As for Southern Legitimacy: I couldn’t possibly be more Southern. Paw-Paw is a cotton farmer, Aunt Jean’s favorite phrase is “for cryin’ in the cow butter!”, and the little old ladies in the grocery store used to run up and touch my head so they wouldn’t give me “ojo.” If the preacher’s sermon went long, he’d apologize for holding up dinner. “Kudzu,” “The Lockhorns,” and “Tumbleweeds” were all staples in the morning paper where I grew up, though I’ve never seen mention of any of them elsewhere until now. I left home, but it’s shaped me, and most of what I write is about the love/hate relationship I have with my Southern past.

What? Who said you can’t have sweet tea and grits together? It’s not about the rules, it’s about what’s good. Breakfast or dinner, I say you can!

Southern Legitimacy Statment:
I am a true son of the South. I was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. My mother once said to me that myself, Elvis, and US Highway 45 were the only three things that ever came out of Tupelo worth mentioning. I was raised in Corinth, Mississippi. I graduated from Corinth High School and ventured forth into the big world beyond Alcorn County in 1983.

I hunt and fish and purposely seek out mud holes to whip my pickup truck through, even though mud in California can some times be at a premium. I have a cousin named Larry Joe. I have been known to pick up fresh road kill on occasion. I believe barbequed Raccoon on a hot biscuit is one of life’s more special pleasures. I love my Mama and visit her twice a year no matter if I can afford to take the time away from my West Coast life or not.

I am Southern, first and foremost. Everything else is just, well…….extra.

From the summer of 1989 to the summer of 2001 I lived in South Carolina. Before moving there I had not heard of the Gullah language and many other things. For the first eight years that I lived there, I read regional histories, old letters, diaries, cookbooks, etc., and took notes. Then I spent the next two years arranging the notes. The result was my Sisters Grimke Book of Days, which was published by Oasis Books (England) in 2003.

The best barbecue is pork with slaw. The best pork barbecue with slaw is Polar Freeze in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas (unpaid advertisement). Their slaw has a bite to it, and after decades of wondering how they get such flavorful cabbage, I have discerned that they spike their slaw with turnips. That’s my opinion, not a fact. All of it is. Now I know I’m going to start a new war between the states by those darned Texans who call beef-slathered-up-with-red-sauce and slapped-on-a-roll-sans-Cole-slaw the best barbecue in the world. All I can say about that is they have a right to be wrong. Also, it’s a shame how young’uns don’t gather up at the Polar Freeze of a hot summer evening with the mosquitoes lighting on their Off-scented limbs like they did back when.

Why am I Southern? I date Yankee girls because they’re easier to dump. I even managed to part ways with one at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. That’s gotta earn me some bonus points or something.

I was born amidst the Blue Bonnets of East Texas and chased horned toads and armadillos across sandy roads until Mom called us for supper. We later moved, and I was reared along side the sugar cane fields in South Louisiana. We lived so close to the “Big Easy”, we could hear an old cornet wailing the blues and the classy sounds of jazz played on a stride piano, the sounds commingling and drifting like dark fog down the bayou on a Saturday Night. A thousand frogs lined the bayou and sang chorus while on a moonlit night one could hear the lovely solo of a mocking bird, its melody carried on the silver wings of moonbeams. Willow trees lined the bayou, their branches drooping and touching the slow moving current as the soft lisping sounds of little waves touched the banks of the bayou. ‘

And in high school, every Friday night, we played high school football and dated the cheer leaders. Saturday we tail gated at the local University and watched SEC Football. Man, to be a southerner in football season tops the grits, sweetened tea and all the other trivia your southern writers talk about. I bet all their dogs are porch dogs!

