Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Well, I have lived in Texas (which I am not certain counts), Georgia, and North Carolina—all when I was in the Army, but I think you want something more. While some might think I want to find Faulkner’s South, I want to return to the South and discover the epicenter of Frank Stanford’s poetry. I want to bury myself in the back hills, compare the rural childhood I had in Utah with that of the South. I don’t drink tea, sweetened or otherwise, but I want to spend hours talking and eating in the late afternoons, watching the sky, high above the trees darken. I want to fall asleep on a porch while listening to the sounds of a small town go on about its life.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Born in north Georgia, I grew up believing that the greatest desert in the world was a Moon Pie, accompanied by an RC Cola. I am thoroughly convinced that fried green tomatoes and green apples are a delicacy that have been completely neglected by most of the gourmets in this world and are long overdue for their recognition. I grew up tasting and drinking muscadine wine, which runs circles around that wussy French grape, the pinot noir. I can go from zero to redneck at the slightest sign of an injustice or slight to someone else. I am a hopelessly chivalrous antiquated soul, a good ol’ boy, a yellow dog democrat, and a politically incorrect redneck doctor, resort-owner, and humanitarian group director.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

On the first day of eighth-grade in Marietta, Georgia I wore a khaki suit over a flowered blouse, and carried a faux-leather brief case. I was a new kid from Chicago, and didn’t get it – the other kids wore hip-hugger jeans, gauze blouses, and hippie headbands. That was the day puberty kicked in for me – I had sweat rings the size of dinner plates under the arms of my jacket. Cobb County teens took school a lot less seriously than we did in Chicago.

I wanted to be Southern. A girl at lunch, as she reached over to grab a roll off my tray, said, “ you can’t be called Southern unless you, your parents, and your grandparents were born in the South.” But I didn’t give up.

In high school I listened to the Allman Brothers, Lynard Skynard, and Mother’s Finest, frequented a bar (sneaking in behind my older friends) called The Poet’s Corner in Buckhead, featuring singers named Ben Dover and Tennessee Tucker, drank Budweiser and Rusty Nails and sang ‘Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother.’ I went barefoot at keg parties and hung out along the banks of the Chattahoochee on humid summer afternoons, where we’d swim like otters in icy currents and lounge on boulders.

In Athens, Georgia at UGA I pogoed at the 40-Watt club to REM, Pylon, The Side Effects, Love Tractor, and The Method Actors, to name just a few of the bands. We’d stand outside the club between sets, flanked by seven-foot tall elephant ear plants. Inside the rafters would bend and creak with the weight of our dancing bodies.

But I didn’t realize how Southern I had truly become until I went to Spain for the summer. One evening another student and I went out to the countryside with some Spanish friends, drank Rioja wine until our tongues loosened, and sang Dixie in a country pub with our arms around each others’ shoulders, homesick.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Many people look at Virginia on the map and don’t consider it the SOUTH. On a map of the United States, it seems to tilt toward the NORTH. The sensibility of Virginia continues to be that of the SOUTH, but seeks reconciliation between the north and the south. For example, less than a mile from my house is a farm that has been in the hands of a local family for over 150 years. On that farm are a couple of giant rock piles where the bodies of slaves used to be buried. The dead slave would be placed there and rocks piled on top. That was the family cemetery for slaves.

As time passed, the plantation house, now refurbished, had a secret room added beneath the dining room floor. It became a place to hide runaway slaves who were trying to make it to the north. In other words, the plantation owner showed the true nature of people from the south: We have giant hearts, full of love, compassion and mercy. When someone talks about SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY, I can tell you that is not a cliché. It is the truth as fully as it can be expressed.

I have lived in the north and the south, but I was born in the south, raised in the south and am, through and through, southern!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Despite being born in central Texas, I was raised among the wheat fields of Oklahoma. Where the lazy hawks swooped through tornado alley and we all would get sick from eating too many crab apples. The land of the Indians, the outlaws domain, and the center of Big XII football was my home for 10 years of my youth. Now, living south of the Red River, I enjoy the winter season in shorts and sandals, a snow cone while Christmas Caroling, and wonder why anyone would want to shovel snow. If that is not enough to prove my southern legitimacy, please note: my grandparents were second cousins!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Where I’m From
— after George Ella Lyon

I’m from the muddy swirl of Cecil’s Creek,
the polluted currents of Salt River
where bare-assed boys swam beneath
dead hogs, flood-beached and bloated
on the limestone shelf of the river bend.
I’m from the aroma of new-mown hay,
tobacco hanging in the barn, manure
spread on the spring fields, earth freshly turned
by the John Deere plow.
I’m from Joseph’s Chapel Methodist Church, sunlight
through its bare windows on Sunday morning,
the drone of Brother Ed Delaney’s sermons,
those revivals on summer evenings.
I come from Farmall tractors, New Idea mowers,
International Harvester hay balers, sweat
and chaff, straw and hay.
I’m from alfalfa and livestock,
my Jersey cow, the black lamb rejected by the ewe,
and white leghorn fryers, necks wrung on Saturday,
fried on Sunday, the milking parlor and hay loft,
pastures and the shade of maples in the yard.
I come from the Warm Morning stove, darkness
beneath piles of quilts, a gas heater
in the bathroom, ice in the bathtub.
I’m from poison ivy and Calomine lotion,
Luden’s Wild Cherry cough drops, castor oil
in the Frigidaire, and my mother’s hand
on my forehead.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My MaMaw taught me how to make iced tea so sweet a spoon’ll stand up in it around the same time she introduced me to Elvis Presley. She also told me the secret to making red beans smell like heaven (and not taste like dirt), and instilled in my both a love and healthy fear of cast iron skillets. I learned how to ride a horse bareback before I learned how to drive— but both lessons took place in an open field in rural Oklahoma.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

In January, I moved from Summit, a town in north-central New Jersey to Mays Landing, NJ. And already I hear talk from neighbors and townspeople about “that other NJ” up North. I have southern roots. My father was born in Barnstable County, SC, and grew up in Fairfax. When I was both child and teenager, several family vacations were spent driving south to visit his various relatives.

