Southern Legitimacy Statement

When I went off to college, the guy at the registration desk asked me if I was a Texas resident. I told him I was and he asked how long I’d lived there. “All my life,” I said.

He nudged the woman sitting next to him at the big folding table they had set up there in the gym and said, “How long have your parents been here?”

“All their lives,” I said.

He gave his woman friend a sidelong glance and asked about my grandparents. I told him they’d lived in Texas all their lives, too.

He gave me the in-state tuition rate, so I guess I’m Southern, if Texas counts as a Southern state.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Grits, Sweet Tea, Magnolias? Not so much. We had Captain Crunch, Diet Coke, and kilometric flora. I was born on Saint Simons Island, Georgia, which is the home to the world’s largest outdoor cocktail party, and educated at the University of
Georgia. Now I live in San Francisco, where being a Georgian is pretty much exotic.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I live in the South. I coach tennis and go to school in the South. I drink in the South. But not sweet tea, because I’ve never liked tea of any kind, though in the last four or five years my wife has gotten me to drink Asian tea when we have sushi. I used to hate sushi. Now I eat with chopsticks and drink Asian tea that might be more correctly called Oriental tea, but does anyone really know for sure? I eat in the South, way too fucking much. But not grits. They never made me smile. Though by the ever-increasing size of my ass, you wouldn’t think that taste, texture, or FDA guidelines were any kind of pre-requisite. Just whether or not it fits on a shovel. I drove through the south once. Camped with a dirty Mexican in the Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky. We never got out of the car because we were so afraid to hear the ding-a-ling-ding of dueling banjos drifting through the trees. It was June. We hadn’t showered for a couple of days. We were drunk and sweating. I think we had to burn the car when the trip was over.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I’m John Calvin Hughes, son of a son of a preacher chased out of Mississippi for plucking the flock. I’m a southern boy who moved south and found himself surrounded by Yankees. I’m in Florida. There’s not a hill in sight and the restaurants that specialize in “Real Southern Cooking” put sugar in the cornbread. My own son told me the cat pushing on his chest was “making bagels”!

Southern Legitimacy Statement
My Daddy’s people came out of Arkansas in nineteen hundred and thirty-two ’cause their land blew away and all the people left. And the Sheriff wasn’t even after them! In fact, my Grandpa Milo was the Sheriff, kept the lock up and he owned sixty acres and a couple of mules too, share-cropped ‘em. Never farmed himself; he was ‘quality.’ Grandma Pearl and her sister, Mae, kept the general store, and since she’d gone clear though 8th grade, she also taught the one-room school. It was Grandma Pearl who saw the writing on the Red Sea and said, “Enough is enough,” and dragged her husband and three boys off to California in their 1924Ford touring car. […more]

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Would anyone in his right mind claim to be Southern who is not? I was born thar, my family still lives thar, I go back for visits regularly to keep my accent in shape. Little Rock Central High School class of ‘58 (that’s 1958). Heard about the integration crisis, and Faubus, and Eisenhower calling out the 101st Airborne to help us integrate? If that’s not Southern, what is ?

Our final story from Life on Black Mountain by Ann Hite. Read the entire collection by visiting the archives. Downloadable pdf realbook free version of Life on Black Mountain available by … hmmmm … July 4th (if not sooner).

by Ann Hite
Mama had these little crystal bowls that sat by each dinner plate. Each bowl held a few drops of water so we could dip our fingers in the bowl before we ate our meal. Somewhere Mama got the idea that it was a sign of class like we had money or something. One […]

by Ann Hite
Men are the stupidest animals on this earth. Mollie decided this long before she celebrated fifty years of marriage, but that year, that golden year, really put her to thinking on a lot of things. Like, how men thought they knew everything and they never was wrong. Or, how they tried to make […]

by Ann Hite
Carly K came to Black Mountain in the summer of 1972. Nelson should have given more thought to a woman alone in a hick mountain community, but to tell the truth he was purely dazzled by her the first time he laid eyes on that smile. She was visiting Carson Waterfall, his favorite […]

by Ann Hite
The world was filled with blood: roiling, boiling, unending sticky redness. Or, so thought Miss Arlene Bradshaw, who spent most Saturday nights watching scary movies. This contributed to her over active imagination and her firm belief that something evil was in Holly Iowa’s house next door. Arlene, Holly’s dearest, oldest friend was not […]

by Ann Hite
My mama always took the time to tell me a story each night before I fell asleep. She was good like that. My favorite story was one she called, Ghost on Black Mountain. For the longest time I believed it was a story about our family, but when I told Mama my […]

