Southern Legitimacy Statement
Edgar Rider learned how to be an angry customer service representative after coming back to the same job five times. He learned about life and death and realized he wanted no part of management. This is a story about being addicted to fast food and hoping your next job could be better. Edgar Rider has been published in Dead Mule and Avatar Review. Edgar wishes he grew up in Georgia and was a part of the now defunct WCW. He hopes the southern style of TNA will become competitive one day.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Being a person who has lived their entire life in the South, and who has also been fortunate enough to have traveled extensively outside of our fair country; I am here to say: I like pie.

Now if you are not from the South, let me explain the deep and abiding understanding exchanged in the ether between me and my kindred Southerners concerning my simple three word statement.

Pie is not just delicious and nutritious with the soul-satisfying properties. Pie is ambrosia to the gods, an institution of all things Southern.

Let’s take the pie shell, or crust for the un-pie-initiated; the shell is like all Southern people. We all have humble and simple beginnings. Through careful measurement, work and a nice splash of cold reality we are formed into a raw container for what life has to offer.

Almost all of us are pricked by our upbringing and those gentle wounds allow us to weather the storms, not breaking up under the heat.

Some of us are thrown into the fires of life young and unfilled leaving us tougher and often flaky. We are the ones who can handle the harder and chunkier things life throws at us, showing our best grace and spirit.

Others are coddled along and filled to the rim with all that life has to offer. Often it takes time for those to mature. Yet, in the end life is still as sweet.

So in saying, “I like pie,” I am saying I love being Southern and all of the things that make me and mine part of the great liturgy of the South.

Oh, and I like cake too! (That’s Southern for Yankees.)

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Being a true Southerner is the product of a shared mindset, a particular, some would say peculiar, way of viewing the world. Blame it on our Camelot ideas of the old south, or blame it on our lingering mortification at having been an occupied region. Or blame it on a somnolent climate before air-conditioning. Or just blame it on your great-grandmother’s second cousin Randolph, twice removed on your mama’s side. And if that doesn’t make sense, Sugar, have another glass of iced tea and let’s talk some more.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My granny and pa didn’t have an indoor toilet until I was over twelve years old. I can still feel how my skin chilled in the late night air when I hit that turn down by the cow pasture where the land bottomed out on my way to the outhouse…finding my way by flashlight or oil lamp, feet moving over dewy, slippery grass at a pace that outran the imaginary haints on my heels. And I made quick work of the job at hand too…ever wonder exactly what lives down in that cavernous hole that your bare rear end’s hovering over?

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My mother’s people hail from South Carolina, my grandparents tenant farmers during the depression. My grandmother, Pearl, was the matriarch of our family, her bowed back a sign of years bent over a shovel or a tray of biscuits in devotion to her kin. She wore scratchy, faded cotton pants and fed her family from a chest freezer out in the back shed. The rusted-metal freezer was always stacked high with parboiled vegetables, waiting to be brought to life again and then cooked to death with fatback and heavy doses of sugar. Looking into that chest was like gazing on the Holy Grail.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in the southern edge of the Blue Ridge in central Alabama, the product of a father from the cotton mill village and a mother who lived on the “respectable” side of the railroad tracks. A forester by trade, I roam the back roads of Alabama meeting people and looking for stories. Besides reading and writing, my interests include old country music, motorcycles, pork barbecue, and fine Boxer bulldogs.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

There are times when I wonder how my brother and I survived childhood on an Arkansas farm. Our land was on a rise above a slough and creek. The area was called Snake Holler. When spring rains came the snakes headed to the only high ground around, our yard. We didn’t kill them. We just took a stick and moved them out of our way. For fun we rode our two sows Sally and Cook. Chores meant milking cows, gathering eggs, slopping the hogs, and pulling ticks off the dogs. It never occurred to us to wear shoes, none of our other friends did, until we went to school. I loved hog killing time after first frost. There was always fresh crackling for the kids and a fine pork roast on Sunday. We had chickens, turkeys, bees, and a wonderful garden. Food was always plentiful although we worked hard to be able to enjoy it. Being a Southerner is a treasure trove of memories about learning and events fading from time. To this day I remember the names of all our cows, dogs and hogs. Although we never named the snakes I can still see that big black six footer that visited for several years. I wouldn’t have wanted to survive childhood any other way.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My family comes from Georgia, and while they have mostly died off or moved further south, I still call Atlanta home. My great granddaddy wore grey and fought in the War. My daddy was a dirt farmer and Mama a school teacher. My growing up years happened in that strip along the south Georgia-north Florida state line on a hard scrabble tobacco farm. We also raised hogs, corn and for a time, cotton. Those days, tomatoes, fresh from the garden, and corn on the cob signaled the beginning of summer. Grits, fried catfish and hushpuppies got served up at least weekly sometime more often, depending on who got loose to fish. Bird shooting, coon hunting and hounds marked the fall, barefeet, tobacco picking and watermelon characterized the summer while the winter was given over to busting up pine stumps and hauling wood for the fireplace. I have lived in California and Texas and, for the last 30 years, Arkansas. Sweet tea is still my house wine.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

