I left show business to pursue my lifelong dream of goat farming in
Appalachia. Speaking of which, I now live in Cocke county, reputed to
be the most lawless rural county in Tennessee. I run into Popcorn
Sutton now and again at the grocery store and can tell you where to
get the best ’shine–through a friend of a friend of a friend. I’m on
good speaking terms with the cockfighting crowd. Oh, and the church I
attend–they handle serpents. Really.

My hobbies include soapmaking, canning, gardening heirloom vegetables,
wildcrafting and squirrel hunting with dogs.

In my spare non-goat related time, I write about and document
Appalachian culture–or assist production companies, scholars and
artists who are doing the same thing. I also write about food.

I could go on and on in this manner including my recipes for coon,
possum and fricasseed squirrels with sherry over biscuits or go
through my DAR lineage but I think you must agree–my Southern
credentials are impeccable.

I verify that I am Southern based on my heritage, including but not limited to, blackberry picking with my brothers and sister in the heat of a Black Belt June, getting chiggers that would, my Mama K swore, only come out if we soaked for 20 minutes in baking soda, riding my Shetland pony Buttermilk through the fields and woods of Pine Grove Farm in Ridge Grove, Alabama, riding her on down to Washburn’s store to get a little Peach Nehi that “Was so good,” old Mr. Washburn told my dad, “that you could almost taste the furs.”

In addition, I verify that I am Southern because, although I have no dead mule in my past, I do have a dead horse. Maggie was a mare my sister and I paid a dollar for so the former owner could write a bill of sale. He didn’t tell us that the old gal was already more than a bit long in the tooth, but as they say, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and we didn’t. A few months later, after we took all our horses to be wormed (Yes, it is as bad as it sounds), poor old Maggie, bless her heart, barely made it off the trailer before she keeled over. She was kind of big and we were kind of small, so we just dug a hole right beside her, flipped her over into it and covered her with lime. Worked fine, but the field where she was lying belonged to Augusta Christian Day School’s baseball team. In the end it did turn out okay, as these things do. We just gave the place a name—Maggie’s Field—and warned the players to stay away from the dent in the outfield.

Yeah, I’m Southern.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

As I have grown to be a man, my work has taken me all over this great country of ours where there are many things to be seen that are grand beyond the means of words to describe them, and though I have often thought of leaving for the sake of newness and grand adventure, my address has always remained here in the sacred soil of Virginia.

Whenever possible I avoid restaurants that offer only unsweetened tea, and I can pretty much stomach any vegetable as long as it’s overcooked or made with vinegar. As yet I am dispossessed from organized religion, but have a strong faith in God and pork, the barbecuing of the latter solidifying my faith in the former. Whenever given a choice on my birthday for a cake, I always prefer my mother’s Carolina Pig-Pickin’ Cake, a religious experience in itself. Like any southron, I am always haunted by the past and enjoy the telling of a good story, though I do have a penchant for the ghostly and the weird (which I have been fond of as far back as I can remember.) I plan to tell stories until I die and on that day I plan to be buried in the dirt of Hanover County outside of Richmond, where I have always called home and woe to any soul who should seek to prevent it.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I like to think that the “aunts” in this piece are New Englanders, and that Edwina is Southern. She strikes me that way, anyway. I know this because my mother was born in Atlanta and years spent in Europe and New England never quite took that particular twinkle away.

The reason I know I’m country through and through is that even in Atlanta Georgia, only one hundred miles away, friends laugh at my dialect. You know something though, I don’t have any desire to change it. I am too proud of my southerness.

I’m a Southerner because it’s where I’m from and where my people are from, including Cherokee. I was born in Georgia and raised in North Carolina. I had a Mamaw, a Papaw and a Nenaw. There’s a Civil War (War Between the States) rifle in the hall closet of my grandparents’ house. Story is, a relative got it off a Union solider. My Mamaw once set the place on fire by trying to burn kudzu above the garden. I have her quilts in almost every room in the house. My Granddaddy said a person couldn’t help being poor, but he could help being no count. He said never be beholden to anybody. All my book learning can’t match his common sense.