I remember the old farmhouse and its surroundings from my earliest childhood visits: chickens running around my bare feet in the dust, and visits to the feared and hated outhouse where once my mother found a snake curled round the ledge inside. And I remember meeting Dad’s grandmother. She was sitting in a rocking chair by the barn, long white braids hanging down either side of her high cheekbones, Cherokee ancestry clear in her features, as well as in my grandfather’s and various Uncles’ faces. I remember meals in the parlor—Grandpa Harter sitting at the head of the table, his belly bulging over denim overalls and straining his plaid shirt; the torn screen on the door that was swinging open and closed in the hot breeze; and flies settling on the corn and fried chicken–or trapped on the flypaper hanging over the table, and the warm, unpasteurized milk, fresh from the cow.

I remember the drive out into the swamp to Uncle Sam’s log cabin, where Uncle Framp and other uncles and cousins drifted in from the surrounding tangle, coon-skin caps on their heads. During a visit when I was seventeen, Uncle Sam heard I was going to college. He walked into his cabin, then came back out holding an old sock, which he emptied into my hand. I held four tarnished silver dollars and a couple of quarters. “This is to help your education,” he said. “He gave you all he had,” my father said, visibly moved. Yet after that, during the same visit, there was a watermelon seed spitting contest off Uncle Sam’s porch, and I felt embarrassed to take part in it —after all, I was now sixteen, and the whole scene had become alien to me.

And I remember my father’s endless stories of his own childhood: the first time he heard a radio in the Sulkie-Hatchie swamp, and snuck up on the chain-gang; times he and his hound dog Dixie treed an old raccoon; his plowing the farm field behind their old mule; his catching fish in the swamp, then setting up a campfire beside the train tracks and frying those fish to sell to passengers when the train pulled in. And now that he is gone, and there are no more stories, I crave them and wish I’d written all of them down or had him record them. He even said we were descended from Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox—but he had a great imagination, so I wonder about that.

Many years later, after my husband and I had left NJ for eleven years in Santa Fe, and my parents then moved from New Jersey to Texas, I became another kind of southerner, frequently visiting them in Buda, a little town outside of Austin, where country music, fish fries at the firehouse, and an all-pervasive heat filled our days. And writing all this down this morning has had led me to realize that although you can take a girl out of the South, when it’s in her blood, you can’t take the South out of her.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Almost a century and a half ago my ancestor concluded his last letter to Texan reinforcements with “VICTORY OR DEATH!” Promptly afterward he sacrificed his life during the Battle of the Alamo. Nearly a century and a half later, I moved from pecan-strewn Texas to water-mapled Kentucky after falling in love with the land. Upon arriving, my best friend, who was born and raised there, pointed to her family crest. Below it read vincere vel mori. Victory or death. I’ve been here ever since.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

There’s one thing that’s essential to claim Southern legitimacy. Roots. Whether you set them down yourself, or grow up a part of them, they gotta exist if you’re truly Southern.

My Daddy makes the best Gumbo you’ll ever eat. My uncle Ray danced with his pet goat and did most of his cooking outside. I watched my Mammaw ring the neck of more chickens than I can count. My uncle Arthur had a pet alligator that lived in the slough behind his house. He fed “Leroy” chicken from the sharpened end of a broom handle. Every day of his life, my Papaw had a pack of Red Man in his front shirt pocket. Those, my friends, are Southern Roots.

I’ve continued to grow on those roots. I still live in the South. I like a little tea in my glass of sugar, and there’s no better breakfast than biscuits and cream gravy. I got more porch dogs than I can count, and everyone I know has a nickname. Yeah, I think I’ll just stay put.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

When someone mentions “wife beaters,” I think “t-shirt,” not “abuse.” Plus, I live in a horrible school district.

People say there can be many pronunciations of a word. These people are wrong. It’s pronounced “pee-can,” not “pecahn.” But, both ways, it’s delicious in a pie.

I think of myself as Southern not because of my residence in NC, nor because of the amount of time I spent in that location (7 years), nor because of the constant sunburn on my back. No, I think of myself as Southern, because, frankly, there are worse things to be in life, and I know.

I used to live in the north.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

When I was growing up, heading North meant going to Atlanta, I grew up South of Georgia’s fall line. Atlanta might as well been the North Pole as far I was concerned, I could not imagine a place further away. Big city, fast-paced (well, fast-paced for the South at any rate), and full of people, it just was not my cup or tea. For me it was about getting up early, going to the beach or off fishing someplace. Back then, my South was small and laid-back. For me, it still is. Being “Southern” has many ways to define it, born here, moved here, dream about here – they all count. Being “Southern” is more about Highway 17 than I-95. Stopping for boiled peanuts in a brown paper bag at a red light, rather than some vending machine item at a rest stop. If you understand that, then you understand the South, my South.

The Dead Mule needs a few more snow or cheerful holiday poems for December. No gloomy poems, please.
Send these by November 1. Other issues are filling up quickly.