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Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up in a small-town in rural Virginia, where folks slopped hogs and referred to dragonflies as “snake doctors.” I’m not even going to admit to how many pieces of red velvet cake I have eaten in my life.

Editor’s Note:

Jayne Pupek, whose poems have been published in the Mule several times, loved life. The Dead Mule proudly publishes this chapbook in celebration of Jayne’s life.

Jayne Pupek March 8, 1962 – August 30, 2010

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Sallet

for Gin

Nature’s first green is bittercress,
sheep sorrel, plain and curly dock.
Grab your knife—let’s go out and cut a mess.

Wilt it with some sizzling bacon grease
or in a stir-fry pan in chicken stock—
nature’s first green is bittercress.

Wilt with red-eye gravy to caress
your tongue, simmer with an old-ham hock—
Grab your knife—let’s go out and cut a mess.

Lamb’s quarters, plaintain, let me stress—
to those who may be inclined to mock—
nature’s first green is bittercress.

For beverage we might try some sassafras
to thin the blood and get our vigor back.
Grab your knife—let’s go out and cut a mess.

In spring, the landscape’s bleak but there’s largesse—
remember dandelion, yellow rocket—
nature’s first green is bittercress,
grab your knife—let’s go out and cut a mess.

Southern Legitimacy Statement 5:

I’ve played baseball in a pasture,
used sun baked cow pie for all three bases
and home plate.
I’ve read several translations of the Bible,
from Genesis to the Book of Revelation,
but the authorized King Jimmy
is on my nightstand.
I drink muscadine wine
and moonshine
out of mason jars.
I have no preference
when it comes to
eastern or western
Carolina pork barbecue;
it’s all good to me.
I believe God gave us the banjo,
a loving woman’s voice,
and the sound of rain
on lush green leaves
to soothe
and comfort a man.
I’ve dined on what I shot,
spitting number 7 lead pellets
out of a fried rabbit
or squirrel leg without
slowing down to drizzle gravy
on the aforementioned
delicacy.
I like hog jowls on a buttered biscuit
with a slice of tomato and mayonnaise.
In the south we call lightning bugs,
“lightning bugs”, not fireflies.
And every time I hear a whippoorwill
I think of Hank Williams.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I learned the art of flirting before I could spell the word; I have Magnolias planted next to my Mimosas; I eat figs and pecans right off the trees in my backyard; words like Gumbo and Mardi Gras are part of my everyday vocabulary. I am indeed a Southern girl.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Family legend has it that my father’s father was shot at by the FBI when he was a child while he and his own father, a bootlegger, were being chased while making a delivery. Pawpaw used to say if it weren’t for the whiskey in the back seat that took his bullets, none of us would have been born. When we were little, he liked to say of people he didn’t like that that they were so ugly they looked like they’d fallen out of the ugly tree and hit every branch but one on the way down, so they’d climbed up again and to it right a second time. It was nothing to watch him and my uncles and my daddy string a deer up by its hind legs under the big oak tree and clean it, using a hose to spray its guts down the driveway and into the street gutter. My mother’s folks, on the other hand, weren’t hunters so much as the kind of people likely to fight at a funeral over whose flower arrangements were closest to the casket. I didn’t see my Aunt Rosemary for years after Granny Canon died because my own wretched grandmother banned her from the family for not sharing the ham a church had left on her doorstep.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My husband and I almost moved to Greensboro from Portland, Maine, in 1981. Mother of a one-year-old, underemployed and weary of the long winters, I was considering an MFA at UNC-G. I wrote to the Greensboro Chamber of Commerce and they sent me beautiful glossy brochures. Then a friend told us Greensboro was KKK headquarters and there had been a massacre of leftist protestors by the Klan. So Durham became our destination. There I met a most interesting enclave of people—transplants like me and natives—people who mashed buttons and carried people in their cars and made “tar” and “fire” rhyme. I love mimosa blossoms, with their pink-tinged Einstein (or is it Bernstein?) hair, tipped with gold dust and sweetly scented. We joined a babysitting co-op and danced to Rebecca and the Hi-Tones. I joined a poetry co-op, where I met Paul Jones, Richard Kinney, Robert Long, and some wild and crazy poets who changed their names a lot. I made an okra quiche for a potluck, which everyone avoided (I found out the only way to eat okra is fried—as any Southerner would have known from childhood!). I worked for a rabbi, where I learned some great Yiddish words (despite my name, I’m not Jewish), then went to work at Duke. I love mockingbirds, which I’d never heard before, how they perch high up on wires and roofs and sing and sing. I learned that you should never have a birthday party for your husband during March madness (unless the purpose of the party is to watch the games). When we moved to Mebane in 1989, I learned that some of the people who sat beside me on the bleachers as we cheered for our sons’ baseball team also liked Jesse Helms and joined him in demonizing secular humanists (remember that phrase?)—a group to which I unofficially belonged because I supported a teacher who loaned a Maya Angelou poetry book to a student (her parents went ballistic). We helped each other during Hurricane Fran. It took 15 years of my almost daily greeting before an elderly neighbor would wave or say hi. A neighbor, age 11, told me over Cokes, cicadas singing overhead, that she had been raped by her father. Her brother stole things and hid them in the walls of their house. I love cicadas, their hypnotic, pulsing song. Another neighbor boy, my son’s age (8 at the time), lived in a junkyard. When we first met, he climbed into our back seat and said straight out that his father was a murderer. He liked to collect railroad spikes, and he got several that day on our walk. We had ice cream, the best he’d ever had, he said. When we dropped him off, his mother, who had long red hair and a flimsy dress, hugged him while a litter of dogs jumped and barked. Another neighbor and I planted a joint garden on our property line so our yards flowed together. I love fennel and the swallowtails it attracts. As I write, I hear the rhythm of the mattress factory, a lift, hiss, release, the steady hum beneath. I feel the steamy heat of summer. I love drinking iced tea on my porch swing and watching the toddlers all in a line on their way to the library, the way their spirits lift their lithe bodies past my house, every Wednesday.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina and came of age in the 60′s there. Raleigh was a sleepy town back then even though it was the capital city. Back then everywhere go folks knew you or someone you know. I was known as Miss Nan’s or Gum’s boy. I was their only child. Some of my childhood memories are all of us sitting around watching the country music TV shows on Saturday night and eating good NC BBQ. Miss Nan grew up dirt poor on a tobacco farm in Bunn, NC, during the Depression years. Miss Nan joked she didn’t realize her family was poor until TV came along. My daddy, everybody called him Gum, was from South Hill, Virginia. My daddy was 24 years older than my mama so it was an interesting marriage that lasted until Gum died in 1994. Family lore goes Gum drifted around the South hopping trains and working odd jobs during the Depression years. He ended up in Raleigh and found a job driving a milk truck. World War II came along and Gum was drafted while in his 30s and served in the Army. After the war, Gum settled down and married Miss Nan in 1947 and later yours truly came along. Then there were forty odd years of family, little money, and a lot of love. Miss Nan died in 2004.

