A Truly Gifted Mule Christmas Essay.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

A resident of Arkansas, I know everyone in the south drives a green car or truck each Spring, regardless of the color of paint underneath the pollen. To confirm my southern residency, I can ask “what recession?” We’ve been poor so long, its hard to tell we’re living in a recession – and I’m glad the rest of the nation might now enjoy life as much as we do.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: A corny description of Bubba:

It is difficult to say where the name Bubba originated. It does conjures strange notions as to its roots… Imagine the pride of the first mother who looked at her newborn child, took a few seconds to assess her little miracle, and then uttered, “Welcome to the world, Bubba Lee Strunk!”. It does lend slightly more credence if Bubba Lee happens to be a male child, although in vast regions of the American South, the name is unisex. It has become tradition that every southern family has at least one Bubba.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Spokane Washington is a long way from the South, but we do have our commonalities. When my son, nephew and their pals were boys, they liked to hunt for crawdads along Hangman Creek near Waverly, Washington. They’d come home so full of mud that I wasn’t sure which children were my toe-headed own. I’d get to worrying if they didn’t appear by six o’clock, so I’d walk out into the yard and yodel across town, “Supper!” The pitch and octave infused into that single-word song echoed across the valley and bounced against the little butte that stood out to the east of town. The children always came home, although I’m not sure if it was hunger that brought them or that I’d scared the crawdads back under the rocks.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in northern Alabama, and though I have moved around all my life, my roots run deep in those lower Appalachian foothills. Most of my relatives still live there, or in Tennessee and lower Alabama, but most of my immediate family live in Virginia now. My husband’s mother also came from northern Alabama. I love the mountains, country living, growing my own vegetables and canning what I can. I love raising farm animals and hope to do that one day. I love buttermilk, fried okra and green beans swimming in hambone juices and cooked all day. I love Sacred Harp singing, mountain ballads and any music from a strummed dulcimer and fiddle. I love listening to the sound of a mountain stream in the darkness while wrapped in quilts, sleeping in a cabin loft. I am a Southerner.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

Although I live in South Georgia now, I am descended (proudly) from the pioneering Mississippi family of whom I write. My ongoing research into family history continues to delight, amaze, and teach me. I hope that Mule readers who were introduced to Purvis folklore in the previously published “Utah Grits,” will also enjoy “Old John.”

I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama. Even though I have lived in New York City for many years, I am instantly recognizable by my accent. When I taught English to high school students in Arequipa, Peru, I informed them that the pronoun for second person plural is “y’all.”

I’m as country as cornbread and can get you to the bootlegger’s house in Chewalla, Tennessee, if need be. I even know the back way in. Trust me on that one

I live in Phoenix Arizona. I hang out at North Phoenix Baptist Church and like most Southern people, I eat a lot. Southern people speak their minds and say things whether they are popular or not.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
We take the pursuit of happiness seriously here in Louisiana, as you have probably heard before. What’s more, you all would be speaking the Queen’s English if we hadn’t saved Andrew Jackson’s tail from the red coats.

I’m a native of a small town called, Hiawassee, Georgia. We have a language of our own, and lately I’ve been paying more attention to it. Just the other day I heard this saying, “If you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” Another one I hear quite often is, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” These are short but filled with some truth.

Mule essays provide a wonderful link to real life.  Southern stories are less fiction and more truth than any tales around. Enjoy this month’s collection while sipping some hot cider… or buttermilk egg nog. Yup, there is such an animal – but ya’ll have to do your own googling. I’ve got more stories to load [...]

I earned my Southern Credentials in 1963, the first time I said “Yes, Ma’am” to my Ohio mother. She sent me to my room, said we didn’t move to the south so I could learn to be a smart ass. That’s a true story.

I feel southern, I sound southern (when I open my mouth), and some would even claim I look southern. My birth certificate shows that I was born in a part of Texas that is culturally indistinguishable from an area often referred to as the “Deep South.” When I travel back to the place where I got my start, I still hear people say things like “y’all” and “fixin’ to” as in “Y’all fixin’ to go to Walmart?” I have many fond memories of my high school days when I drove hotrod pickup trucks, chewed tobacco (Red Man or Brown’s Mule), and listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd with the volume dial turned far to the right. Today, years later, I no longer do some of those things, nor do I even live in the United States, yet deep down in my molecular structure, I’m a small-town, southern boy.

Dear Santa… I have no complaints. I am what I am and I ain’t what I ain’t.

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.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Although I do not claim to be Southern, I myself come from a long line of Okies. These farmers and hog-raisers lived in the Boggy River region of the state’s cypress-covered, southeastern corner until moving to the cotton town of Florence, Arizona after WWII. This makes us, as we like to think, “Desert Okies.” My family was kind enough to pass on their predisposition to heart disease and diabetes, along with a passion for purple hulls, well-crafted stories and gravy-covered foods; hopefully with hard work and some horse-blinders, I can avoid the family’s cardiac tradition and narrative one.

