I have lived in Georgia for fifteen years now and I feel as Southern as a pecan pie cooling on the window sill of a cosmetologist’s shotgun house as she sits in her rocker chuckling over old Lewis Grizzard columns. I feel as Southern as a Krispy Kreme in the petite paws of a Pentecostal lady before she races off in her long, long skirt to speak in tongues at Sunday meeting. In other words. I feel Southern. And that’s what counts.

t’s not the usual mid-life temptations, a young chick or a new Harley, that have Eliot Smith casting about restlessly as he enters his fiftieth year on the planet. Rather it’s the “things done and left undone” in his life that send him off on a meandering road trip in Eliot’s Tale, the engaging new [...]

Southern Legitimacy Statement — I’m a Tar Heel Born and a Tar Heel bred (and educated – UNC Chapel Hill J School) and when I die I’ll be a Tar Heel Dead. For the past 20 years I’ve lived in the Southern Yankee town of Princeton (the only Ivy where Southern gentry seem to get away with seersucker suits and white bucks), but I join my motley family of mostly women on an annual summer trip to Sullivan’s Island SC or thereabouts, the location of my story.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
I’d like to tell you I’m a native Southerner, but it isn’t true. I was born in New York City, but crept down South under cover of night when I was eight. I came to NC under pretenses of a visit, but cute kid that I was, managed to secure permanent residence with my granny in a place called Tyner. She taught me about such delicacies as ham hocks and butter beans, and how sometimes it’s okay to eat leftover fried fish for breakfsat. I now live in Durham, NC with my husband and son (both legitimate natives).

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Originally from Allendale, SC and then transplanted to Charleston, Columbia and Myrtle Beach, I now spend my days fixin to do things in Chicago, Illinois. And no one in Chicago has any idea what that means.

As far as my SLS, my brother and I once removed ticks from a dog with a pair of pliers and used them to catch bluegill from the end of our grandparents’ dock. And I currently live in Kentucky and like to camp in North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas.

My Southern Legitimacy Statement can be validated by this piece about New Orleans and the fact that I once drew the Mason Dixon line on a map with a red crayon.

My third Southern Legitimacy Statement:
As a boy, my country family – my own family moved into the small town of Fayetteville, Arkansas when I was four years old – had no electricity, no running water, and no indoor bathroom facilities. I remember clearly using coal oil lamps, carrying buckets of water from the well and from a clean, sweet water spring down by the creek, and using the outhouse – which I dreaded in the cold of winter even more than in the hot, sticky, insect-riddled summer. I occasionally attended a one-room school with my cousins in the little community of Mayfield. My family was musically talented and although the old generation of players is now gone, I join my generation of country relatives every other week in a music get together at which I play the upright bass. I have often said that I would not trade the family or the part of the country that I was born and raised in for any other. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Editor’s Note: The South is not the South without its hellfire, brimstone, and damnation stories and neither is this Dead Mule.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
When my folks had me, they were stationed in San Antonio. They had a place on the base, a nice spot for the three of us. This is where, in my walker, I locked them both out and they had to get the MP’s to unlock the door. Where the naked man was at the front, crawling on his hands and knees and howling at the distinct lack of a moon all the while saying, I’m a wolf. At about a year old, we came back to North Carolina, and that’s where we’d stay. My dad had worked at the local gas station when he was a kid. Puckett’s, it became a barbecue joint after the influx of people brought in more gas stations, and a grocery store. In middle school, I caught the bus in front of Puckett’s, where I would buy cokes and sell them on the bus, candy too. The trailer we lived in when I first started remembering things, it doesn’t exist anymore. The old Presbyterian church, it’s still there, by the new high school. The Baptist church is a Food Lion now. Everything’s changing here. Building’s going up where cattle grazed. They can put up damn near 50 houses in one development in two weeks. This is Huntersville. It’s changing all the time.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Every house I lived in growing up was within hearing distance of Hickory Speedway. I went to a lot of Saturday night races there during my teen years where I watched people like Harry Gant and Dale Earnhardt get their starts in the Sportsman class. Not many poets will admit that they’re NASCAR fans. Even fewer NASCAR fans will admit that they’re poets. I say it’s time to come clean.