But hey. Lets get real. In my neck of the woods Katrina came. Where are the sounds of the cornet playing the blues? The melodic sounds of jazz on the piano? The bayou is silent now. The thousands of frogs have been swept back into the marsh lands, and the willow trees lie twisted and torn along the banks. Occasionally on a still, pure and pristine night, when a tipping moon is full of silver moon beams falling to the ground, one might hear a single mocking bird, weeping for the time we lived before Katrina. Now we all stand in the sorrow and trauma of the aftermath, knowing things will never be the same as before and as we look forward, putting all the BS aside,we are not sure what the future holds for the “Big Easy” and South Louisiana.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I’m John Calvin Hughes, son of a son of a preacher chased out of Mississippi for plucking the flock. I’m a southern (if I spell it southren you’ll get it, right?) boy who moved south and found himself surrounded by Yankees. I’m in Orlando. There’s not a hill in sight and the restaurants that specialize in “Real Southern Cooking” put sugar in the cornbread. I’m making my own red eye gravy

Southern Legitimacy Statement
I’m from Michigan, but only because my grandparents left Eastern Kentucky to pick potatoes here back in 1942. Also, I lived in North Carolina half my life and graduated from N.C. State.

Author interview by Valerie MacEwan, editor The Dead Mule

Joseph Finder, Power Play

Joseph Finder is the author of five novels, all of them thrillers. His website, JoeFinder.com (duh, betcha’ never thought that would be the domain name) is updated daily. Go there and take a look around, get some free stuff… I’ll save you a […]

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born raised and breeding kids in Southeast Virginia. Though I had to go to Buffalo to get hitched. Didn’t cross the M/D line till I was 19, and then for only a weekend. Unlike many, I know what’s it like to turn soil all day long, which is why I don’t do it.

With the exception of one summer at a northeastern university, I have never left the cope of the South for more than two weeks consecutively. For that matter, I have never left the cope of the broader boot of Louisiana and Arkansas for any sustained period. And when I felt homesick that one lonely summer, I became the only person (I believe) to pace the walks of Cornell University with the Ole Miss Rebel Marching Band’s version of Dixie blaring through his or her headphones. I told the greeter at the Walmart just outside Ithaca that the store was to be my semi-official Southern embassy. Furthermore: I wholeheartedly approved when my friend Flick convinced his fiancé to let him play the LSU fight song as their wedding recessional. I preface questions with preparatory preambles such as “Let me ask you this.” I went to a segregated high school in the early 1990s. I made a scene at a California wedding when I realized they didn’t have (nor had they heard of) a groom’s cake. I spend inordinate amounts of money traveling to Southeastern Conference football games that I can’t afford and that my favorite team often loses. I received my terminal degree in American History from a fine Southern institution (the University of Arkansas—Woo Pig Sooie!), specializing in Southern cultural and intellectual history, as well as Civil Rights and race relations. Finally (in a list intended to be representative rather than comprehensive), I feel no offense when seeing a Confederate flag, but feel simultaneously guilty for not being offended. And nothing is more Southern than a divided mind.

The vintage Victorian advertising cards come to us from our beloved Assistant Editor Phoebe Kate Foster. Her grandfather, it seems, lived in Canada as a youth and collected these cards. I will do some research on the history of such advertising and post it in August. The advertisements have a drawing or illustration on the […]

My life as a southerner, with the exception of a few visits south of the Ohio River, has been largely vicarious, but I shaped my career as a lawyer after Atticus Finch and my career as a writer after Lee Harper. I married a man who spent a summer sweating in the Mobile, Alabama heat, and who’d rather have sweet potato pie than pumpkin.

A native of Hiawassee, Georgia, I appreciate my heritage and try not to stray too far from its teachings. For example, I know what the word, “Gaum,” means. I’ve heard my grandmother say many times over the years, “This house is a gaum!” I still cherish sayings such as, “He’s a snake in the grass!” or “I’m fair to middling! As we speak, I am cooking a mess of soup beans, and will later bake some cornbread to go with them.

by Thomas Scott McKenzie
Dayne Sherman is writer both dedicated and determined. A former high-school dropout, he began writing fiction in the spring of 1996. In a little more than three years, he has racked up 13 short story acceptances and has published a novel with MacAdam/Cage. That novel, Welcome to the Fallen Paradise, was named […]