God, I sure miss’em.

Southern Legitimacy Statement 2:

Having a mother from New Orleans has broadened my understanding of America in ways minor and major. Tree frogs, Spanish moss, cypress knees, and kumquats are part of my childhood landscape. And I appreciate “y’all,” as far superior to “you guys” when referring to a group.

Southern Legitimacy Statement 2:

My aunt didn’t go to church much—couldn’t tolerate the church ladies—sbut was a Christian nonetheless, she said, and nobody was going to tell her any different. Instead of cussing she’d say “I Swannee” and “Lordy, Lordy.” Once I pointed out to her that “Lordy, Lordy” was pretty close to using the Lord’s name in vain. She told me to stop reading so much. It was going to finish-off what little common sense God gave me. There was a difference between calling on the Lord and insulting him. Even an idiot knew that. We argued a lot. She called her cat a hussy every time it got pregnant but refused to have it “tampered” with. When I asked why she said, “How would you feel if someone did that to you?”

She made wicked good persimmon pudding and worked thirty-four-and-a-half years in a textile mill. They let her go before her last year was up so she wouldn’t qualify for her tiny pension. But her little house was paid for and her husband was dead so life was peaceful while she waited for me to leave her alone and for God to come get her. I never gave her what she wanted, I’m glad to say, but the Lord came pretty much when she thought he would.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I’ve lived in Starkville, Mississippi for eleven years. I grew up in mid-Michigan, where I walked on frozen lakes every winter. Now, I wear long johns under my jeans and sweater, under my jacket, inside the house, when I visit for Christmas.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Ma-Ma would take Bo and I digging for sasafras roots in the woods next door. She would boil the roots and then we would drink the hot “tea” ’cause Aint Essie said it would keep ya reglar. “She stopped a horse from bleedin’, ya know? Tom Waters brought his horse over, pourin’ blood outa his neck. Aint Essie went ’round the back of the house and when she come back, that horse ‘ad stopped bleedin’.” We dug potatoes, too. She had on her lipstick and floral print dress. As soon as we came out of the garden, she put her heels back on – black patent leather, put the potatoes on to boil. “We havin’ old timey pataters and lemon marengue pie.” She watched wrestling while she ironed the sheets. Then she took me over to Aint Correll’s. We were going to get my wart taken off. I was five. We drove round a dirt driveway up to a little house and an old man came out. Flowers everywhere and trees and a bench swing hanging on a rusty old swing set. They talked a minute and then he gently asked me to go sit with him on the swing. He held a leaf in his hand, twirling it round between his finger and thumb. “Suzan, this hyere’s a peach leaf. Come off ‘at peach tree righttare.” Silence. “D’you b’lieve I can take off that wort from your hand, thare?” “Yessir.” “Well, hold out chur hand and lemme just rub this leaf hyere on yer wort, like this. See. Peach leaves ‘er kinda fuzzy.” “Now, when you wake up tomorra, yur wort’s gonna be gone. D’you b’lieve me, Suzan?” “Yessir.” Sure ‘nuf, that wort was gone the next day.

I think my southern legitimacy is evident!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was raised in a small town in southern Virginia…when I moved away for college in 1997, the population was 670. No stoplights, no real grocery stores. It really was the sort of place where store proprietors sat on their porches and drank most of the day. My step-father owned his own logging business, and I was forever out on his sites, exploring the ruined countryside and his equipment. I grew up in a family that was VERY proud of southern heritage. Most of my childhood was laden with Merle Haggard, David Alan Coe, hunting, and a splash of racism.

As I grew older, I began to appreciate the Friday or Saturday night “pickin’ and grinnin’s”…the out of tune guitars and poor, poor mandolins with tree frog and crickets in the background. (Of course, I’d never admit it). Ultimately, I felt a small victory when I moved away to college. Ironically enough, I ended up living only an hour away from my home town, and those memories that I tried so hard to get away from keep popping up in my fiction and poetry.

As a group, the writers of the Blue Ridge area not only have a keen sense of place but also a great appreciation for character and story. Nature molds the character in the small towns and remote villages in which mountain people live.