Southern Legitimacy Statement #3:

You never formed sentimental attachments to live stock on the farm—dogs, cats, even a mule was okay, but be careful about making a pet of chickens or cattle, anything of that order. That’s a lesson I learned the hard way. I was seven at the time, but a big boy for my age. My family and I had gathered around the supper table to indulge in the delights of one of Momma’s home cooked meals. I had just forked my second sausage patty (for it was not unusual to have breakfast for supper or supper for breakfast, you ate what was available) when it suddenly occurred to me to inquire as to the whereabouts of my pet pig, Sparky, a scrawny little thing that I’d adopted, helped feed, and watched grow into a massive 500 pound hog. Sparky had been missing for a couple of days, which wasn’t unusual as he had an annoying habit of breaking out of his pig pin. Daddy and I had trudge the hills and hallows of Western Rockingham County on more than one occasion, in mud, rain, and sometimes snow looking for that pesky hog. Most of the time we’d find him waiting for us when we returned home, snorting and grunting for something to eat. I’d have inquired about my missing hog sooner, but I’d been preoccupied, of late, with a tree-climbing, freckled-faced, red-headed girl what lived down the road. (Trying to keep up with that girl sure worked on a fellow’s appetite—but I digress.) So, amidst the clatter of forks, spoons, and plates, I put the question to Daddy, “Have you seen, Sparky?” says I, during a lull in the dinner chatter.

“Why yes, son,” says Daddy, looking over his glasses, “I saw him recently.”

“Is he nearby?” I asked, dipping another spoonful of tomato gravy onto my plate.

“Yep,” says Daddy, “as a matter of fact, there’s a sizable chunk of him on the end of your fork.”

Peeing on an electric fence couldn’t have jolted me more than the impact of Daddy’s words. The table fell silent, except for a slight snicker from my oldest buck-toothed sister, Essie, who enjoyed tormenting me whenever the opportunity arose. I stared at my fork, gravy dripping off the remains of my pet pig, wondering if I was looking at the end that snorted or the end I wanted to kick whenever he broke out of the pin. My heart sank… …right into the pit of my ravenous stomach.

“Dang it,” says I, taking another bite of Sparky, “I reckon he had it coming.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was 5 the first time I fired a shotgun, 6 the first time I saw a cow slaughtered, 10 when I reached up inside one to pull a calf out, 12 when I got my first real job priming tobacco, and 45 when I wrote my first poem about a mule. I don’t remember when I first ate my granny’s cheese pie or her biscuits made with lard. I don’t remember the first time I heard a whippoorwill at 2 AM or a distant train whistle when everything else was silent. I don’t remember when it first occurred to me that no one got out of my hometown without some time in the cotton mills. No matter where I go or what I do, I will always be FROM the South.

Southern Legitimacy Statement :

Jane Crown was raised in South-West Houston, Texas where trees never change with the seasons and the city never dares stay the same. She grew up with mild mannered Midwestern parents who traveled with her as a five year old to Savannah, Georgia, and she realized Texas was not the only Southern state. And in Savannah their leaves had colors other than dead-brown and eternal green, and their city had been there forever, practically unaltered!

She has lived happily in other Southern cities, such as; Atlanta, New Orleans, Austin and presently resides in San Antone. Hurricane Katrina kicked her out of her home (in Louisiana) of 10 years with her proud and suffering New Orleanian husband in 05′.Jane has missed romance, living below sea level, pirogues, albino gators, crepe myrtles, Creole cookin’ and violence ever since.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

“Where I hail from we use fox for yard dogs and owls for chickens, but we sing true.” My theft of Eudora Welty’s famous line would be more than reprehensible were it not for my upbringing in the wild piney woods of central Georgia where wildcats preyed on my kittens. Southerners love the land and its denizens. We may not farm it, we may not even understand it well; but it holds our hearts and the critters close to it hold our imaginations. I still hear the lonesome whip-o-will who sounded his inconsolable voice out of the deep woods that extended beyond my bedroom window. He was born in the loblolly pines that stretched until others towered above them, skinny, limbless pines able to bend in a strong summer storm. He sang true, as well.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’m what happens when, generations later, southern blood flows north. Southerners from England bearing my mother’s maiden name settled in the New South of the former Colonies: Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee. We once owned the land on which Natural Bridge stands. Somehow, more than a century later, we ended up in Pennsylvania. Our first trip to Virginia – I was eleven at the time – felt more than a little like stepping out of time. It was then that I first tried proper grits and decided that, if only the rest of the country were to adopt them as standard breakfast fare, all would be right with the world. More than anything, though, it was the mountain roads winding into warm, green oblivion that made me feel safe, finally: loved by land that knew me and simply wanted to say, “Welcome home.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’m northern Appalachian by birth, stuck in a city for the foreseeable future, and eager to reclaim the place I lived for the first 22 years of my life through my poems, stories and novels. I’ve been in the Mule before (Hi Val!) and know where the good stuff gets printed.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Some may think Texas is not necessarily a legitimate part of the South, but I once almost picked up a copperhead in an East Texas corncrib and I’ve eaten Black Diamond melons before the 4th of July in a hot sand field my granddaddy plowed with a team of mules.