It was late December 1965 when Susan Holcomb found Black Mountain, North Carolina. She must have lost her mind thinking she could buy an abandoned cabin in the middle of nowhere, but solitude was impetrative at this place in her life. Susan was there under the guise of writing a book, based on the true […]

Life on Black Mountain
a short story collection by Ann Hite

Life on Black Mountain
A short story collection by Ann Hite

Life on Black Mountain
A short story collection by Ann Hite

Life on Black Mountain
A short story collection by Ann Hite

Life on Black Mountain
A short story collection by Ann Hite

Life on Black Mountain
A short story collection by Ann Hite

Life on Black Mountain
A short story collection by Ann Hite

Life on Black Mountain
A short story collection by Ann Hite

Life on Black Mountain
A short story collection by Ann Hite

Life on Black Mountain
A short story collection by Ann Hite

“The Last Stopping Off Place is the final story in Nellie’s life and is told from quirky Bea Weehunt’s—the readers will remember her from Mr. Snake Gets Religion—point of view. When I wrote this story I thought it was over. I thought, okay that’s the end of Black Mountain. Now I move on somehow.”
–Ann Hite

An original short story collection “Life on Black Mountain” to be featured here in May! Read a bit about the author, Ann Hite.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

By birth I am a Yankee, but I was adopted and raised
in southeastern Arkansas. For that reason, I am
southern. I am southern like snake stories, like
catfish caught on blood bait. I am southern as in a
landscape always softened by humidity. I am southern
like the piano at my home church. Its middle b-flat
key wears a worn, finger-shaped divot (check your
Broadman Hymnal). I am as southern as “tote,” “I
swanny,” and “under conviction.” I am southern like a
three-quarter-length sleeved “Swangin’” t-shirt, circa
1983. I never went to a wake, but I attended
Visitations. I remember the ritual of tick check. I
have been baptized….three times. For those reasons, I
am southern.

Southern legitimacy Statement:

Why are you southern? Mama and Daddy disowned me because of it
Why could you be southern? I giddyup when I drive
What do you think is southern? Plum pie
Do you eat grits? ya’ll, why you askin that!
Is your mama an icon? I think my mama was Edith Massey
Do you have yard dogs? tied to the pick up

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My ancestors are divided into two neat groups, immigrants from foreign lands and good ol’ Southerners. Thanks to my Southern heritage, I say y’all and I bake my cornbread in an old black iron skillet. Some of my great-greats wore gray in the War Between the States and I listen to old-fashioned Southern music like Johnny Horton and Hank Williams. I have kinfolk buried from Louisiana to Mississippi to southwest Virginia. I drink my tea sweet (is there any other kind?) and fry every meat I can like chicken, catfish, and pork. I consider cream gravy to be a food group and yes, I like to eat boiled peanuts. I always like RC Cola and Luzianne tea.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Although born in the great state of Ohio, I have spent almost all my life in the south. I eat grits, collards and occasionally fried okra. I am a southern boy. I was raised in Texas, Florida and North Carolina. I don’t know if you’d really count Florida as a southern state. It’s more like a quarantine zone for northerners so they won’t infect the rest of the south.

To bolster the point that I am southern: I have killed more deer with my car than I have with a gun and I have a hound dog out back. I have even buried a dead pet one Halloween night in the fog and dim light of a security light. I have also watched the greatest sunsets and seen the most beautiful of God’s creatures. It is good to be in the South.

my southern legitimacy statement:
On a road trip, When I was a baby my aunt gave me a hunk of pork skin to gum. My daddy saw I was choking on it. He slammed the station wagon brake causing the passenger door to fly open. He grabbed my ankles as I scooted across the vinyl seat. Fortunately the duct tape covering the cigarette burns slowed me and daddy yanked me back in, ran his finger down my throat and dislodged the pork skin. which he tossed to our hound dog General Lee who sat in the back with my aunt. We continued our trip..

Hey Mom, I’m on the Mule! Can’t get more legitimately southern than that….

Southern Legitimacy Statement
By birth I am a Yankee, but I was adopted and raised
in southeastern Arkansas. For that reason, I am
southern. I am southern like snake stories, like
catfish caught on blood bait. I am southern as in a
landscape always softened by humidity. I am southern
like the piano at my home church. Its middle b-flat
key wears a worn, finger-shaped divot (check your
Broadman Hymnal). I am as southern as “tote,” “I
swanny,” and “under conviction.” I am southern like a
three-quarter-length sleeved “Swangin’” t-shirt, circa
1983. I never went to a wake, but I attended
Visitations. I remember the ritual of tick check. I
have been baptized….three times. For those reasons, I
am southern.

