Suddenly, the person next to you jumps up. Their knees are slightly bent forward, their body rigid. Their eyes are closed tightly, face flushed, arms outstretched, their hands clenching and then opening with the rhythm of the pulses. Their alternately rising and falling voice seems to shake and break us with its volume and intensity. Then their arms drop, their eyes open. You catch their glance and an expression of total, questioning bewilderment passes over their face. I want to be silent, but my tongue is locked in place, they say. I hear my words, but I do not understand them. Then, almost without having to catch their breath, they pass into language.

After a sleepover at a friend’s you are dragged along to church the next morning. Among the crowd bumbling outside after the droning service you overhear someone’s breathless account of their cousin’s friend’s being visited by a new tongue. You are envious of the excitement, the certainty; it sounds nothing like your own ghost. You never managed to muster anything you might call belief, but that’s not why you weren’t ready.

             It’s a question of presence, being always sort of half there.

             Wheel’s ma bayest frayund. 

             The parents had moved from the warmed, rangey rounds of the midwest to the south before you arrived. They didn’t take to the infection of a bouncing Southern twang kindly. After a silence and a long stare: What did you say?

             Will’s my best friend.

Afternoons after school were allowed an hour of TV; sometimes, in hollowed-out hours before the cartoons would come on, the public-access channel showed cookery shows. Gangling figures stretching and rearranging pots and knives, only to suddenly pull out soufflés and waxen roasts that seemed to be ready waiting in a nearby oven. There were determined old men in papal chef’s hats, and a gaunt grey man whose desire to appear jovial never managed to shake his haunted severity. There was a tall woman, her hair a balloon of large curls, who had certainty to her slant. It was the shape of the words: she spoke with a force, a landscape of low rolling vowels marked with high-pitched punctuatings, that held an elusive elsewhereness.

             A good few years later, a video of old comedy sketches calls her back from these stare-eyed afternoons. Dressed in a light blouse and wig, the first clue towards who this man was meant to be imitating was his considerable height. Hello, he says, I’m Julia Child. He begins to prepare a chicken, attempting to approach and accentuate her baubled chimes in a growling falsetto:

             You save the liver, fry it up with some onions, for a little snAck or if you have a number of livers you can make a lovely liver potay – or, uh, perhaps a delicious liverwurst which you can spread on a cracker, a Ritz cracker, or sah-halteen.

             His drawn out, breathy delivery of saltine gets one of the biggest laughs from the audience in front of him. What, you wonder in that moment, might be funny: that his exaggeration was itself so over the top, or that a voice could somehow be the punch line of a joke? Child began making The French Chef for US public television in the early 1960s, lasting for ten series; just over two hundred episodes that remained in circulation as daytime filler for decades. The show was the first in the country to include captions; you wonder how those who didn’t hear might have imagined the sound of the words issuing from her robust mouth.

             Child’s voice had the harder consonants that might have come through her mother, who was raised with the pulled bounce of Massachusetts. Her father might have provided a drawn flatness of Illinois, though Midwesterners also roll their Rs in that tongued, rounded-off way. Growing up in the neutral, end-of-the-world wash of California must have tempered these influences, made space in between them for when she would move to India, Sri Lanka, China, France, Germany, Norway. Maybe that, moving in circles of polite diplomats, was how her more British-sounding uhs began to appear. The French-sounding Ahs might’ve come from Paris markets, a consular attaché’s wife struggling to learn to be a homemaker after a lifetime of meals prepared by others, picking up language from awkward exchanges with the more patient stallholders. The cookbooks and TV series were a form of protest once she returned to the US, settling in New England. It was, on one level, an attempt to steer a generation that had learned to love the undying flavours of military rations away from tinned-soup casseroles, one potay at a time. Child would pepper her shows with bits of French, but it felt like more than simply giving the names of the dish or a pastel flourish. It was a strike against space; to act as if she wasn’t where she was, to be determinedly not there.

I have spoken in other tongues, you hear them say, and every word seems to come out upside down. When the holy spirit comes, it feels as if my veins will burst open, as if my head were swelling up, but real big, and then it becomes small once more, and this feeling reaches down into the legs and the middle of the back. It grabs you.

A friend’s mother takes you to the Six Flags for the day – we’re goin to sickflags, your friend  says over and over, the anticipation overwriting any of the day’s bumps and slides. At its end, you are picked up at the park’s entrance, then dropped off at a church lock-in.

             After a potluck dinner on Styrofoam plates, you sit outside on the tarmac in the warm evening, half listening to one of the organizers go on about prayer and discipline. One older kid picks up a pebble, tosses it towards a parked van. It skittles underneath.