I left Texas many times, but I’ve always returned and sit at home here right now. It’ll likely be my final resting place.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Hey, I have been waiting for an occasion to write this for someone who cares. First, a disclaimer (and a riposte to folks who look at me askance and say, “You ain’t from around here, are you” –it’s not a question). I was born in Wilkesboro, NC, and I grew up in Statesville, NC. My father was a tobacco salesman and a moonshine runner. I was a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner before they saw the light of day. The disclaimer is that I have lived in many places, – and I mean for more than one year and to list them would be tedious — but in the South I have lived in, other than NC, Brunswick, Georgia; Jacksonville, Florida; Marietta, Georgia; and for twelve years in Louisiana, in Baton Rouge and Monroe, Louisiana. The South for me does not stop at geo-political lines. I lived in the Bahamas for a year and a half, and in Ecuador for four years. Guayaquil is somewhat like New Orleans. I am not a NASCAR fan. I spent too many Saturdays when I was a tike sitting at the Gwen Staley race track and coming home sunburned and covered in dust and rubber and temporarily deaf. I start every day (well, most) with a bowl of stone-ground yellow grits mixed with cheddar cheese and jalapeños and chow-chow. Read my poems along with this, and tell me I am legit.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Daughter of an Onslow County, NC carpenter, I was born in 1950. Before my birth, my father played a fiddle for country square dances and on a local radio show. When I was a toddler, he made wooden blocks for me and wrote letters on them with crayons. He taught me to love comic books and what we called the funny papers. He encouraged me to draw, and he quoted poems that he learned as a child. My mother was a good speller, wrote poetry, and sang many songs.

As a young girl, I helped Daddy in the garden, planting seeds and picking vegetables, and Mama and I shelled butterbeans. On Saturday evenings the three of us watched the Porter Wagoner Show and The Arthur Smith Show on TV. Fun for me meant sitting on the wooden porch swing singing songs from Daddy’s country music magazines while he accompanied me on his guitar.

Mama made a fresh pan full of homemade biscuits every day for Daddy’s noontime dinner. Some of our favorite foods were fried meat biscuits, peas and snap beans with corn dumplings; country ham, collards, and chicken and pastry. For dessert we broke open biscuits and spooned on plenty of pear preserves, and we sopped molasses that came from a barrel in a store downtown. Fried cornbread and butter always accompanied fried fish and homemade coleslaw.

Christmas was special at our house, and Daddy celebrated by making homemade decorations. One of his traditions was to fire his shotgun on Christmas morning. For Christmas breakfast we would eat homemade pork sausage, eggs, rice, and biscuits. When it snowed, we had snow cream. There was an outhouse in the backyard, with corncobs and Sears and Roebuck catalogs.

Stories about my Southern ancestors have been handed down to me by word-of-mouth, including the one about how my great-grandmother Jane stood up to a couple of Yankees who plundered in her personal trunk. I am very proud of my heritage, and every time I hear the song “Dixie,” I cry.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Though I was born and raised in the bluegrass state, often I get asked if I’m “not from around here” since my speech sometimes lacks extended vowels and dropped g’s. In reply, I always say that if I could make my speech carry the sound of lightning bugs clicking against the pierced lid of a Mason jar, the nine-mile echo of a train whistle, or the evening-purr of cicadas in the summer, I would. But I can’t. So I write poetry instead.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

As if being born and raised in Alabama were not enough to convey Southern legitimacy, Nancy Posey was fed a steady diet of cornbread (crumbled in fresh, cold buttermilk), okra, fried catfish, and watermelon, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Tennessee Williams. She learned to sing harmony in church where hymn books always had shape notes. When she left for college in Nashville, Tennessee, kinfolks thought she had “gone North,” and when she moved in 1995 to North Carolina, they asked her “Does it snow a lot up there?” She has been castigated (obviously by a transplanted Yankee) in the letters to the editor of the Charlotte Observer for publicly defending the word “y’all” as a contraction, not a grammar error. She has never consciously worn white shoes before Easter or after Labor Day. She feels personally responsible for collecting and passing along all the old family stories. She has never put sugar in her grits or her cornbread.