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I’m named James for my daddy and his daddy who was named after a book in the Bible (so I’ve been told). He was a one-armed man who lost his arm in a car accident with a drunk driver on country road in Headland, Alabama. People said he could do the work of two men. And the Ladd is from my other grandfather whose real name was Frank Lester but was called Ladd since a boy playing baseball, a love he never shook, listened to the Braves and Hammerin’ Hank on his GE radio while sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen eat red hot chilli peppers like they were licorice. I’ve lived in Dothan, Prattville, Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, and Auburn but now live in central Florida, not far from Orlando, a place that is nothing more than a very large small town that is too south to be in the Deep South. People keep talking about the New South, but that’s a lie. The South will always be the South because it can never give up its past. Just look at the fans wearing Bear Bryant hats at an Bama football game. And that’s not really a bad thing.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
The Southern in me pipes up so fast that I usually have no advance notice of it. I’ve been known to state that I never want to live north of the Mason-Dixon line, that I enjoy a good fish fry of catfish and hushpuppies, that I can let off steam by sliding into an out-in-the-country-Bible-thumping-hands-raised-to-heaven deep south church service at the passing of an old straw hat in lieu of a collection plate and that I can pick out the best barbeque places (and we must have pork!) by knowing their look — the tucked away, hole-in-the-wall, dirty, grimy shacks that pass the sauce-better-than ambrosia dripping sandwiches through the front door and the super “gullet washers” out the back.

I left show business to pursue my lifelong dream of goat farming in
Appalachia. Speaking of which, I now live in Cocke county, reputed to
be the most lawless rural county in Tennessee. I run into Popcorn
Sutton now and again at the grocery store and can tell you where to
get the best ’shine–through a friend of a friend of a friend. I’m on
good speaking terms with the cockfighting crowd. Oh, and the church I
attend–they handle serpents. Really.

My hobbies include soapmaking, canning, gardening heirloom vegetables,
wildcrafting and squirrel hunting with dogs.

In my spare non-goat related time, I write about and document
Appalachian culture–or assist production companies, scholars and
artists who are doing the same thing. I also write about food.

I could go on and on in this manner including my recipes for coon,
possum and fricasseed squirrels with sherry over biscuits or go
through my DAR lineage but I think you must agree–my Southern
credentials are impeccable.

I verify that I am Southern based on my heritage, including but not limited to, blackberry picking with my brothers and sister in the heat of a Black Belt June, getting chiggers that would, my Mama K swore, only come out if we soaked for 20 minutes in baking soda, riding my Shetland pony Buttermilk through the fields and woods of Pine Grove Farm in Ridge Grove, Alabama, riding her on down to Washburn’s store to get a little Peach Nehi that “Was so good,” old Mr. Washburn told my dad, “that you could almost taste the furs.”

In addition, I verify that I am Southern because, although I have no dead mule in my past, I do have a dead horse. Maggie was a mare my sister and I paid a dollar for so the former owner could write a bill of sale. He didn’t tell us that the old gal was already more than a bit long in the tooth, but as they say, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and we didn’t. A few months later, after we took all our horses to be wormed (Yes, it is as bad as it sounds), poor old Maggie, bless her heart, barely made it off the trailer before she keeled over. She was kind of big and we were kind of small, so we just dug a hole right beside her, flipped her over into it and covered her with lime. Worked fine, but the field where she was lying belonged to Augusta Christian Day School’s baseball team. In the end it did turn out okay, as these things do. We just gave the place a name—Maggie’s Field—and warned the players to stay away from the dent in the outfield.

Yeah, I’m Southern.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

As I have grown to be a man, my work has taken me all over this great country of ours where there are many things to be seen that are grand beyond the means of words to describe them, and though I have often thought of leaving for the sake of newness and grand adventure, my address has always remained here in the sacred soil of Virginia.

Whenever possible I avoid restaurants that offer only unsweetened tea, and I can pretty much stomach any vegetable as long as it’s overcooked or made with vinegar. As yet I am dispossessed from organized religion, but have a strong faith in God and pork, the barbecuing of the latter solidifying my faith in the former. Whenever given a choice on my birthday for a cake, I always prefer my mother’s Carolina Pig-Pickin’ Cake, a religious experience in itself. Like any southron, I am always haunted by the past and enjoy the telling of a good story, though I do have a penchant for the ghostly and the weird (which I have been fond of as far back as I can remember.) I plan to tell stories until I die and on that day I plan to be buried in the dirt of Hanover County outside of Richmond, where I have always called home and woe to any soul who should seek to prevent it.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I like to think that the “aunts” in this piece are New Englanders, and that Edwina is Southern. She strikes me that way, anyway. I know this because my mother was born in Atlanta and years spent in Europe and New England never quite took that particular twinkle away.

