Am I southern because I was born and raised in Wilton and Montevallo, Alabama? Am I southern even though I do not reside anywhere, as they like to say in the south, but am incarcerated on Alabama’s death row at Holman prison?

Does being sent out as a child by my sisters and other pregnant women in my neighborhood in search of a certain quality of dirt and then to the store to buy them boxes of starch to be enjoyed like candy on the porch in the evening qualify me? And what about my also acquiring a taste for the stuff? Almost as delicious as honeysuckle!

I think I know that I am southern when I remember growing up in a small town and hearing some folks referred to as negras. I often wondered who they could be talking about. It could not be me, after all I knew I was black. Ah well….you tell me!

Freecycle is wonderful and Doug Marlette is talented… read all about it.

Various members of the community were given highly fictionalized analogs in the novel, from a vegan restaurateur to a sex-toy manufacturer. But most of the book came straight from the imagination. I thought by giving Pick qualities nobody would ever attribute to me it would inoculate me from criticism. I was wrong.

My folks came to Texas from Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina, mostly right before the Civil War - farmers except for the occasional banker or cotton ginner. I grew up on a farm and thought a fine day was lugging a Mason jar of tea out to my Daddy when he plowed. I played in the sweet dirt while he rested in the shade of the tractor. I still ache for my mother’s fried pies, black-eyed peas, cornbread, squash and okra.

Now, I live in Houston - one-time capital of the Lone Star State and all-time capital of humidity and mosquitoes. Out my window I see pine trees, azaleas and crape myrtles getting ready for summer.

Here’s my story about a little town in Texas, fried turkey and ambrosia. I hope you like it.

For access to archives for this issue, use “archives” link at bottom of each page. For 1998-2005, see the page linked to this excerpt. 2007 archives will eventually include all the Mules … and don’t forget to read the rest of the MuleBlog entries.

I know I’m southern because I survived all the unwritten rules for women. You know: Don’t sleep with a man before you’re married. Don’t smoke in public. Don’t get a tattoo. Find a good man and marry him. Don’t wear white after Labor Day.

*The Mule just adores Ms. Hite’s work.

Thanks be to Mule writers and a hint of what I’m about to publish on the Dead Mule this morning.

Not only have I spent my entire life in Virginia, but I can pick a tick off a sleeping dog, burn that sucker with a match, and get back to the stove before the corncakes need flipping. My front porch is cluttered with furniture that doesn’t match and wasn’t meant to be used outside. I believe two things: 1) The only real cake is red velvet cake; 2) If a woman can’t tuck her money inside her bra, there is no point to wearing one.

I am not submitting poems about mules. They are far too personal. I did, however, listen to Tom Waits sing about a mule… “you gotta get behind the mule every mornin and plow” The recording was sold in the South. I know this for a fact because I bought it in the South, and then played it on my stereo — which I keep in the South — for just such an emergency.

I was born — or so I’ve been told — on the Outer Banks, North Carolina. And though I’ve never seen a mule there, I keep searching.

I was born in Greenville, North Carolina. My mother and father were born in North and South Carolina, respectively. I attended college at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee for two years (majoring in foolishness) and graduated from Tennessee State University in Nashville in 1977 in nursing. I spent almost 25 years in the desert of Arizona in the man-made paradise known as Scottsdale, yet I returned to Nashville last September because I felt a deep need to return to the South.

My ancestors of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe in North Carolina have been there for hundreds of years, and my ancestor, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was making “colored babies” at least four hundred years ago. I do enjoy collard greens, grits, fried chicken wings, cheese biscuits, chess pie, sweet potato anything, and hot water cornbread. I love Southern gospel and the gut-bucket blues. For these reasons and all of those that elude my conscious mind, and have not yet surfaced, I feel that I am indeed of Southern authenticity.

Celia is southern. She knows it, we know it… and Mule readers of our previous 10 years of literary excellence know she’s southern.

Kathryn Stripling Byer has not forgotten her southern roots. True, she is the current North Carolina Poet Laureate. True, she has received accolades and praise. True, she is very, very busy. But when the Mule contacted her, asking for poems. she promptly said, “yes,” because she is as southern and polite as we are.

These poems come from Byer’s new manuscript, more mountain women’s voices.

My place of birth is but one example of my Southern Legitimacy. But, entering the world by way of Newport News is not the only southern birthmark I wear. Years (actually more than two decades) spent in that place of perpetual summer (sometimes referred to as Florida) grant me the right to call myself southern. The place I call home now is but another example of my southern authenticy for I reside in North Carolina (though there are those who take issue with the north in the name). And I have to confess that my southern legitimacy is sometimes challenged because of my accent. Early childhood years spent in New England have made their stamp on my speech and the food I crave (no, I never have taken to grits). But, I do love the blue that is fondly called Carolina blue and the sound of crickets, the wonder of fireflies and the history of the land whose pulse beats so close to my heart.

