Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in North Carolina, but spent two years of my very distant youth in Louisiana. According to some of my Cajun friends, being from North Carolina makes me a Yankee (i.e., “North”). I tried to explain to them (between large bites of a shrimp po’boy sandwich), that the word “North” in “North Carolina” is meant to clarify the difference between the two Carolinas, but they didn’t buy it. Then again, they never met my Great Aunt Ethel, who called everybody “doll baby,” (with special emphasis if she was addressing a man), and made pitchers of sweet tea that would give diabetes to a honey bear. Her sister, my grandmother, could stretch a vowel farther than a string of silly putty. And those are just two of the many proud Southern women in my family, of which I am definitely one, despite any views to the contrary, ya’ll!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

In 1943 my Mama found me in a cardboard box in Tyler, Texas. Daddy was a railroad man and we moved to Arkansas in ‘53. We ate a lot of black-eyed peas, white bread, fish and squirrel. On cool Fall nights we liked to hunt coon and possum. I smoked my first tobacco at 11 and had my first drink of liquor from an uncle. I somehow managed to get a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arkansas. I live in Palestine, Texas now and seldom leave the south, except on my Harley.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born, raised and still live in Atlanta. I remember this town before the Braves and Falcons came. I remember when what is now an access road used to be the interstate. I still say ya’ll (it is only proper), know the difference between dinner and supper and know a frog strangler is a heavy downpour. I’ve eaten at the Varsity more times than I’d like to admit, been a Waffle House patron before it was cool and order tea assuming it will be sweet. Strangely, I don’t care for grits. It must be some recessive Yankee gene.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in L.A. (Lower Alabama). Have a hankerin for grits, cussin, and fiesty southern women.

Am always fixin to do somethin. Mostly just fixin.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Would anyone in his right mind claim to be Southern who is not? I was born thar, my family still lives thar, I go back for visits regularly to keep my accent in shape. Little Rock Central High School class of ‘58 (that’s 1958). Heard about the integration crisis, and Faubus, and Eisenhower calling out the 101st Airborne to help us integrate? If that’s not Southern, what is ?

“Alcohol, Tobacco, & Firearms should describe a convenience store, not a government agency.”
Author Unknown
-sent from a friend — a Mule family favorite

Southern Legitimacy Statement
My Daddy’s people came out of Arkansas in nineteen hundred and thirty-two ’cause their land blew away and all the people left. And the Sheriff wasn’t even after them! In fact, my Grandpa Milo was the Sheriff, kept the lock up and he owned sixty acres and a couple of mules too, share-cropped ‘em. Never farmed himself; he was ‘quality.’ Grandma Pearl and her sister, Mae, kept the general store, and since she’d gone clear though 8th grade, she also taught the one-room school. It was Grandma Pearl who saw the writing on the Red Sea and said, “Enough is enough,” and dragged her husband and three boys off to California in their 1924Ford touring car. [...more]

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 boy who moved south and found himself surrounded by Yankees. I’m in Florida. There’s not a hill in sight and the restaurants that specialize in “Real Southern Cooking” put sugar in the cornbread. My own son told me the cat pushing on his chest was “making bagels”!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’m either an adopter or an adoptee, but in either case, Virginia is the other party involved and has been for close on 20 years. Although I travel a lot and don’t spend nearly as much time in Virginia as I really really want to, I’m dedicatedly saving pennies to buy a small house for retirement in Rappahannock County – along the Rappahannock River, of course – with a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains and close enough that I can go camping in the Blue Ridges every single weekend if I want to, especially in spring, in oak and hickory forest with purple and yellow violets and wild geraniums and Carolina chickadee and hooded warbler…

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I live in the South. I coach tennis and go to school in the South. I drink in the South. But not sweet tea, because I’ve never liked tea of any kind, though in the last four or five years my wife has gotten me to drink Asian tea when we have sushi. I used to hate sushi. Now I eat with chopsticks and drink Asian tea that might be more correctly called Oriental tea, but does anyone really know for sure? I eat in the South, way too fucking much. But not grits. They never made me smile. Though by the ever-increasing size of my ass, you wouldn’t think that taste, texture, or FDA guidelines were any kind of pre-requisite. Just whether or not it fits on a shovel. I drove through the south once. Camped with a dirty Mexican in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky. We never got out of the car because we were so afraid to hear the ding-a-ling-ding of dueling banjos drifting through the trees. It was June. We hadn’t showered for a couple of days. We were drunk and sweating. I think we had to burn the car when the trip was over.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

I had a friend once who harkened from southern Illinois, so I figure she rubbed shoulders with the south. That and her sister’s name was Maggie. She had that southern woman capability of being within ten minutes of looking like a million bucks, no matter the day or time.

I’m a slender woman. Some would unkindly refer to me as skinny. The first time I met Emma, she gave me the once-over and remarked, “Honey, it looks like you’ve got to run around in the shower to get wet.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I guess there are many ways to be southern, like the time I, as a youngster, made myself a salad out of cabbage, and the other time I got in trouble for throwing pieces of broken shingles at cars. Or maybe being southern is evident in the hours I spent on the front porch of Papaw’ house, checking the temperature of the candle wax he had to soak his foot in because the doctor said it would help his arthritis. It didn’t. No, I believe my southernness is best shown by the fact that one summer my Papaw and my Dad took time to stand in the driveway and show me how to wash mud off of the asphalt by using a “back and forth” swishing motion. Yea, that would be it.