-hating cad, Ronald Thorne-Finch.

In using bad grammar as a signal for good personhood, and reversing standard narratives about social class and personal morality, I wanted to stand up for working class people, highlighting their unique voices, and their smarts and strength and worth, in spite of a lack of education.
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Thus proving, perhaps, that my father did not “learn me nothin’” after all.

This is not a victim story. When my sister and I were in middle school, we were pushed, called names, laughed at, and regularly excluded by the other children. We were not invited for sleepovers. When the boys would shove each other into us and screech like maniacs, chasing each other around with “Lavell fleas,” the girls would sit primly on the school steps, giggling into their hands.

I offer this truth only by way of indicating how astonished I was, how utterly gob-smacked, with the parallels between our lives and those of the “poor little Kelveys” in Katherine Mansfield’s classic short story, The Doll’s House.

Written in 1922, the story shows how wealthier parents poison their children against the poor, and for poorer children, the social barriers against overcoming the position into which they, and their parents, were born.

In The Doll’s House, three little wealthy girls, the Burnells, receive an astonishing gift, an amazing doll’s house, fully furnished and realistic, and they use it as social capital, bringing the other proper little girls in pairs back to their yard to see the marvelous thing. All except two little unfortunates, the Kelveys. Daughters of an Irish washerwoman and an absent drunken father, Lil and Else Kelvey are disdained by the others, and so, of course, meant to be denied the doll’s house delight. But in the end, Kezia, the youngest Burnell, invites the Kelveys into the yard and, for a brief moment before being shooed away, they get to see it.

I encountered this story at three different times in my life; the first time, in high school. I had read stories before in which there were poorer characters, even stories that inspired sympathy for the poor. But I had never really seen a story that showed so completely an understanding of those characters. A story that was about those characters, and in which the reader was on their side.

It was the first story I ever read that clearly acknowledged social class hierarchy and prejudice. Though I was too young at the time to define what social class disadvantage even was, I knew and experienced its effects often.

The similarities between us and the Kelveys were undeniable. My sister, one year older than me and two inches taller, and I were often seen wearing other people’s hand-me-downs, faded dresses too long or too short. When out in the world, we were silent little, big-eyed urchins. My mother was not a washerwoman but she was uneducated and a Christian to boot, so yes, definitely seen as lacking the proper culture. My father, like the Kelvey father, was a rife subject for titillating gossip.

Leaned up against the brick wall of the old school at recess, reading, as was my typical way of making it through recess, I read this story over again. Too young and inexperienced to have a literary vocabulary, still, I could see that the author was taking the Kelveys’ point-of-view.

It made me personally happy that the little girls did get the chance to see that amazing dollhouse. At their age, I would have so liked to have a dollhouse like that. Or a pretty painted room of my own, like some of the girls at my school had, or a canopied bed, or a musical jewelry box. Or new clothes that looked nice.

I didn’t spend my days and nights craving them. But if I were to dream, while flipping through the Eaton’s catalogue, say, I would have liked to have them.

But more than that, my high school self felt somehow understood by that story. Validated. I felt the author knew me, and accepted me, kind of liked me. Just because of the story she had written.

Instead of a sympathetic tongue clicking at the plight of “those less fortunate than ourselves,” as the poor were then characterized, this story had a sharp finger pointing at the cruel “better” kids and their parents.

I read it as an affirmation. Someone . . . some woman . . . long ago, understood my life. She knew about the cruelty of children who had things. And where they learned that cruelty. She knew the degradations of poverty on the poor. Knew it wasn’t our fault. And she knew that what was done to us, though it hurt us, was not the sum total of who we were.

She ended the story back with the Kelvey girls, out of view of prying eyes and unkind judgements. And she had little Else, with one of her rare smiles, telling her sister, “I seen the little lamp.” 
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The writer seemed to see my spirit too, my hopefulness, my determination to get away, to move up, to be something better. And the possibility, maybe even the inevitability that, someday, I would prevail. That someday, I would transcend the shabby expectations I had been allotted.

She knew that the story of a girl like me did not have to be a victim story, but instead could be one of hope.

A writer did that.

And because of this story, and others, I decided that someday, I would be a writer too. Because I had those kinds of stories to tell. About poor people and who they really were; interesting, complex people whose stories were worth knowing.

In my university Literature course, I came to a better understanding of the symbolism of the lamp as transcendence. By grad school, I was the one pointing out the workings of social class and the place of figures of authority in maintaining social hierarchy. 

Around that time, I was also working on genealogy, building my family tree, and found an even stranger parallel between this story and my life. I discovered that my grandmother Josephine’s Irish granny’s maiden name… was Kelvey. True story. And that is why, in writing A Seven Year Ache, I bequeathed to my Rosie the married name, Kelvey.

There is a fond place in my heart for this story, and for Katherine Mansfield, the long-ago woman who wrote it. Just as with a first love or a first kiss or a first friend, The Doll’s House is memorable and bittersweet and stands, unblemished, in time. This story was the first glimmer in a life’s journey to read, and to write for, my own people.

And through this story, I also "seen" the light.