I’m a Southerner because it’s where I’m from and where my people are from, including Cherokee. I was born in Georgia and raised in North Carolina. I had a Mamaw, a Papaw and a Nenaw. There’s a Civil War (War Between the States) rifle in the hall closet of my grandparents’ house. Story is, a relative got it off a Union solider. My Mamaw once set the place on fire by trying to burn kudzu above the garden. I have her quilts in almost every room in the house. My Granddaddy said a person couldn’t help being poor, but he could help being no count. He said never be beholden to anybody. All my book learning can’t match his common sense.

When I was a child, I used to run along behind the truck that drove through the alleys in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, blowing clouds of poison to kill the mosquitoes. I’d turn and twirl in the mist, reasoning that if it coated my body, the mosquitoes would leave me alone. (They didn’t. Dit’n.) I went on to acquire a BS degree, holes in my brain notwithstanding. I was born in Arkansas, and raied in Arkansas (but. I. did. not. have. sexuuuuul. relations. with . that. President), North Carolina, and finally, the suspicious foreign land of California, where I now make my home. I love grits and okra (fried, boiled, raw–slime–yum), home grown peeled tomatoes with salt, watermelon without salt (I know, I know), crookneck squash, potatoes and gravy, cabbage, biscuits, and pot roast, but my dubious connection to yon foreign land of fruits, nuts, and flakes (I’m at least two of those) leads me to drink unsweet tea. I hang my head in Cracker Barrel and say, real quiet, “Unsweet.” As long as I’m confessing: I never liked greens, not collards, not turnips, not any of them except the delicate spinach variety, which is probably direct evidence of demon possession. God love her, she don’t like greens.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

I was born to Yankees but that’s not my fault. I did have the good sense to get them to move to Birmingham, Alabama before I was born, but then they moved me to New England where I learned to talk with one of those weird New England accents!

Poor me. I worked on the universe and got us to move to Richmond, Virginia when I was six and where I managed to stay ever since. Now nobody claims me. Whenever I open my mouth people around me say, “You’re not from around here are you?” I think my accent ended up somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike. I believe one day I’ll travel up there and find my hometown where I speak like a native and no one looks at me cockeyed.

But my heart will always be here in the South, my real home, even if nobody does claim me.

Like the true Southerner I am, I don’t give a shit.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I used to crumble bacon into my grits, load it with butter and mix it with runny eggs. Then my doctor lectured me about cholesterol. Now I crumble turkey bacon into oatmeal topped with Smart Balance, and mix it with scrambled eggbeaters.

I’m a Cajun from south Louisiana, the original, original, original land of Dixie.
An outrageous claim?
Louisiana was home of the ante-bellum ten dollar note with the word “dix” printed all over it. Dix, of course, is the French word for ten and it is really pronounced “deese,” but the Americans that poured into Louisiana, especially after that whuppin’ Colonel Jackson and Jean Lafitte put on the redcoats in 1814, didn’t know it was pronounced “deese.” They said “dix,” as in “Gimme some of that Dixie beer.”

I’m descended from the Acadians of New Brunswick, that fat and sassy bunch that wouldn’t pledge allegiance to the King of England in 1759. At the same time, I’m also descended from a redneck from the piney woods of north Louisiana.

I’m just as likely to say “poo yai” or “dang” in exclamation or greet you with a French “Comment-ca vas?” or a “How y’all doin’? How’s momma and them?”

I like okra and tomatoes and corn bread and milk, only we Cajuns call it couche-couche (pronounced cush-cush).
So when I meet folks from Mississippi or Alabama or Florida and they, upon hearing my Cajun accent, say, “You sure do talk funny!” I reply, “I like the way you talk.” And then they admit, “I like the way you talk, too.”