Am I southern because I was born and raised in Wilton and Montevallo, Alabama? Am I southern even though I do not reside anywhere, as they like to say in the south, but am incarcerated on Alabama’s death row at Holman prison?

Does being sent out as a child by my sisters and other pregnant women in my neighborhood in search of a certain quality of dirt and then to the store to buy them boxes of starch to be enjoyed like candy on the porch in the evening qualify me? And what about my also acquiring a taste for the stuff? Almost as delicious as honeysuckle!

I think I know that I am southern when I remember growing up in a small town and hearing some folks referred to as negras. I often wondered who they could be talking about. It could not be me, after all I knew I was black. Ah well….you tell me!

As a small boy, Jim Booth wanted nothing more than to be a goatherd wandering the ancient hills of his Southern homeland. Then he heard the gospel according to John and Paul and abandoned the pastoral life for the responsible hedonism of rock musicianship. Having failed gloriously in that endeavor, he took on the academy, ate it alive, and spat it back out as dark sarcasm in the classroom. Currently he writes occasionally award winning fiction and occasionally homeland security annoying bloggery. He lives in a heavily fortified bunker in an undisclosed location In Danville, Virginia just off 58 after you pass the Honda dealer but before you get to Carter’s restaurant.

*Editor’s note: Mr. Booth’s got a new book coming out and this story is an excerpt. Ahh, hell, let’s get personal, Jim’s even been to eastern NC and he and his lovely wife are charming folk (that’s not just because they paid for my lunch, either). A review of his book “The New Southern Gentleman” is on Popmatters.com, written by yours truly, VMac. Use the Popmatters google-search and type in MacEwan and you’ll find it.

Mr. Miller’s marvelous poem was previously accepted by the Mule. We are proud to publish it in the Spring 2007 issue.

I was born and reared with one foot in Memphis, Tennessee and the other in a farm in Forest, Mississippi. I left the South for college in Montana, England, and Seattle, then returned to Mississippi in 2002. I am most definitely a bone fide Southerner. In fact, I can say that I have actually plowed with a mule.

One great great grandaddy sent four sons to fight at Battery Wagner and Okalustee (Fla.), another sent three to die at Vicksburg. I scratch when it itches, even when the quality is watchin’.

As for my southern legitimacy: sweet tea. Once, when visiting family in Mocksville, North Carolina, I drank so much during the week that I had something akin to the sugar DT’s when I got back north. Snapple can not compare.

I’ve lived in the Provinces of Eastern North Carolina all my life with the exception of a couple of years (not consecutively) up north. I know that BBQ is a noun and not a verb. The word “tote” is a regular part of my vocabulary. I believe in the basic politeness with which we were all reared and think if we adhere to our raising we are automatically politically correct and believe if you have to think about what you say before you say it, you’re politically incorrect even if you get the words right. That having been said. I don’t believe in political correctness and think art to be impossible to make if such is a consideration. (click on title to read more of Mr. Monroe’s SLS, it’s just amazing… one of the best ever on the Dead Mule…)

Born in D.C., reared in Maryland with excursions in the Carolinas and the Blue Ridge, I had Navy stopovers in Virginia and Texas and, while I currently find myself in San Diego for job purposes and such, hain’t surrendered a lick of devotion to things like bluegrass w/ neckties on (BTW we have some of the best right here in SD), beat biscuits w/ white gravy and Jimmy Dean links, straight Jack Daniel’s, fried chicken takes two hand washins to get clean again, and writers like Faulkner (Light in August my all-timer), Caldwell, Welty (Delta Wedding, oh yes), McCullers, Shelby Foote.

What makes me southern?

I live in Richmond, Virginia, so, one, location. Two, I have lived only once in the north, and that was for a year and a half. I worked in New Jersey for Ma Bell and people would ask me to “Say something” just to hear my southwestern Virginia accent. Three, I have attended and maybe even joined churches where women did not wear jewelry, makeup or slacks, and whose swirling, teased beehives were nocturnally swaddled in Charmin, preserving a hairstyle, that, when fully erect, could tower a good nine or ten inches, sometimes a foot above the natural hairline and the fellers they married. P.S. I have been previously published in Dead Mule, and if that don’t make you southern, Good God Almighty, what does?

What makes me southern?
I wasn’t born in the south. I’m a transplant. I suppose I’m a bit like the kudzu — I started in one region and grew across the southern United States, or maybe it grew on me. There were some people along the way who would’ve liked to get rid of me. But the fact is: I am here to stay. The south and I have a lot in common. We’re both full of contradictions, nostalgia, a sordid past, and at times we’re ruled by these things. Yet there’s still a drive to understand, realize, to maybe even transcend the pain into hope or beauty.