             You pick up a pebble and do the same. It bounces up, arcing inevitably from the ground to ping loudly off the van’s metal body. The speaker stops short.

             Who dithat? You say nothing. No one will leave, and there will be no films shown during the lock-in, unless someone owns up. After a long minute, your limp arm lifts. They walk over, looking down their nose and demanding an explanation in front of everyone.

             Didn’t mean to hit the van.

             What’d you say?

             Repeat.

             Then wha’ DIDya mean to hit?

         Don’t answer, attempting to retreat into the seething hole burnt around you. An awareness has dawned, obvious but until then unspoken, that the ghost that had by then settled on you was your concern alone, and to continue speaking would be to dwell on that distance. That no Midwestern Rs would matter a damn. That a sense of being, of belonging somewhere, isn’t as reliant on where you were born as where you imagine yourself belonging, and what possessions haunt your dreams.

             The rest of the evening was flattened silence, as if the world had gone mute. Lying in a sleeping bag on the carpeted floor of the nave that night, dreams were replaced by the TV in front of the altar, playing one horror film after the other.

             In such sleepless, confusedly ashamed moments, some of the area’s other ghosts can start to be felt. What’s broadly nodded at as a Southern accent only became known as such after the dispersals of the Civil War, huddling into some kind of entity sounds that had co-mingled for several hundred years: those indigenous; invading English and Ulster Scots; the range of African voices forced to be there. Sensing the different shapes and uses of these encounters, of vernaculars that are intimately connected but at times felt so obviously, sharply apart, is only a tremor retelling of a scarred history. In such moments the area’s living segregation is audible and apparent – that most neighbours, schoolmates, the chefs on the TV screen, were divided broadly along lines that could be heard if you wanted to listen.

The Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel is meant to account for the origins of the world’s languages, the unifying tongue confounded by a petulant god. Part of the attraction of the tale is its analogical accuracy: the image of a metropolis full of people unable to communicate, each alone with their own bubbling stream of words. It, of course, doesn’t go on to specify the creation of distinct languages, or even start to account for their tilts and stretches and dialects; all it asserts is a lack of understanding.

             Every word has its own personality, a theologian once remarked. A translation is but a mask. But what, then, is an accent? The Swiss writer Johann Breitenger, gesticulating from the eighteenth century, considered all languages to be equivalent. A body that remained the same but just wore different clothing: translation was just dressing up. Accents, then, might be the detailing, the embroidered flourish. More common is the image of a tree. We assign accents to places, like flora that will only grow in one particular valley. Several writers in the sixteenth century likened the use of vernacular Italian and French as fresh young shoots sprouting, from what earth, near the dying old tree of Latin: a small and subtle branch which has barely flowered, and not yet borne the fruit of which it is capable.

             These tendrils are rooted in a time when distances were thought of as such, and gaps between places were more pronounced. But it doesn’t feel so direct, so shiningly healthy or green, when asked casually, daily, about where your accent is from. You don’t know how to explain it to others, much less yourself. Perhaps like a recipe, changing slightly each time it’s made up: dash of Southern, dash of mellowed Midwest; two parts mid-Atlantic; quickly shaken with the sympathetic echolalia of talking with someone from France, Turkey, India, Poland, Lesotho. As if each of those pronouns might stand in for a whole use of words, that the outline of a county, a state, a country is a static lawn and its language merely a gathering of mouths.

             An improvised theory, as your voice itself became a familiar foreigner, was that interacting with speakers rooted in differing areas and influences creates an accent deficit, a non-accent. This explained the creation of the plains of the modern North American palette, or those acquaintances who grew up going to schools made up of mixed nationalities and ended up sounding like wayward Canadian settlers. That somehow through the jumbled patchwork of the suburbs, wherever they might be, you ended up creating a generic accent, sounds soaked up like a brittle sponge.

             There was a resounding familiarity in encountering a parenthetical aside in Dante’s essay ‘On Eloquence in the Vernacular’, where he notes that he considered the confusion induced at Babel nothing other than the forgetting of the previous language. The founding of language instead becomes something like just making it up, filling a void with whatever sounds might come to hand.

The man grips the side of the podium, stares around the auditorium at those eager to hear his first lecture, or perhaps looking for some other sign. In the widest sense, he says, whatever is written in a particular language, is a portion of its literature.

             The works of writing in English, argued the new chair of University College London’s English department in his inaugural lecture in 1848, should be considered worthy of equal attention and study as the classics in Greek and Latin. Behind the statement, you might hear the murmuring of his previous experiences in the church, wondering to what extent any utterance might be considered part of a language, admitted to be worthy of attention. Just before taking up an academic career, Alexander ‘Sandy’ Scott had been a theologian, accused of heresy and stripped of his right to preach.