Why I’m Southern:
1. My name, on my birth certificate from Alamance County NC actually is Virginia Lee.
2. My late father named me Virginia Lee because he was a Civil War buff and had aspirations to be a member of Southern gentry, a goal he never came close to achieving.
3. My dad was born in Arkansas, as was his daddy, but my paternal grandmother was born in Tennessee. Her mama was from Alabama. (I have a deep-seated dread that we are distant kin to the 10 Commandment judge, Roy Moore.)
4. My mama was born in Tennessee, as was her mama. Her daddy was born in Tangipahoa Parish in Louisiana, just north of Lake Ponchartrain. He was raised in Biloxi,
Mississippi.
5. My parents are the first generation of heaven only knows how many who were NOT farmers at some point.

Last, but certainly not least –
6. I have a degree in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi.

Unmerciful rays of sunlight, filter through the tall pine trees along the highway, and a woman wearing leather sling-backs, and a black gabardine wool suit, struggles along the pitted highway surface. She passes another field of corn; stalks as high as a young child, feathery corn silks fluttering in the heated breeze that swirls up […]

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
When I was a little girl my Granny took me uptown to have my picture made at Belks Department Store;I think I was about five years old. She said that the photographer talked to me a bit and laughed as he told me , “Honey, the house would burn down before you got anybody told.” One word out of my mouth and the whole world knows I’m southern. Not just southern, the mountains of North Carolina southern and believe me there’s a whole lotta south in that kind of accent. Imagine the voice of Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton if they couldn’t sing. I used to season everything my family ate with fatback and salt until the doctor told my husband that I was trying to kill him. I cook healthier food these days except at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Sometimes when I’m eating something that really needs salt I remember my Granny who lived to be 96 and never ate a new age ‘healthy’ meal in her life. She ate eggs from her own chickens, pork from a pig slaughtered on her own land, and vegetables out of a garden she planted. She prayed over her food with a voice that sounded like it had a mountain in it. I might just ask that doctor what he thinks about that.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

Ten reasons I’m Southern even though I live on the Illinois prairie.
1. I use “y’all,” “out yonder,” and “git” in normal conversation.
2. I can scare up a mess of collard greens that’ll buckle a grown man.
3. My Uncle Joe served a life sentence for beating a man to death over the last swig of whiskey.
4. My grandma watched a hangin’ in the town square and loved telling the story of it to warn us that if we ever had the chance to see one not to.
5. My favorite writers are Flannery O’Connor and William Gay.
6. I say “Appa-latch-in” and “Looah-vull.”
7. My grandpa played the fiddle, wore a coal tattoo and died of black lung.
8. I have kin with two first names: “Barbara Jean,” “Jimmy Jay,” “Cottoneye Joe.”
9. I have picked up paw paws and put’em in a basket.
10. Snake-handling Pentecostals are everyday folk.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I can brag of experiences of many souths: jambalaya, but also ratatouille, pavlova, and rolled fish tacos. A bit of each has made me who I am. What attaches me to the memory of a place? Is it who I met there and miss now or what I ate there and crave now?

Thanksgiving, the Creole restaurant in Paris, doesn’t, can’t, make jambalaya like Alex did at the restaurant where we worked in Greenville, South Carolina. I learned never to talk politics with Alex, but I’d eat his jambalaya every day. On mutual days off during the summer, Alex would drive me and his two retrievers to the old quarry in his pick-up complete with gun rack. I wasn’t in love with Alex. He was cute and sweet but my small-mindedness couldn’t separate him from his politics and his gun rack. I was in love with Alex’s cooking. Alex’s jambalaya. Alex’s crab cakes. Alex’s gumbo. Alex’s soft-shelled crabs. Alex’s bread pudding. Alex’s greens. I was in love with Alex’s greens. When we went to the quarry, I enjoyed seeing the strong young man swimming, to see Alex out of his apron. In all honesty, though, I went for the picnics he’d pack: sweet tea, deviled eggs, fried chicken, cornbread, coleslaw. He probably took me there to enjoy seeing me swimming, to see me out of my waitress uniform. But, I could never stray too far from his peach cobbler. I’d be dishonest if I were to state my southern legitimacy by sharing my experiences with Alex, or by describing the quarry, or by affecting the accent of our customers. The South is in me through my stomach and it’s my taste buds, not my tongue, that make the best argument for going back.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born and raised in Kentucky, love grits with butter and pepper, don’t understand people who screw up grits with milk and sugar, for gods sakes people, grits and cream of wheat are two different things, as different and horses and mules.
I live below the Mason Dixon line, only time I get in trouble is when I go north and marry some Yankee woman, always have to buy them a house, pack them up and then send them back north with all my money; I just can’t speak or understand their language, you know what I mean. Boy, I am damn glad to see ya’ll back up and running again, only decent writing on the web in a style I can understand.