Southern Legitimacy: I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky on the banks of the muddy Ohio River. This story also takes place in the great Bluegrass State.

I’m loading mule-writers all day but there’s a kink in the project. What? How can anything but find joy in my entering uniqueness? It’s Ruth Florence Chapman Heinold. My mom. She’s 90 years old today and we’re going to take a ride into the hinterlands to Carolyn Sleeper’s Slatestone Studio to visit both the potter […]

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
-I was born and raised in Pageland, South Carolina, a town of 2500 souls and The Watermelon Capital of the World.
-My great-grandfather Dickson fought with the Palmetto Sharp Shooters in the Civil War. He owned a mule. That mule is now dead.
-I can’t pronounce the ‘g’ in words ending in ‘ing’ if you pay me.
-I would do almost anything for a plate of fried okra, collard greens, crowder peas and fresh cornbread.
-Yes, I still think of my father as ‘Daddy’.

The three boys came back from their “coming-of-age” cross-country trip in mid-August, a few days before their freshman year at Rutgers started. When they got back, they took their girlfriends out to a fine Italian restaurant (at the suggestion of one of the boy’s old-fashioned Italian mothers) with the remainder of their cross-country funds (an […]

My family name, Fain, is French Huguenot. We were the Protestants who fled France and persecution to come to the American South in the 16th and 17th centuries to experience religious freedom. Arriving in Georgia to settle, my people, over the centuries, eventually found their way to Texas where my ancestors worked the land furiously and with dedication. My family continues to practice as Southern Baptists today with the same fervor for the Protestant faith my French forebears did. I, on the other hand, fell in love with a Cleveland Jew while going to graduate school in Boston. One summer I dragged him down to Houston in mid-July and married him in front of all our family andfriends. (I have 45 first cousins.) As fast as we could, my Yankee husband and I moved to Atlanta to begin our life together, finally settling in Chapel Hill, NC with our two school-aged children. We are happy and settled. We are the new American South, or at least a part of it. To tolerance.

Old about page, new one coming eventually on account of none of this has really changed so why re-write it, eh? Except to say:
Ruth Florence Chapman Heinold is ninety years old today, April 13th, 2007.
ABOUT
The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature is found on the web at: www.deadmule.comFounded in 1995 [Dead Mule Faculty and Alumni […]

I was born and raised on a farm near Manchester, Tennessee, that my great-grandfather purchased after being emancipated. It is still in my family. My grandfather was a truck farmer who reared 13 children after my grandmother left him. I remember planting seed potatoes with him under the moonlight. Twenty years after his death, people still drive to my parents’ farm and ask about “Mr. Glenn” and his “Irish potatoes”.

Except for an occasional trip to Utah, I spend my time in South Georgia, writing about grits, molasses, and my grandfather’s mule (whose name was Old Kit). To be sure, all of the above show up in the piece that you are about to read.

Okay. Okay. Put away them shotguns and embrace just one more yankee. Born in Western New York, I moved to North Carolina twenty-five years ago. It was here I first saw the ocean, drank sweetened tea which was cold instead of hot, and discovered that “homecoming” was not always about high school football. I got my first sunburn, tasted fried okra, and made some of the most lovely friends a woman could hope for. If home is where the heart is, I’ve certainly found it. So, um, does that make me legitimately southern despite the fact I’ve never seen a mule?

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up on a catfish and rice farm in eastern Arkansas. I must admit, I will take biscuits and gravy over grits any day, though.

I was born in the South, educated in the South, and have lived my entire life in the South. I drink sweet tea, grow antique roses, eat Creole tomato sandwiches, and own a copy of Longfellow’s “Evangeline.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in North Georgia in the Appalachian foothills. I know what cathead biscuits, protracted meetings, #9 turners and #2 washtubs are. I can read shape notes and sing from the Sacred Harp book. If that ain’t Southern, then grits ain’t groceries.

The writing currently available on the Dead Mule is from our archives. Ten years of creative excellence. Peruse it, revel in it… can’t ya’ll just eat it up?
New Mule coming live on April 13th around midnight. Why don’t ya’ll plan a party around it, like when the latest Harry Potter book comes out… stand in […]

The female protagonists in Connie May’s books don’t become “one” with their adulthood by hitting a triple and sending Frankie in for the scoring run. These girls don’t have a fumbling, poignant, first sexual encounter that is both bittersweet and endearing, and they certainly don’t become mature adults by sucking it up and just “getting over it.”