Sable Monroe

I Wasn’t Allowed to Speak Freely

At my grandmother’s house in Montego Bay, I could run around the yard barefoot.

That probably doesn’t sound like freedom to most people.

It was to me.

Nobody was policing whether I had remembered my sandals before I went outside. I picked up words from my grandmother. I picked up the way the children around me spoke. I spoke more Patois. I sounded more country.

Nobody cared.

Then my mother would come to take me back to Kingston.

She could hear Montego Bay in my mouth almost immediately.

“Boy, you chat bad. You chat bad, sah. You cannot go to school speaking like that.”

And just like that, freedom was over.

Kingston was a different ballgame.

If I forgot to put something on my feet before going outside to play, I could be beaten for it. If I didn’t speak properly, there could be correction, ridicule, shame or beating.

My mother had paid money for me to attend private school. She reminded me of that.

She was spending all this money for me to go to school. Why was I speaking that way?

Patois was “chatting bad.”

And the policing didn’t stop when I got to school.

Teachers corrected me too.

I grew up in an environment where adults had two particularly effective tools for controlling children:

Beating and shame.

They used both.

I couldn’t simply say something and have the content of the sentence be what mattered. The sentence itself could be inspected.

Use the correct tense.

Say it properly.

Don’t speak like that.

Don’t embarrass us.

Say it again.

Say it in a proper sentence.

I learned very early that speaking required monitoring.

There was a way educated people were supposed to sound. There was a way people from a certain class were supposed to sound. There was a way a child attending private school was supposed to sound.

And there were ways I was absolutely not supposed to sound.

My mother cared enormously about presentation.

What other people could see mattered.

The clothes mattered. The manners mattered. The school mattered. The way I ate mattered. The way I spoke mattered.

I was taught how to use the correct knife and fork at a formal dinner. We practiced proper table manners on Sundays.

Even the dolls I played with weren’t entirely my choice.

Nothing was ever truly my own.

Certainly not my voice.

Looking back, I understand that some of this was about aspiration.

My mother didn’t want me speaking like what I came from. I needed to sound like what she aspired toward.

Language could tell people things. In Jamaica, people listen. The way you speak can give people clues about where you’re from, how you were educated and what kind of social environment shaped you.

My mother wanted people to hear the right things when I opened my mouth.

So I learned.

Not patiently.

I have difficulty even relating to the idea of being patiently taught something as a child because patience wasn’t exactly abundant in my upbringing.

If I got something wrong, there wasn’t always some calm adult waiting to explain it again until I understood.

There was correction.

There was shame.

Sometimes there was beating.

So I became very good at correcting myself.

That is one of the fingerprints my upbringing left on me.

By thirteen, however, something else had happened.

I had stopped believing her.

That distinction matters.

I still had to comply. I was still a child. Adults controlled where I lived, what I ate, what I wore, where I went to school and almost every other meaningful part of my existence.

But compliance and belief are not the same thing.

By thirteen, I understood that my mother’s assessment of me wasn’t necessarily the truth.

There was no winning with her. The standard could move. Something could always be wrong.

I could outwardly conform because I had to without allowing every judgment to become my own.

Those teenage years almost feel like adulthood when I look back at them.

I was functionally an adult in many ways, except without the rights and protections that come with actually being one.

So I learned something young:

Authority could make me comply.

It couldn’t necessarily make me believe.

Then I came to America.

I was around twelve years old, surrounded by American children for hours every day.

Naturally, my speech began changing.

I picked up American slang. I picked up pieces of an American accent. I began accommodating to the people around me the same way I had absorbed the speech around me when I stayed with my grandmother in Montego Bay.

My mother made fun of me for that too.

Why was I faking an American accent?

It would come naturally, she told me. I didn’t need to put it on.

The funny thing was, I wasn’t putting it on.

It was coming naturally.

Apparently, in Jamaica I could sound too country.

In America I could sound too American.

There was no correct answer because the correct answer could change.

But the training stayed.

I’m pushing fifty now, and the fingerprints of that upbringing are still all over me.

You can hear them.

I have a slight Jamaican accent. There is Queen’s English buried in my sentence construction. There are decades of America in there too. American slang will come tumbling out beside language that can sound strangely formal.

Even my Patois is polished.

I don’t know what my natural adult voice would have sounded like if I had simply been allowed to speak.

That’s the truth.

