Southern Legitimacy Statement:
The Southern in me pipes up so fast that I usually have no advance notice of it. I’ve been known to state that I never want to live north of the Mason-Dixon line, that I enjoy a good fish fry of catfish and hushpuppies, that I can let off steam by sliding into an out-in-the-country-Bible-thumping-hands-raised-to-heaven deep south church service at the passing of an old straw hat in lieu of a collection plate and that I can pick out the best barbeque places (and we must have pork!) by knowing their look — the tucked away, hole-in-the-wall, dirty, grimy shacks that pass the sauce-better-than ambrosia dripping sandwiches through the front door and the super “gullet washers” out the back.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I’m named James for my daddy and his daddy who was named after a book in the Bible (so I’ve been told). He was a one-armed man who lost his arm in a car accident with a drunk driver on country road in Headland, Alabama. People said he could do the work of two men. And the Ladd is from my other grandfather whose real name was Frank Lester but was called Ladd since a boy playing baseball, a love he never shook, listened to the Braves and Hammerin’ Hank on his GE radio while sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen eat red hot chilli peppers like they were licorice. I’ve lived in Dothan, Prattville, Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, and Auburn but now live in central Florida, not far from Orlando, a place that is nothing more than a very large small town that is too south to be in the Deep South. People keep talking about the New South, but that’s a lie. The South will always be the South because it can never give up its past. Just look at the fans wearing Bear Bryant hats at an Bama football game. And that’s not really a bad thing.

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