Illinois 4

Listen to Illinois 4, a 23-year-old woman from Harvey, Illinois, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 23

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 1976

PLACE OF BIRTH: Harvey, Illinois

GENDER: female

ETHNICITY: African-American

OCCUPATION: student

EDUCATION: When recorded, the subject was an undergraduate theatre student.

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS: N/A

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH:

The subject’s mother worked in the education field.

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Eric Armstrong

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 14/10/1999

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I don’t know if she-she-sh-sh-she had teased me all day and wh- and tha- and I think, yeah, she shoved me, she shoved me, er, or she hit a ball or something, and, and everybody was laughing at me? Everybody, it — it wa- it happened, like, right in the middle of everybody. And, um, I hated that. I hated that moment, because she looked … it was just like I was in some psycho fairytale movie where you’re just this little peapod of a person and everybody’s standing above you cracking up, and everybody else jumped in and teasing me; she made all these jokes. Well, she walked away down, like, toward the other end of the gym. And everybody else moved too, and I finished tying my shoe and all this rage was just coming up in me, cause I, I wasn’t good at the lingo that everybody else knew how to do, everybody else knew how to hurt you. And I didn’t know how to do that, so I had no defense mechanism. So she’s walking away going down to the end of the gym, and the teacher’s moved out this way and that way, all her friends moved away. All I could see was the back of her and she had on this rainbow-colored sweater, and my rage was just, like, set on that sweater. And I don’t know what possessed me, I’ve never done anything like this since; I ran at her at least 90 miles an hour and when I got, like, within three feet of her, I jumped up and went at her, like, horizontally. I remem- I will never forget this: the only time my feet have been off the ground and I’ve been parallel to the floor. That’s exactly how it was — I didn’t know I could get such height — and I jumped up and I rammed into the back of her and I was on top of her, everybody came out of nowhere, and they were laughing and cracking up, and it was like this 30 second silence ’cause she didn’t know what’d happened to her and you could see it in slow motion. Whoooooo! And these two big girls falling to the floor, she was, like, fell down face forward, and just whoooooooo! And her curls were in that time so her juice was flying everywhere. But anyway, and I was like on top of her and when we got to the floor, I hadn’t finished the plan in my head, ’cause now I was scared. ‘Cause there I was I was this great moment, then I say she gonna get up and I’m gonna be in trouble but I was sitting on her back and she was screaming, “Get off me! Get off me!” ‘Cause I, I think she hurt herself, ’cause her face went into the floor, and my next reaction was just to run the heck out of there as fast as I could, and I got off of her, and she looked at me and she looked like this pede- possessed demon — she — ’cause I had re-embarrassed her in front of everybody, ’cause everybody’s still there, it’s just — it was, it was so movie-esque ’cause it felt like, at the time I was doing it, there was no one in the room, and so I ran out the double doors, and I, I’ve never ran that fast, and she was behind me and it was all in slow motion and then right, right when it looked like she was going to catch me, a teacher grabbed u[s] — grabbed me and got in between her, and so nothing ever happened and we went to the principal’s office and she’s crying and stuff’s on her face and I was cracking up, and I was just great ’cause I was like, “Yes! Yes!” And then, you know, I didn’t get a lot of picking on after that. I was — I was like — it was just really interesting, and that was like the one time, uh, when I first started saying to myself I’m not gonna, you know, whatever they think is different about me, I’m not gonna, you know, let that affect me, and I’m gonna be me, and that was, like, my coming-out moment started.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Shawn M. Muller

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 14/10/1999

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY: N/A

COMMENTARY BY: N/A

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

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• Text of the speakers’ biographical details.
• Scholarly commentary and analysis in some cases.
• In most cases, an orthographic transcription of the speakers’ unscripted speech.  In a small number of cases, you will also find a narrow phonetic transcription of the sample (see Phonetic Transcriptions for a complete list).  The recordings average four minutes in length and feature both the reading of one of two standard passages, and some unscripted speech. The two passages are Comma Gets a Cure (currently our standard passage) and The Rainbow Passage (used in our earliest recordings).

 

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