Summer 2010
This is the third and final book review by the Poetry Editor that the Mule will publish in 2010. She chose this book because Tim Peeler is a poet who’s been in the Mule for years. He’s a poet all of the Mule editors read and admire. We hope our readers will enjoy the review and consider buying Peeler’s latest book, Checking Out.
Long quotations appear with permission.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I have woken up in cities and towns all over the world, but there is nothing like waking up in my own bed in my own small town in North Carolina. I love it here. I love the trees and flowers, the birds at my birdfeeder—even the scent of the air, which changes with the seasons. And I love it that much of my family lives so close, I can jump in my car and see their beautiful faces in fifteen minutes or less. And even though I might poke fun at myself and others for our “Southern” ways, it comes from a place of deep affection for this place and its kindhearted people, who will “do anything for you” whether you’re friends, family, or needy strangers. I’m so fortunate to have been born and raised in North Carolina. I can’t even imagine living anywhere else.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised in South Carolina. My idea of a great meal is fried okra, fresh collard greens, fried chicken with gravy and homemade biscuits. My great-grandfather fought in the Civil War. He owned a mule. That mule is now dead.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in the state that made Coca-Cola, but we always called it Co-cola. I used to dig deep in the iced filled barrel at the Acree Grocery store to find the coldest drink in the little bottles. Now I live in a small town where everyone I meet raises one finger off the wheel of his pickup in greeting. I’m not afraid to ask favors from my neighbors who bring homemade chicken soup, or mashed potatoes, or fresh made cornbread when I’m sick.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Am I a legitimate daughter of the South? I present the following for your careful consideration: I know what a poke is. I have attended tent revivals on hot, humid summer nights where I just about wore out my wrists waving a paper funeral-home-fan on a wooden stick to keep from fainting. I give directions with landmarks. I always have a block of cream cheese and a jar of hot pepper jelly on hand to spread on Ritz crackers for serving company, even those folks who don’t have the common courtesy to call first before dropping by. I keep my granny’s pitcher in my icebox filled with fresh tea, a bottle of Southern Comfort at the back of my pantry for medicinal purposes, and a bottle of Jack Daniels Black Label stashed away in my secret hiding place for special occasions and impromptu celebrations. I know the middle name of every child I grew up with. I have been lulled to sleep by the sound of rain on a tin roof in the winter, and the soothing hum of a big round floor fan at the end of my bed in the summer. I have eaten just about everything in Ernest M. Mickler’s “White Trash Cooking” cookbook, and I know folks who have eaten the things in it that I wouldn’t. I was blessed to grow up among folks who loved to tell stories. I’ll never get too old to love listening to them, one after another, especially when they’re told in a soft, slow voice that rounds off the edges of words as they are spoken. I respectfully submit this statement as sufficient evidence of what I already know: I am Southern through and through.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
When I was about five years old my parents (with the help of some of my uncles and grampa) built a new house alongside a dirt road, so I wouldn’t have to walk a long mile or two to get on a school bus—a distance I would otherwise had to walk from our farm. At that house they planted mimosa trees for shade, and some peonies and some climbing roses. The mimosas grew fast, and the peonies smelled sweet and attracted lots of pinching mean ants. Japanese beetles ate up most of the roses.
That first summer in the new yard, my daddy made us a trucker wheels wagon to ride down the hill. It had wooden wheels, wooden axles, wood seat. I think about all that had metal was wires from the steering wheel to the front axle. The steering wheel was made from a wooden barrel lid, rimmed with metal. My sister and I busied ourselves riding that wagon.
I tied strings on June-bug legs. I stared at doodle bug holes, dropped a few of those mean pinching ants in theme little sandy cone holes to see what would eat them—most times the ants got free, but a couple of times I saw something about as fast as lightning nab an ant and drag it down.
As far as birds goes, cardinals were the state bird and I couldn’t throw rocks at them, or take aim at them with a gravel shooter. Same for bluebirds, maybe robins. Other birds were fair game for lobbing rocks at because they thieved fruit from our cherry trees. Weird thing is I grew up into a bird-watching crazy ornithologist, but I prefer the hill names I grew up with near Ferrum, VA. I love the name joreen for towhee, and timber doodle for woodcock, and wood hen for Pileated Woodpecker, and yellow hammer for flicker. When I was five my father showed me the nest of a “pewee-bird” a kind that I later discovered had the book name of Common Yellowthroat. The nest was well-hidden in the nest of a wild rambling rose, which is now the name of the road (paved now) where that house is, and where my folks still live.