My better half currently lives in the NC Piedmont, and when I’m fortunate enough to visit, we eat at Beef Burger a lot and hike in and around the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Being Southern is not something I chose. Who would volunteer for the mosquitoes, the destitution, the suburban sprawl, the closed-mindedness, the good ole’ boy governments or the deteriorating cultural identity?

No, Southerness selected me, and owns me despite my embarrassment or my contrarian’s instincts. This is because Southerness is more than the geography that constitutes the south; thus we can’t escape it by moving (though my own Southerness did not do so well in Philadelphia or Cincinnati). But it’s also because what allowed my ancestors to set up shop in the swamps of Florida was a primordial drive that they passed on to via seven generations of roughin’ it.

Because of them, the Southerness pulls at my guts like the flu when I drink tea that’s been sweetened after it has cooled, or when I listen to someone gush about Florida’s theme parks and not its oak hammocks or its formerly infinite pastures.

Hell, sometimes I fantasize about being from New England or the Midwest—areas that have retained a degree of authenticity due to their lack of in-migration—because there’s so little that’s Southern about the Florida I live in now. Orange groves were uprooted for subdivisions with foreign names, and the $8 open air rodeo, where I spent my gum-chewing years sitting on the fences and pulling up my feet when the bulls came careening by, is now a $55 multi-use event center.

But if Southerness has a mythology of preservation that parallels its tale of destruction, it is evidenced only in the literature it produces.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up having maw maws and a paw paws and a distinct view of life. I say ma’am, swear that barbecue is a noun only and is made from pork, and know that chivalry is not dead, if you know where to look. And even though I chose professions of technology and literature, my memories will always be of playing outside on humid summer nights, catching fireflies in an old mason jar, wondering why the ice cream maker was so slow.

Meet one of the newest poets in the Mule family as Helen Losse, Poetry Editor for the Dead Mule, interviews poet Evie Shockley. The amazing, in-depth, insightful conversation is poetry itself. I hope our readers enjoy the interview as much as I did — V. MacEwan, Editor/Publisher

Southern Legitimacy Statment:
I am a true son of the South. I was born in Tupelo, Mississippi. My mother once said to me that myself, Elvis, and US Highway 45 were the only three things that ever came out of Tupelo worth mentioning. I was raised in Corinth, Mississippi. I graduated from Corinth High School and ventured forth into the big world beyond Alcorn County in 1983.

I hunt and fish and purposely seek out mud holes to whip my pickup truck through, even though mud in California can some times be at a premium. I have a cousin named Larry Joe. I have been known to pick up fresh road kill on occasion. I believe barbequed Raccoon on a hot biscuit is one of life’s more special pleasures. I love my Mama and visit her twice a year no matter if I can afford to take the time away from my West Coast life or not.

I am Southern, first and foremost. Everything else is just, well…….extra.

A native of Hiawassee, Georgia, I appreciate my heritage and try not to stray too far from its teachings. For example, I know what the word, “Gaum,” means. I’ve heard my grandmother say many times over the years, “This house is a gaum!” I still cherish sayings such as, “He’s a snake in the grass!” or “I’m fair to middling! As we speak, I am cooking a mess of soup beans, and will later bake some cornbread to go with them.

Various members of the community were given highly fictionalized analogs in the novel, from a vegan restaurateur to a sex-toy manufacturer. But most of the book came straight from the imagination. I thought by giving Pick qualities nobody would ever attribute to me it would inoculate me from criticism. I was wrong.

My family name, Fain, is French Huguenot. We were the Protestants who fled France and persecution to come to the American South in the 16th and 17th centuries to experience religious freedom. Arriving in Georgia to settle, my people, over the centuries, eventually found their way to Texas where my ancestors worked the land furiously and with dedication. My family continues to practice as Southern Baptists today with the same fervor for the Protestant faith my French forebears did. I, on the other hand, fell in love with a Cleveland Jew while going to graduate school in Boston. One summer I dragged him down to Houston in mid-July and married him in front of all our family andfriends. (I have 45 first cousins.) As fast as we could, my Yankee husband and I moved to Atlanta to begin our life together, finally settling in Chapel Hill, NC with our two school-aged children. We are happy and settled. We are the new American South, or at least a part of it. To tolerance.

Except for an occasional trip to Utah, I spend my time in South Georgia, writing about grits, molasses, and my grandfather’s mule (whose name was Old Kit). To be sure, all of the above show up in the piece that you are about to read.

The female protagonists in Connie May’s books don’t become “one” with their adulthood by hitting a triple and sending Frankie in for the scoring run. These girls don’t have a fumbling, poignant, first sexual encounter that is both bittersweet and endearing, and they certainly don’t become mature adults by sucking it up and just “getting over it.”