The Mason-Dixon Line means nothing. I was at a party in Fairhope Alabama. There was a woman there drinking Bourbon. I told her I’d lived in the South before. She said, “Oh, really? Where?” I told her, “Charlottesville, Virginia.” She said, “Oh, that’s not really the South.” So I told her my Australian Shepherd was born in Red Level, Alabama. I told her, I’d driven out to the farm to pick him up. There were old propane tanks rusting in the yard, and a John Deere tractor that wasn’t even green anymore. Everything, even the dirt, was the color of rust. “That counts as the South,” she said.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

When you prime tobacco the old way, moving down a row, hunched over at the waist, snapping the bottom three leaves off the stalk and stuffing them under your arm, you’ll get thick black wads of tobacco gum from your armpit to your waist. The bottom leaves, the ones you’re picking, yellowing a bit at the tip and along the veined edges, are the last to dry. If you’re lucky you get the row closest to the wide sled row so that, when you’re loaded with all the tobacco you can carry, it’s only a short shuffle to drop the leaves in the sled. If you’re unlucky, or are too young or too old or too slow, whoever is in charge of pulling the sled forward might leave you behind and you’ll have to walk twice as far to unload. But it’ll be okay. When they reach the end of their rows the rest of the primers won’t mind taking a minute to catch their breath. Maybe they’ll even have a short Coke and a package of nabs while they wait.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in West Georgia on the Chattahoochee. Now I live in Florida with the hawks and tree frogs.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Lynda Montgomery Parsons was born and raised in Alabama. Granted, we are talking Huntsville, the Rocket City, which as many know ‘isn’t really Alabama’ on account of all the transplanted engineers and scientists. But along with the engineers, whom Senator Sparkman convinced needed the red clay to hold down the rockets for testing, in Huntsville, there is still plenty of cotton, churches, barbeque, tornados and twang-talking folks to make an upbringing there legitimately Southern. Her parents came from border places, meaning northern Virginia and south Florida – but when they lived there (and the generations of kin before) those places really were southern and hardly anyone lived there. All Lynda’s kin have moved away– to Tallahassee and Roanoke. Her Yankee children brag about her good biscuits and grits. She’s got relations called Little Bit, JB, Buster, Pixie, Perky, Bob-Williard, and Bob (who’s real name is Clyde). There’d be a different version of the family tree if she were talking to her friends Mary Margaret, Mary Shea, and Mary Jean – all former debutantes. But if being able to rattle off the right version of the family tree isn’t a trait of Southern legitimacy, well then, Lynda wonders, what is? Right. Somewhere in the attic is a Confederate two-dollar bill. Ouch.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My granny never mixed words. If you deserved it, she would call you a Jezebel or a hussy. Just never to your face. She even taught her bird to say hellfire and damnation and let him do the talking when she couldn’t.
Her room was full of prewrapped gifts organized by sex and age. She might not have been happy that her grandchild had brought a perfect stranger to Christmas, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to be accused of being non-hospitable by not having a gift ready. I used to think it was better to be upfront with people. If you thought they were a Jezebel, tell them. Don’t say it behind their backs and then say, “Have you had supper yet? If not, I can whip up something real quick.” Now, I miss people smiling at me, no matter what they really thought, and no matter how they felt I might be wronging them or could be wronging them in the future. They might have been cursing my name a few minutes before, but when I arrived at their house they would pull out a chair and offer to make me a glass of milk and cornbread.

Oh, and not only do I know where the Mason-Dixon line is, but my Papaw used to drive for them, The Mason and Dixon Lines, Inc. that is. This story is for him.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

New people have been moving into Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley of late–some good, some bad. As a native Virginian, looking at the Singhs, I’d say, “’bout right.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Jo Neace Krause was born in Shoulderblade, Kentucky, Breathitt Co.and everyone tells her, you’re ok—that is considering where you come from. Her southerness shows in her blood which stays around 1.7% when stopped on the road.

Southern Legitimacy Statement (*we like this one!)
I am “Southern, not redneck, not peckerwood, not good old boy…Southern. I believe in America, where it came from, where it has been and where it is going.
I thank God I was born breathing Southern air and with His blessing my last breath will be Southern.