The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature highlights images found within the Library of Congress. This month our imagination is captured by the Carnegie Survey of Southern Architecture. Photographing in the 1930s, Frances Benjamin Johnston’s glass slides capture compelling portraits of over 1,700 buildings. Johnston primarily traveled through urban and rural regions of VA, MD, [...]
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My great grandmother helped rebuild Vicksburg from Grant’s siege as a toddler, helping to carry bricks up and down the hillsides of Vicksburg.
Once I killed a water moccasin on the Skilligalee creek with an air rifle while pretending to be Davy Crockett. I call Mississippi, Georgia, and Virginia my home. Once i ate squirrel at the deer camp because someone told me it was Grizzly.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was conceived on a houseboat on the Ashley River in Charleston, South Carolina and was born in Monroe, North Carolina first year of the Baby Boomers.
I got my undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. My kin, Irish immigrants to North and South Carolina, fought for the Confederacy. I drive miles out of my way to eat Lexington Barbeque, and belong to a band of pirates and sailors, Brothers of the Coast, located in Savannah, Georgia. I live in the town of Black Mountain in western North Carolina.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
A sliver of my soul is southern (and apparently alliterative). I lived in Florida for nine months and once met “Smokey and the Bandit” powerhouse Burt Reynolds there. My favorite T-shirt is from Fame Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. (The shirt has a water tower on the back and lists people who recorded at the studio. Wilson Pickett is listed without the second “T” in his last name.) My favorite album is Etta James’ “Tell Mama,” recorded at Fame. On many days, my wife reminds me that I own other good albums.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I now live in Ohio, which is about a far as you can get north in Ohio without falling into the lake and swimming to Canada, but when I was a girl, my mom and grandmother drove us to Florida every year in February and didn’t bring us back until April. I knew the good food started when the soil seen from the car window looked red. // I know, I know, Snow Birds aren’t REAL southerners, but consider the amount of grits, greens, hushpuppies, sausage and gravy, and sweet potato pie I ate every year driving through Georgia, and in northern Florida, too. And how many catfish died to fatten my skinny body! Old-fashioned bony catfish, too. Back then, my mother used to say at that restaurant — Catfish Smitty’s? — they just took the bones back to the kitchen, slapped batter on them, and fried them up for the next customer. But my sister and granny and I thought they were delish. // Did I mention Key Lime Pie? And yes, I am aware that it is NOT green.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised in southern Illinois but got an M.A. at the University of Arkansas decades ago. I currently reside on a mountain outside Hot Springs, but I also lived in Fayetteville, North Little Rock, and Newton County (the latter is quite rural except for Jasper, its urban hub, but I was situated three miles north of Swain). On top of that, I found Arkansawyers in my lineage. One aunt hailed from Siloam Springs, and her grandmother was born between Mena and Mount Ida, near Waters (now called Pine Ridge, after the town in the “Lum and Abner” radio show and movies; in fact, one of the regulars at their Jot ‘Em Down Store had the same last name as my great grandmother’s, which I’m convinced is not coincidental). My great grandmother married my great grandfather in Lonoke; he sold supplies at DeValls Bluff to cotton plantations. It also turns out there are Confederate soldiers in my family tree (who evidently became Union soldiers after capture and drew a federal war pension). Reading family letters from the 1800s, I found some cousins with an address in New Bern, North Carolina. If all that’s not enough, I now employ the phrases “might could”, “might should”, and “might ought” at least once a year, without even trying.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born in North Carolina, I’ve lived here the majority of my life except for years when I was off gallivanting in other parts of the world, getting above my raising. If mixed farming in red Piedmont clay can’t make a girl hanker after far-away places, little will. After my college escape from the farm, I rid myself of my home accent, but in my dotage have embraced my southern roots and, as memory fails, I call everyone honey and darling and bless their hearts. I still honk hello to dairy cows, call hound dogs sugar, and make my own music. I know about bee keeping, frog gigging, moonshine making, and cures for chigger bites. I can milk a cow and saddle a horse or a tractor; I pick up snakes and carry them away from our house; and although I’ve studiously avoided it since my youth, I can prime tobacco and make hay when the sun shines, then go to the kitchen and make lunch for the men folks. I still indulge in southern cookery, but except on special occasions, the men folks can make their own damned lunch and, if they’re willing—God love their precious hearts—mine.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born and bred in Virginia, now a Texas Resident, Richard Peake is a partially unreconstructed Confederate, who learned about Sherman Sentinels from his mother and uncle speeding through Georgia on the way to Mississippi. Three of his maternal great uncles served in the Army of Northern Virginia. One survived. His maternal grandfather voted at the Constitutional Convention that brought Mississippi back into the union. Educated at UVA and the University of Georgia, he grows and eats collard greens, although he’s never been able to eat chitterlings. He has been published in such bona fide Southern journals as Impetus, The Georgia Review, Jimson Weed, The Steel Toe Review, Boundless 2010 and 2011, and The Book of the Year 2010 and 2011 of the Poetry Society of Texas.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Consider me Southern: I have lived in and around Raleigh since the early ‘80s.
I married Southern. I (have learned to) eat Southern. I love the beach and the Blue Ridge. My (Midwestern) family thinks I talk Southern. Visiting a high school (as an exchange teacher) in England, I was asked to read the beginning of To Kill A Mockingbird, which I did in my BEST Suthrn. I am a descendant of Zachary Taylor, which makes me related by marriage to Jeff Davis. Anythin’ else?
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My dad’s parents came from the South (of Italy). My mother’s family was mostly Seneca, which did affiliate with the Southern Tuscora when the Iroquois Confederacy expanded from five to six nations. I have only been south of the Mason-Dixon line a half-dozen or so times, but every time I’ve visited I have enjoyed myself quite a bit.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born in West Virginia – raised in Pocahontas, VA, a small coal mining town in Southwest Virginia. As with most kids in the holler, we were raised by just about every family around those parts. They all had a hand in it at one time or another. My Dad was a coal miner as was his Dad and brother and uncles, etc. Most kids thereabouts had Daddy’s who mined coal. Our fortunes would rise and fall with the strikes and the union’s eventual agreements to go ahead and work awhile – at least until the next contract came up for voting. In the meantime, we went to school, to town for groceries, played up and down the hollers and hills – busy with growing up and acting out and all the rest that childhood demands. We were surrounded by silent stories that whispered to us of Indian raids and family feuds and ghosts returning for their loved ones. We walked the roads looking for bottles to sell at the local store returning home with pockets of candy and bottles of pop. We had no appreciation of our histories – our little valley’s history – we were simple country holler kids who were more concerned with getting out of school and finding a really neat place to play. We clashed up against our Southern roots only when faced by a rebel flag in a window or on a shirt – we believed the South would rise again even though we had no idea it ever fell. We had no idea we were a part of something we would later yearn for and be proud of – and be forced to feel ashamed of until reconsidering it all and deciding that hell, I am Southern and it’s solely by the grace of God – Amen.
Southern Legitimacy Statement #2:
You’re not southern ’til you’ve been switched in the face by a cow’s tail,
Or stepped on a bee, barefooted…
How about eating warm tomatoes plucked off the vines in the tomato patch;
Or have Daddy bust a ripe watermelon out in the field, cause everyone’s thirsty.
Ah, did you ever bath naked under the eaves of the house during a summer shower,
Or gather warm eggs from underneath the hen, sometimes getting pecked!
Then watch a baby chick peek out of its shell – to be free. I did, I was, I am.