I grew up hating the first bars of Dixie because more than once I was yanked by my ear to a standing position by great aunts at football games, the same UDC aunts who sometimes drove Carrie, the maid who raised me, home, her house in a different Atlanta, Buttermilk Bottoms,where the streets were alive with people and smells, so removed from our quiet house where Daddy’s fist came down on the dining room table whenever the name, Martin Luther King, came up. But . . . wasn’t he like Carrie? It was all so confusing. Unlike my first election where the choice for Governor was Jimmy Carter vs Lester Maddox, and when the people of my state chose the man who handed out ax-handles to use on black people, I knew I had to leave the South, college; and so in San Francisco, I became a spiritual hippie, but after three years my teacher decided our new community would be located in Tennessee, where, when we arrived, no one could understand a word of the locals’ hard twang, which meant I was pushed forward as a “Georgia boy” ambassador, urged to “talk and act Southern so they’ll accept us,” which I did . . . because it had never left me.

When I was a child, I used to run along behind the truck that drove through the alleys in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, blowing clouds of poison to kill the mosquitoes. I’d turn and twirl in the mist, reasoning that if it coated my body, the mosquitoes would leave me alone. (They didn’t. Dit’n.) I went on to acquire a BS degree, holes in my brain notwithstanding. I was born in Arkansas, and raied in Arkansas (but. I. did. not. have. sexuuuuul. relations. with . that. President), North Carolina, and finally, the suspicious foreign land of California, where I now make my home. I love grits and okra (fried, boiled, raw–slime–yum), home grown peeled tomatoes with salt, watermelon without salt (I know, I know), crookneck squash, potatoes and gravy, cabbage, biscuits, and pot roast, but my dubious connection to yon foreign land of fruits, nuts, and flakes (I’m at least two of those) leads me to drink unsweet tea. I hang my head in Cracker Barrel and say, real quiet, “Unsweet.” As long as I’m confessing: I never liked greens, not collards, not turnips, not any of them except the delicate spinach variety, which is probably direct evidence of demon possession. God love her, she don’t like greens.

Essay on Politics by CIA Renditioner Robert Seldon Lady. The byline is “William Lady.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement

I was born to Yankees but that’s not my fault. I did have the good sense to get them to move to Birmingham, Alabama before I was born, but then they moved me to New England where I learned to talk with one of those weird New England accents!

Poor me. I worked on the universe and got us to move to Richmond, Virginia when I was six and where I managed to stay ever since. Now nobody claims me. Whenever I open my mouth people around me say, “You’re not from around here are you?” I think my accent ended up somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike. I believe one day I’ll travel up there and find my hometown where I speak like a native and no one looks at me cockeyed.

But my heart will always be here in the South, my real home, even if nobody does claim me.

Like the true Southerner I am, I don’t give a shit.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I used to crumble bacon into my grits, load it with butter and mix it with runny eggs. Then my doctor lectured me about cholesterol. Now I crumble turkey bacon into oatmeal topped with Smart Balance, and mix it with scrambled eggbeaters.

I’m a Cajun from south Louisiana, the original, original, original land of Dixie.
An outrageous claim?
Louisiana was home of the ante-bellum ten dollar note with the word “dix” printed all over it. Dix, of course, is the French word for ten and it is really pronounced “deese,” but the Americans that poured into Louisiana, especially after that whuppin’ Colonel Jackson and Jean Lafitte put on the redcoats in 1814, didn’t know it was pronounced “deese.” They said “dix,” as in “Gimme some of that Dixie beer.”

I’m descended from the Acadians of New Brunswick, that fat and sassy bunch that wouldn’t pledge allegiance to the King of England in 1759. At the same time, I’m also descended from a redneck from the piney woods of north Louisiana.

I’m just as likely to say “poo yai” or “dang” in exclamation or greet you with a French “Comment-ca vas?” or a “How y’all doin’? How’s momma and them?”

I like okra and tomatoes and corn bread and milk, only we Cajuns call it couche-couche (pronounced cush-cush).
So when I meet folks from Mississippi or Alabama or Florida and they, upon hearing my Cajun accent, say, “You sure do talk funny!” I reply, “I like the way you talk.” And then they admit, “I like the way you talk, too.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Although I do not claim to be Southern, I myself come from a long line of Okies. These farmers and hog-raisers lived in the Boggy River region of the state’s cypress-covered, southeastern corner until moving to the cotton town of Florence, Arizona after WWII. This makes us, as we like to think, “Desert Okies.” My family was kind enough to pass on their predisposition to heart disease and diabetes, along with a passion for purple hulls, well-crafted stories and gravy-covered foods; hopefully with hard work and some horse-blinders, I can avoid the family’s cardiac tradition and narrative one.

