Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I believe I mentioned Emma to you before, my friend from southern Illinois. She offered me a piece of plum pie one day. I thought to myself, plums? That must be poor folks’ pie. Lady that I am, I politely refrained from looking down my nose at the errant deviation from the well known superiority of Washington grown apple pie.

I took a small bite. The angels guffawed and I deserved it. They rolled on the floor. Brown sugar melted on my tongue and mocked me for thinking it only belonged in pecan pie. Each one of those plums begged to please, mingled with butter, cinnamon and performed a fete beyond what I thought the lowly fruit could accomplish. After all, don’t most folks just let the things dry up and call them prunes?

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in the shadow of the Big Chicken in Marietta, Georgia. Well, actually I was born before the Big Chicken was built, but I did grow up just five miles east of the thing. I was a dutiful southern daughter who went to my high school football games on Friday nights, babysat the neighbor’s kids on Saturday nights (for 50 cents an hour) and sang in my church youth choir on Sundays. The only shame I ever brought to my southern heritage is the fact that to this day I still cannot properly fry chicken. May my forefathers and mothers forgive me.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and still live in eastern North Carolina, a tradition in my bloodline since the 1700’s, long enough to consider whole hog pork barbecue and banana pudding as separate and essential food groups Many in my family have hands permanently stained by tobacco, from working with it, not smoking it. I not only know the function of a tobacco stick, I know what it feels like across the backside.

After six weeks in the hospital following a stroke and brain tumor surgery, my mother asked me if I wanted anything. I replied; Yes, a plate of fried chicken and a fruit cocktail cake.

We like our turnip salad run up and cooling it on the porch when we’re run down.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I recently spent one week of vacation in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee. The highlight of my trip was waking up to the grandeur of the Smoky Mountains each morning. I also got a kick out of buying a purse and a book at a garage sale from a southern gal.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

When I was five years old, I pulled my reluctant four year old brother to the front of the one- room Baptist church in Tanyard, Kentucky where we sang, at the top of our lungs, “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” (complete with hand gestures) before a smiling congregation. I’m proud of my southern heritage. In the south, we respect the dead. When a funeral procession drives past, we pull off to the side of the road and stop…. grief is reflected in our eyes.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up on a tobacco farm outside of the cigarette capital of the world, Winston-Salem, but now I’m off the farm and at the University of North Carolina. I have been to NASCAR races, I love the Atlanta Braves, and my last two trips to the emergency room were for wrecking a dirt bike and for a snakebite. The last job I had required me to feed hogs, and I know how to play the banjo.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I like living in the South because it’s not as far north as the North. In North Carolina, that means instead of suffering the mud-brown, dreary snow-slushy springs of Pennsylvania, we generally get sunshine and warmer temperatures in March and April. Up North, September is only summer on the calendar. Here, we get to experience the warm and temperate weather you would expect from summer. I swore when I moved here from Key West almost 13 years ago that I would never live further north again, and I intend to keep that promise.

Editor’s Note:

Harry was in the Mule over 10 years ago now. “I still have the ‘I kicked ass at the Dead Mule’ t-shirt in my closet,” he writes.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’ve lived all my life in Greenville SC. I’ve only been to the north a few times and hardly at all out west. So I’m a true Southerner with a deep draw accent. I have been writing poetry for 27 years about the South, because naturally that’s where I’ve been all these years. Everything from tobacco, pecans, cotton, and peaches. But I have been published locally, nationally, and abroad.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have noticed that somehow the most Southern state, Florida, is generally not thought of as a part of the South. Except for that portion known as South Georgia. How that happened I am not sure. I have lived in South Florida for five years. The accents here are of the boroughs of New York, the Caribbean, South America and a few, like mine, from Chicago’s North Side. (Chicagoans from the South Side never leave the city because the many railroad crossings and ethnic rivalries keep them close to home.)

My mother was born in Kentucky. Her emotional attachments were Southern, her political affinities were Democratic. Her uncle was Kentucky Senator Thomas Paynter. But she was also a Catholic and that seemed to make her an outsider in her own land. She used to tell of crossing the frozen Ohio River to attend mass in Portsmouth, Ohio. Her religion was the only thing that rivaled her love of the South. Except, of course, for those burning crosses she saw as a child on the hills above town.

The South may be arbitrarily designated as below the Mason-Dixon line but I can assure you that places like Cairo, Illinois qualify on every other basis than geography– values, food, songs, religion, and family. Hound dogs, dead mules, moonshine, poetry, love of language, orneriness, and similar Southern characteristics are all there as well. So are corn bread, grits, catfish, and the push for canonization of Flannery O’Connor.

The South is more diverse than it wants to admit. It enjoys putting on that twisting-toe-in-the-dirt-aw-shucks flimflam then throwing in a allusion to a little known Shakespearean poem. It hides a sense of superiority in the guise of national victim. But it is just a bit too proud to get away with it. I love the South and have trekked its hills and woods, waded in clouds of tadpoles in its creeks, and slobbered BBQ sauce or butter all over my shirt depending on whether ribs or crawfish were on the plate.

In Chicago there is a saying, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent.” Which means that unless my people know you and vouch for you I don’t want anything to do with you. The South has a similar philosophy and breaks from it just as often as they do in Chicago.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

When not removing cow patties from his running shoes with a stick, T.J. McIntyre writes stories and poems from his home in Alabaster, Alabama.