Some of my earliest memories involved ways all gone now, except for farm museum reenactments. I wasn’t about two and I remember seeing a mule going round and round some sort of thing that squeezed sorghum stalks. I remember the juice boiling in a real long tub. My family and relatives grew most of their own foods, would get together for hog killings in late November or early December.
Also I remember heading down a couple of times with some of my relatives, and my father to their still. Some of them made a wild peach brandy. And here’s an idling sort of digression: one time an elderly woman from Oklahoma originally joined us for some Christmas time celebrating, and she drank some of the eggnog my father made. There was this time warping moment, and she started talking to people long dead, long distant from our home, as if nobody else was present in our kitchen. That was around the same time my great aunt’s “chimley” caught fire, and roared and sent fire way up and over the roof. But it didn’t catch her old house on fire.
Edge-on and deep down and way back and all over I am a southerner living best I can.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Let’s start with Faulkner and maybe the over-heated, time-warped, brain-fevered Absalom and Achitophel, that will do for crazed Southern memories. But my favorites are As I Lay Dying and Light in August, the latter because it contains all of Faulkner’s themes and is, in my opinion, his most accessible novel – at least it seemed to be that way when I taught it. There’s mighty Thomas Wolfe, of course, and Walker Percy, and Eudora Welty and on and on. But how about John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, one of the funniest and most brilliant books of all time. However, for me, it’s all about Flannery O’Connor. English Departments used to teach the Big Three: Faulkner, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Well, O’Connor has to join that group to make it the Big Four. Need I say more than Hazel Motes and Wise Blood. Of course, I can, and it’s those incredible short stories, the greatest of which, again in my opinion, is “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” How you gonna beat that story? “You know it ain’t no such thing as fun in life.” For me, it doesn’t get any better than that.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I spent the first forty-five years of my life in Virginia. It was in Virginia schools that I learned that the first permanent English settlement on our country’s soil was in Jamestown in Virginia, thirteen years BEFORE the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock. Hence, I am conflicted about Thanksgiving: I feel the South cheated by celebrating the Pilgrim myth (rather than the first Thanksgiving which was on Virginia shores) but enjoy the many Southern dishes that find their way to our table.
In Virginia, I learned to cook George Washington’s cream of peanut soup, spoon bread and Jefferson’s apple pudding. I make a mean pecan pie and sweet potato fries. I love fried okra, gumbo and hot hushpuppies. I dream of Goo-Goo Clusters, pralines and pecan pancakes. And a glazed and baked Virginia ham.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My mom’s from North Carolina . My dad’s from Virginia . My birth mom is from Kentucky , but no need to go into that. I grew up in the suburbs of Jacksonville , Florida , eating Merita bread (which our Methodist Church diced into cubes for communion) with mom’s fried chicken and white rice. My uncles were all named Bubba, or Lee. I grew up listening to Roger Miller and Ray Charles without realizing that, for many people, there’s a big difference. I was the utility man for junior cotillion, being brought in only when someone’s cousin showed up unexpectedly. Now I live in Collingswood , New Jersey , where there’s more snow, but fewer reptiles (except for the lawyer types).
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised in a part of the country not thought of a typically southern. I was raised in Estill County, Kentucky, which lies beside the Kentucky River at the foothills of the magnificent Appalachian Mountains. I have always thought of Kentucky as a bastard child of the south. The south doesn’t claim Kentucky in proper society, but we who live there know we belong to the south just the same. Listen to our speech and after three words you know we are related closer to Tennessee and Georgia than we could ever be to our northern cousins. I grew up drinking sweet tea and eating cornbread. I say Mam and Sir. I know what kudzu is and I have tasted moonshine fresh from a still.
Now it don’t matter much what you think, because I know I am Southern.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Years ago I lived in Aiken, GA and worked at the Savanna River Project for DuPont. I came to enjoy the South. This poem is a fond memory of that time.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I enjoy eating pecan pie. Matter of fact, I have got quite a few poems published about the two trees I have in my yard. The trees make about two bushels a year. Its kind of frustrating picking up all the sticks so I can mow in summer. But pecans aren’t so cheap, so its worth having the papershell trees.