My better half currently lives in the NC Piedmont, and when I’m fortunate enough to visit, we eat at Beef Burger a lot and hike in and around the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.

A high school girlfriend of mine died on Monday. By all accounts it was as tragic as a death can be. She was married to a loving husband and had two beautiful children. She had a 20 year teaching career where we grew up. Life was idyllic till the breast cancer showed […]

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Being Southern is not something I chose. Who would volunteer for the mosquitoes, the destitution, the suburban sprawl, the closed-mindedness, the good ole’ boy governments or the deteriorating cultural identity?

No, Southerness selected me, and owns me despite my embarrassment or my contrarian’s instincts. This is because Southerness is more than the geography that constitutes the south; thus we can’t escape it by moving (though my own Southerness did not do so well in Philadelphia or Cincinnati). But it’s also because what allowed my ancestors to set up shop in the swamps of Florida was a primordial drive that they passed on to via seven generations of roughin’ it.

Because of them, the Southerness pulls at my guts like the flu when I drink tea that’s been sweetened after it has cooled, or when I listen to someone gush about Florida’s theme parks and not its oak hammocks or its formerly infinite pastures.

Hell, sometimes I fantasize about being from New England or the Midwest—areas that have retained a degree of authenticity due to their lack of in-migration—because there’s so little that’s Southern about the Florida I live in now. Orange groves were uprooted for subdivisions with foreign names, and the $8 open air rodeo, where I spent my gum-chewing years sitting on the fences and pulling up my feet when the bulls came careening by, is now a $55 multi-use event center.

But if Southerness has a mythology of preservation that parallels its tale of destruction, it is evidenced only in the literature it produces.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up having maw maws and a paw paws and a distinct view of life. I say ma’am, swear that barbecue is a noun only and is made from pork, and know that chivalry is not dead, if you know where to look. And even though I chose professions of technology and literature, my memories will always be of playing outside on humid summer nights, catching fireflies in an old mason jar, wondering why the ice cream maker was so slow.

Why I’m Southern:
1. My name, on my birth certificate from Alamance County NC actually is Virginia Lee.
2. My late father named me Virginia Lee because he was a Civil War buff and had aspirations to be a member of Southern gentry, a goal he never came close to achieving.
3. My dad was born in Arkansas, as was his daddy, but my paternal grandmother was born in Tennessee. Her mama was from Alabama. (I have a deep-seated dread that we are distant kin to the 10 Commandment judge, Roy Moore.)
4. My mama was born in Tennessee, as was her mama. Her daddy was born in Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana, just north of Lake Ponchartrain. He was raised in Biloxi,
Mississippi.
5. My parents are the first generation of heaven only knows how many who were NOT farmers at some point.

Last, but certainly not least –
6. I have a degree in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi.

Unmerciful rays of sunlight, filter through the tall pine trees along the highway, and a woman wearing leather sling-backs, and a black gabardine wool suit, struggles along the pitted highway surface. She passes another field of corn; stalks as high as a young child, feathery corn silks fluttering in the heated breeze that swirls up […]

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
When I was a little girl my Granny took me uptown to have my picture made at Belks Department Store;I think I was about five years old. She said that the photographer talked to me a bit and laughed as he told me , “Honey, the house would burn down before you got anybody told.” One word out of my mouth and the whole world knows I’m southern. Not just southern, the mountains of North Carolina southern and believe me there’s a whole lotta south in that kind of accent. Imagine the voice of Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton if they couldn’t sing. I used to season everything my family ate with fatback and salt until the doctor told my husband that I was trying to kill him. I cook healthier food these days except at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Sometimes when I’m eating something that really needs salt I remember my Granny who lived to be 96 and never ate a new age ‘healthy’ meal in her life. She ate eggs from her own chickens, pork from a pig slaughtered on her own land, and vegetables out of a garden she planted. She prayed over her food with a voice that sounded like it had a mountain in it. I might just ask that doctor what he thinks about that.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

