I might prefer to see this in 3rd person with the dialect only used for dialogue. I'd have to see it to know if that was enough of it to get the overall feel of who the characters are that you do from this version.

That said, even though I am intrigued I would put down this story. The dialect is just annoying. I'm just being honest, perhaps others would keep reading and you can ignore me as that percentage who won't like it.

"We couldn't have known what would happen" doesn't seem to match the rest, especially with "We didn't expect nothing bad" as the intro sentence. ("Would" might need to be "was gonna".) There's one or two other places where the incorrect grammer and the word choice aren't consistant. None of it's glaring, but over time it gets noticable.

"We didn't even stop to pick straw and chew it like usual we do." Coming from a straw chewing area, this isn't something you think about, especially not when you're running to look at something. This is something an external narrator would observe, and not a completely sympathetic narrator at that...

So my big nit winds up agreeing with the others. I'm not sure, but you might get more milage for your dialect buck if you put it into polished dialect in the dialogue and an external narrator who can notice some of the stuff them straw-chawing hicks does without pulling us out of character. If you do decide to keep it in first person, you'll probably want to do a check for consistency of the character's observations and dialect.

It's an interesting set up, however, and Mary Jane and Billy are vivid characters.

I like stories told in first person with a dialect, stories like HUCKLEBERRY FINN, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, and even THE CATCHER IN THE RYE. If a dialect is done correctly, it isn't distracting at all . . . well, once you get the hang of it.

The problem you're going to have is reflected in the sentence that Kolona mentioned: You broke the grammatical rules of your dialect by using correct grammar. This is one hurdle.

Another is this: Is it really authentic? Are you trying to affect a deep southern dialect, or a hillbilly dialect? I live in the south (Texas, which, I admit, has a different dialect than Mississippi and Alabama), and I grew up in the sticks of Missiouri. And, frankly, your dialect sounds nothing like what I'm used to hearing. Have you spent much time in the south or in the sticks? In other words, do you know the dialect you're trying to write well enough to actually write it?

Again, have you read any Southern Fiction -- Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty? You might want to dip into their writing to learn something about the south and how to get that southern feel into your prose.

I don't want to discourage you -- I think you have an intriguing beginning, and I would certianly be interested in reading more. And I find reading a first-person dialect very enjoyable. But from reading this little snippet, I get the impression you're writing about something you don't really know.

It would be like me, a Southern white boy, trying to write a first-person story with the narrator being a black woman in Harlem. I may write it, but I won't know what the heck I'm talking about.

The point is this, (and I know you're not emmulating an Arkansas accent either, or if you are you've missed) that just because a person SPEAKS that way does not mean that in a first person narrative of their experience they would WRITE that way. Maybe your character would, but who is your character and what would he do?

I don't mind the dialect so much, maybe it is the first person narrative that bothers me. Or perhaps the combination of the two.

I think I would like to see this done as a third person POV with the dialect left to the Dialogue only.

I don't know for sure, but maybe you would be the first person to write a Sci-Fi story with the narrator being a redneck. Complete with a slack-jawed yokel dialect. Which brings to mind Cletus from the Simpsons. Maybe that is your hook. (shrug)

Anyway it was good enough to get me thinking, and that shows you have something here. The ultimate choice on how to proceed is yours, but since your asking, I would go with my first suggestion. Yokel speak, dialogue only.
(changed last sentance, used to say "dialect only")

...a side-note on dialectizing, you should check out this site:

When the first-person narrator uses a dialect throughout the story, it takes it has an oral feel. But when the first-person narrator uses a standard English prose style, then the story has a written feel.

This is something to keep in mind when you choose to write in first-person. Do you want an oral feel or a written feel?

Simply put, a person speaking out loud is speaking to a particular, physically present or presented (meaning evident in some way to the senses of the speaker) person or persons. They are in a particular location. This is entirely different from the case of a writer writing. For whatever reasons, it is common for a writer to concentrate on the page to the exclusion of all other sense impressions. This is not only uncommon but abnormal for someone that is talking (one reason that people who really like talking on the phone [or using VR gear] seem so strange is because they are responding primarily to a sensory experience that is not shared by outside observers--but they are predominantly paying attention to something other than their internal perceptions).

Dialect isn't very useful as a narrative tool unless you can persuade the reader that it is a transcript of an interview rather than a piece written by the narrator. And other than the overuse of dialect, there is nothing in this piece to suggest that it is a transcript of an oral narration.

Remember. People don't usually write the way they talk, particularly if they use a distinct dialect in their speech (-ifying). Even more so if they are sufficiently aware of their normal departure from the ordinary rules of spoken English so as to be able to reproduce it on the page. Humans learn to speak from listening to other humans speak, they learn to write from reading. Which means that anyone with a extreem dialect is going to have a pattern of writing markedly different from ordinary speech.

If you wanted me to believe that this was written by a person that simply learned letters and really is writing just the way he speaks, the first thing you have to do is remove all traces of normal punctuation. Meaning periods, commas, apostrophes, and all that stuff (especially quotation marks). It wouldn't do the whole trick, but it would be a start.