People sometimes talk about “finding your voice” as though there is an untouched version of it buried somewhere inside you, waiting to be recovered.

I don’t think I have one.

Mine was being corrected while it was still forming.

Natural speech was beaten and shamed out of me.

My mother did it.

Teachers did it.

The adults responsible for teaching me had very little patience for the process of actually being a child and gradually learning.

So I learned quickly.

Say it properly.

Use the correct tense.

Don’t chat bad.

Don’t embarrass us.

Say it again.

Eventually, nobody had to tell me anymore.

The person doing the correcting became me.

The editor moved inside my head.

And she never left.

I hear when a sentence isn’t right.

I hear when I’ve chosen an imprecise word and will sometimes replace it before I’ve even finished the thought.

I hear the full stop.

I speak in complete sentences so often that there isn’t always an enormous distance between the way I sound on the page and the way I sound out loud.

Apparently, in 2026, this makes some people think you’re a robot.

I’ve had people online accuse my writing of sounding like AI because it is too polished.

At first, I thought that was ridiculous.

Then it happened again.

Eventually, I started paying closer attention to the way I actually speak.

And I realized something rather funny.

I do sound like my writing.

I can ramble into voice-to-text and discover that there was already a beginning, middle and end hiding inside the transcript.

At this point, speaking has become one of my writing tools.

I speak my essays.

That’s literally how much of my work is produced. I talk. My phone transcribes me. AI helps me edit and organize what I said. Then I go back through it, correct anything that doesn’t mean exactly what I meant, and publish the finished piece.

I don’t usually sit in front of a blank page struggling to find the words.

The words are already there.

I can speak the premise. I can tell the story. I can qualify my own argument while I’m making it. I can wander somewhere else, come back, and land the conclusion. The raw transcript may need cleaning because spontaneous speech is still spontaneous speech, and God knows my transcriber occasionally commits crimes against me, but the essay itself is often already there.

Low-key, the thing that was beaten and shamed into me became a superpower.

I can speak an entire essay.

Does that sound arrogant?

Maybe.

It also happens to be true.

I’m pushing fifty. I’m not going to develop false modesty now just to make the sentence more comfortable.

There is something deeply strange about realizing that a skill I now use to create came partly from something that once existed to control me.

As a child, adults demanded that I say it properly.

Now I can say the whole fucking essay.

My speech is controlled because I was trained to control it.

And I don’t use the word trained metaphorically.

So if you’ve ever read something I’ve written and thought, Nobody naturally talks like that, here’s your answer:

I don’t.

I was trained.

Through repetition.

Through correction.

Through shame.

Through beating.

What you’re hearing now is what happened after the training became automatic.

And here is the part I’m not going to apologize for:

I like the result.

I like my voice.

I like its precision. I like my complete sentences. I like being able to reach for exactly the word I mean.

I like the strange mixture of Jamaica, Queen’s English and America living in my mouth.

I like my polished Patois.

I like being able to speak an essay into my phone and discover that much of its structure was already there.

I wouldn’t choose the method.

I wouldn’t recommend the method.

Children don’t need to be ridiculed, shamed or beaten into speaking correctly.

But I’m also not going to pretend I dislike the finished product because I dislike how it was produced.

Both things can be true.

It was beaten into me.

It should never have been beaten into me.

And I like the way I sound.

Apparently, sometimes I even sound like a femme bot.

Fine.

I’m pushing fifty.

I’ll be the femme bot.

She’s kind of hot.

The fingerprints of my upbringing are still all over me.

Some became habits.

Some became skills.

Some are things I would never pass on to my own children.

And some apparently turned me into a Jamaican-born femme bot with an unusually enthusiastic relationship with the full stop.

What I cannot do is go backward and discover the woman I would have become if nobody had interfered with the development of her voice.

She doesn’t exist.

This woman does.

My mother doesn’t own her voice.

My teachers don’t own it.

My schools don’t own it.

Kingston doesn’t own it.

America doesn’t own it.

And some stranger on the internet who thinks my sentences are suspiciously complete certainly doesn’t own it.

I don’t know what I would have sounded like if I had been allowed to speak freely.

I will never know.

But I know what I sound like now.

A little Jamaican.

A little Queen’s English.

A little American.

Polished Patois.

Perfect sentences.

Profanity wherever the fuck I please.

The fingerprints are still there.

But the voice is mine.