Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My flesh is red clay,
my blood the waters of the Saluda.
My lungs are filled with cotton dust,
my belly with fried chicken, grits, cheese pie
and the best tomatoes grown anywhere.
My teeth know the stain of tobacco,
my arms the stick of its gum.
My hands work hard to control
the yearnings that callous up from inside.
In my best dreams it is always
late October in Cade’s Cove.
I was born here.
I live here still.
And I’m not sure if I’ve become the South
or the South has become me.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Whitaker has spent the summer retracing his Confederate great great great unlces and grandfathers routes through Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, and other state parks. Whitaker’s Virginia ramblings have left him wander shod, but upbeat, as the late summer vegetables fatten on the vine.

I’m as country as cornbread and can get you to the bootlegger’s house in Chewalla, Tennessee, if need be. I even know the back way in. Trust me on that one

I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. Even though I have lived in New York City for many years, I am instantly recognizable by my accent. When I taught English to high school students in Arequipa, Peru, I informed them that the pronoun for second person plural is “y’all.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement

Although I live in South Georgia now, I am descended (proudly) from the pioneering Mississippi family of whom I write. My ongoing research into family history continues to delight, amaze, and teach me. I hope that Mule readers who were introduced to Purvis folklore in the previously published “Utah Grits,” will also enjoy “Old John.”

I was born and raised in Mississippi. I left Mississippi to broaden my horizons. My daddy cried and my mama made Daddy drive all the way to South Carolina, where the United States Army had me hidden away in the brig, to try to talk my NCO into letting me come home.

Mama missed the $50 dollars a month I brought home from de-barking pine trees at Mr. Brewer’s Lumber Mill outside of Natchez. I hit my West Point-educated Lieutenant in the mouth when he playfully tugged on my big toe and told me to get my redneck ass out of bed. I then proceeded to admonish him as I pulled his damn pants down to see if his panties had lace on ‘em. They did.

Two weeks later our Yankee President declared war and my NCO finally did let me out of the brig. But he didn’t send me home to Natchez, after all. No, sir.

I celebrated my seventeenth birthday in a hole; a foxhole.

Now about my chosen field:

When I returned to the United States of America, I moved to Louisiana. I joined the Baton Rouge Police Department. After thirty years, I retired.

For the last twenty years I have spent my time fiddling around with my tractor and diggin holes of my own, in the pasture with it. I dug a hole 400 feet long, 75 feet wide and 12 feet deep with my Massey Ferguson and a box. It filled up with rain water on its own and then I hired a man from Arkansas to fill it up with fish. I fish some but nowadays I catch and release. My wife thinks it’s smart, because of my age and all, just in case when I do kick the bucket and find out God is in actuality a striped bass that He won’t have anything to hold against me, much.

Now about my eating habits:

I revert to eating what I was brought up on and grits was the thing. Mama could make kudzu and poke salad taste like mustards. My sisters let me help pull taffy and drop the peanuts in it while it was still warm. Iced tea was the drink but we didn’t have ice, mind you. I still get a hankering for cold sweet potatoes and still spell a singular said spud with an “e” on the end of it.

Now about my music habits:

Tina not Ike. Waylon not Willie. Julie not Lisa. Anybody who is or once was signed with Sun Records.

I’m so Southern that I use to listen to Jerry Lee Lewis play the piano at the black churches in Ferriday when he was a boy. White Churches wouldn’t let him in the door. Nothings changed much and that’s the way I like it.

If that ain’t enough, James Lathern is my first name.

Born and educated in the South, I have lived all my life in North Carolina, except for a few months in London. And though I don’t have a discernable Southern accent, I spent three years as a child eating only grits for breakfast. My last claim to legitimacy is my ancestor Stephen Renfroe who appears in the book STARS FELL ON ALABAMA and who caused some of his relatives to misspell their name “Renfro” or “Renfrow” to avoid being associated with this sheriff and horse-thief hanged by his friends before his enemies could get him. My side of the family was apparently fine with it.

Here’s my Southern Legitimacy Statement: When you are born and raised in the Arkansas Ozarks where does one begin a southern legitimacy statement? Do I actually need one? Well, okay. I grew up thinking Robert E. Lee was the father of my country. I also grew up being fed the plantation owners’ version of southern history, which had nothing to do with my part of the state or our way of life. Northwest Arkansas was as pro-Union as it was pro-Confederate. I am a staunch Federal Unionist and always have been but I was trained to be a southern Rebel. It creates a mixed mess sometimes but I remain a Southern-American. I spent forty years away from home but have come back to finish my life as a writer. I write about local history, I write fiction that sometimes is about or set in the south. I write all the time. That’s pretty southern right there, isn’t it?

Southern Legitimacy Statement
I lived my first eighteen years in New England, but since then I’ve spent most of my life below the Mason-Dixon Line. I’ve traveled all over the South, from Key West to the Blue Ridge to South Padre. I’ve been to the Alamo, and went to the Grand Ole Opry when it was still in downtown Nashville, in the old Ryman Auditorium. Important things have happened to me in the South. I ran my fastest marathon ever in Georgia. I lost my virginity in Florida, and had my heart broken in North Carolina.

But my strongest claim to Southern Legitimacy lies in my twenty years of living in West Virginia. For ten of those years I lived without running water or electricity, in a cabin surrounded by 300 acres of woods. Now that was a Southern life, an old-timey one. I drew my water from a spring and lived by the light of kerosene lamps. I drove around in a beat up pickup truck with “Farm Use” painted on the side doors. I hoed corn and canned it. I put up hay in bales and in haystacks. I cut brush with a scythe. I killed, cleaned, cooked and ate squirrel, rabbit, quail, groundhog and snapping turtle. I learned to make a mean biscuit. Every fall, nuts from the shagbark hickory beside my cabin fell and crashed onto my tin roof. I often laid in bed at night and listened to foxhounds running through the hills, barking into the wee hours.

Southern? Yeah, I think I’ve got that covered.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in northern Alabama, and though I have moved around all my life, my roots run deep in those lower Appalachian foothills. Most of my relatives still live there, or in Tennessee and lower Alabama, but most of my immediate family live in Virginia now. My husband’s mother also came from northern Alabama. I love the mountains, country living, growing my own vegetables and canning what I can. I love raising farm animals and hope to do that one day. I love buttermilk, fried okra and green beans swimming in hambone juices and cooked all day. I love Sacred Harp singing, mountain ballads and any music from a strummed dulcimer and fiddle. I love listening to the sound of a mountain stream in the darkness while wrapped in quilts, sleeping in a cabin loft. I am a Southerner.