             The earliest accounts of glossolalia are, invariably, written by the men who presided over small, dedicated congregations. In 1830, several women in fishing villages on an inlet on the west coast of Scotland had certain manifestations. We only know about them because of accounts their ministers wrote; Margaret Macdonald is only mentioned as ***, the ill sister of James and George, in the book which documents her brothers’ similar visitations – which were acquired after she exhibited them. At one point, it is mentioned in passing, she began reciting passages from the Bible, whether in the body or out of the body she could hardly tell.

             Across the inlet, a reverend wrote on the feverish enunciations of Isabella Campbell, which was widely read and established her as the first moving of the Spirit since the Reformation; but it is only partially through the writings of an ambitious and curious lawyer who came to witness this outbreak that we hear about Isabella’s sister Mary, who had made such unfamiliar noises, she considered herself to be conversing in the language of the Pacific Palau Islands.

             The accounts that the lawyer, John Cardale, wrote became the spark to a wider movement among audiences eager for spiritual revival, and would prove the start of the modern strains of Western charismatic Christianity that would be missioned far and wide, alighting in roadside revivals, warehouses on the outskirts of cities, and mega-churches. After witnessing Mary Campbell, Cardale began hosting private prayer sessions in his London home, upon which his wife and maid also began to speak in tongues. The maid, he wrote, was a remarkably quiet, steady, phlegmatic person, entirely devoid of forwardness, or of enthusiasm, and with very little to say for herself in the ordinary way.

             What’s remarkable about the accounts of these episodes is their absences: their powerful delivery, their force and impact, is highlighted – the voice was certainly beyond her natural strength – but the content, what they actually spoke, is never detailed, nor do they attempt to capture it. Cardale went on to proclaim himself an apostle, founding the Catholic Apostolic Church with a group of similarly august gentlemen.

             The Regent Square apostolic church in London is often cited as the origin for the apostolic revival and the latter rain of speaking in tongues. One congregation member, in a later history of the church, gives a more skeptical account of the spread of these abilities: Cardale was given to a state of expectant susceptibility. He also slyly notes that the assistant minister at Regent Square at the time had previously been based in Scotland, providing his services and persuasions on the charismata to the entire area around the inlet of Gare Loch, and surely was the link in inciting such occurrences.

             That assistant – our lecturer Sandy Scott – wrote extensively on philosophical and theological questions, and had edited a colleague’s account of their shared mission to Baghdad (I feel, the missionary had noted during his visit, the languages to be a great barrier); but he never wrote or lectured publicly about what he had seen and heard while presiding over the congregations on the coast of Scotland or in London. Those voices who inspired this ritual invitation of possession, who sought to give themselves over to another idiom, remain an unheard leap into language, a silent ripple that still echoes outwards.

Accents are a way of inhabiting the places we imagine we are from. Though it is far from settled; the nuances and inflections of how accents define words feel, by now, like a possession – or even multiple possessions at once, that we might host for moments, days, years, decades at a time; ghosts that decant themselves into new homes, entering through the mouth. It is confounding. You can pretend to be from where else, somewhere more interesting, less inane. You have, at various times, told people you are from another state, even another country. But you are possessed, despite yourself.

             Later passages of the Bible feel acute, sensually involved with these fits of language in formation, when it describes a whoosh of wind, a cloven tongue of fire setting itself on the host. Or like the wry comment made by onlookers who thought that those speaking in tongues were drunk: They are filled with a new wine. Present, possessed, intensely half-there. The other part isn’t gone altogether, more just half out of the mouth. Like the way one awed seminary student in Connecticut recalled an episode of speaking in tongues, like driving a nitroglycerine truck down a dirt road.

You pass by an angular red brick building on the boulevard, its cavernous central hall a high isosceles triangle that stands out from the car sales lots around it. The dwindling Baptist congregation that used to meet there has moved, re-housed in a former hobby store down the road. Now, it’s a vegetarian Indian cafeteria, crowded at lunchtimes and weekends.

             A few years before you moved away, you went back to church with a friend on a Sunday afternoon. The new young minister had given the entire place over for a massive game of hide-and-seek. It felt unexpectedly delicious, this handing over of the boredom of gestures and verses and baptisms to admit it was another playground, an intricate and solemn place to play. The game went on most the day, filled with lulls, wandering blank side rooms and lying among the wooden pews in the nave, unafraid of being discovered, sitting in a cupboard in a blank linoleum kitchen for several hours, peeking out occasionally when others would rush by. Waiting thoughtlessly, expectantly, glimpsing through the cracks of light and ringing in your ears the ghosts to come.