Ten reasons I’m Southern even though I live on the Illinois prairie.
1. I use “y’all,” “out yonder,” and “git” in normal conversation.
2. I can scare up a mess of collard greens that’ll buckle a grown man.
3. My Uncle Joe served a life sentence for beating a man to death over the last swig of whiskey.
4. My grandma watched a hangin’ in the town square and loved telling the story of it to warn us that if we ever had the chance to see one not to.
5. My favorite writers are Flannery O’Connor and William Gay.
6. I say “Appa-latch-in” and “Looah-vull.”
7. My grandpa played the fiddle, wore a coal tattoo and died of black lung.
8. I have kin with two first names: “Barbara Jean,” “Jimmy Jay,” “Cottoneye Joe.”
9. I have picked up paw paws and put’em in a basket.
10. Snake-handling Pentecostals are everyday folk.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I can brag of experiences of many souths: jambalaya, but also ratatouille, pavlova, and rolled fish tacos. A bit of each has made me who I am. What attaches me to the memory of a place? Is it who I met there and miss now or what I ate there and crave now?

Thanksgiving, the Creole restaurant in Paris, doesn’t, can’t, make jambalaya like Alex did at the restaurant where we worked in Greenville, South Carolina. I learned never to talk politics with Alex, but I’d eat his jambalaya every day. On mutual days off during the summer, Alex would drive me and his two retrievers to the old quarry in his pick-up complete with gun rack. I wasn’t in love with Alex. He was cute and sweet but my small-mindedness couldn’t separate him from his politics and his gun rack. I was in love with Alex’s cooking. Alex’s jambalaya. Alex’s crab cakes. Alex’s gumbo. Alex’s soft-shelled crabs. Alex’s bread pudding. Alex’s greens. I was in love with Alex’s greens. When we went to the quarry, I enjoyed seeing the strong young man swimming, to see Alex out of his apron. In all honesty, though, I went for the picnics he’d pack: sweet tea, deviled eggs, fried chicken, cornbread, coleslaw. He probably took me there to enjoy seeing me swimming, to see me out of my waitress uniform. But, I could never stray too far from his peach cobbler. I’d be dishonest if I were to state my southern legitimacy by sharing my experiences with Alex, or by describing the quarry, or by affecting the accent of our customers. The South is in me through my stomach and it’s my taste buds, not my tongue, that make the best argument for going back.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born and raised in Kentucky, love grits with butter and pepper, don’t understand people who screw up grits with milk and sugar, for gods sakes people, grits and cream of wheat are two different things, as different and horses and mules.
I live below the Mason Dixon line, only time I get in trouble is when I go north and marry some Yankee woman, always have to buy them a house, pack them up and then send them back north with all my money; I just can’t speak or understand their language, you know what I mean. Boy, I am damn glad to see ya’ll back up and running again, only decent writing on the web in a style I can understand.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I, DB Cox, am an ordained Southern musical minister. I preach to the blue multitudes that gather in the cheap juke-joint playgrounds along the back roads of the great southeast. I can be found in the early-morning hours bent over a Fender Stratocaster, playing with an ache in my tone that can only hint at the dark secrets hidden behind my cheap sunglasses. I am a psychedelic redneck aging without grace-wearing my hat pulled low over one eye, working hard to maintain my spot on the musical fringe, constantly searching for a sacred sequence of blue notes to save us all.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I have been to a one-room Baptist Church in Shelby County, Alabama, and watched grown men, reportedly sane, reach into a box and pick up pissed-off rattlesnakes. I have hunted and eaten poke salad. I have stood outside a narrow cafe just outside five-points in Birmingham, where I was born, and devoured a chili-dog and Grapico lunch special in the hot sun. I have driven my sister to a very successful fabric shop run out of a tin shack next to a pay-per-pound trout pond five miles east of Vincent. And though I am frequently dismayed by hoakey orthography to depict the “colorful” lilt of the southern tongue, my own tongue uncurls against my will with each mile as I drive home from Chicago, where I live now, to Westover, where I started out, until by the time I get there, my speech is run-over with obese vowels like an old dead tractor run-over by kudzu and I end up sounding like Andy Griffith.

Ten things I predict for 2008
Based on the response to my last list which suggested that I was being a bit too pessimisstic (gasp! and I thought I was being funny!). My dad once told me that it’s always EASY to predict disaster, as it’s a safe bet something lousy is going to come […]

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