Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My mamma was old school and would slap me silly when I was a kid if I did something stupid, like fart at the dinner table. While she’d only strike once, her hand was so unavoidably fast that it was just a blur. I rarely did the same stupid thing twice, which has paid off in adulthood.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
I am a Yankee.

Because of my deep concern that you may find my roots both despicable and unworthy of consideration in Southern Literary society, I have copied on this e-mail the names of two respectable Southerners who, I believe, will vouch for my sincere love of the South and hopefully assuage your concerns that publishing something of mine would in some way attenuate or otherwise weaken the forward progress of Southern culture for which we have fought on both sides of the Mason-Dixon for the better part of one hundred fifty years.

There is, in the South’s climate, a heat that enlivens the intellect, causes brain to sweat with the heart, making them one, to produce writing that stirs the reader somewhere deep. Anyone who has had so much as a taste of that heat never forgets it.

The reason I know I’m country through and through is that even in Atlanta Georgia, only one hundred miles away, friends laugh at my dialect. You know something though, I don’t have any desire to change it. I am too proud of my southerness.

I grew up hating the first bars of Dixie because more than once I was yanked by my ear to a standing position by great aunts at football games, the same UDC aunts who sometimes drove Carrie, the maid who raised me, home, her house in a different Atlanta, Buttermilk Bottoms,where the streets were alive with people and smells, so removed from our quiet house where Daddy’s fist came down on the dining room table whenever the name, Martin Luther King, came up. But . . . wasn’t he like Carrie? It was all so confusing. Unlike my first election where the choice for Governor was Jimmy Carter vs Lester Maddox, and when the people of my state chose the man who handed out ax-handles to use on black people, I knew I had to leave the South, college; and so in San Francisco, I became a spiritual hippie, but after three years my teacher decided our new community would be located in Tennessee, where, when we arrived, no one could understand a word of the locals’ hard twang, which meant I was pushed forward as a “Georgia boy” ambassador, urged to “talk and act Southern so they’ll accept us,” which I did . . . because it had never left me.

Essay on Politics by CIA Renditioner Robert Seldon Lady. The byline is “William Lady.”