I lived in Kansas City, MO for one year, and every other year of my thirty-two years of life have been spent in and around the Knoxville, TN area near my family.  I have lived in many different trailers, and I worked at the Waffle House on and off for about five years, sometimes explaining the composition of “grits” to traveling Northerners.  Yet, for most of my life, I identified myself as an outsider and an intellectual, and as such, I uncomfortably distanced myself from all that is southern because I was so aware of the racism, sexism, and the prejudices that go along with the “good ol boy system,” Bible Belt mentality, and redneck sentiments.

But I have grown older and wiser, and I no longer actively position myself in a psychologically defensive stance toward the southern way of life because I realized that doing so only harms me.  I have learned to appreciate southern life, such as the intricacies of southern dialogues, cultural habits, and political beliefs.  I fit right in with southern mentality when it comes to scorn of governmental controls and the fierce protection of individual rights and space.  I will die right beside my southern neighbors if the government ever tries to make us put chips in our skin!  My granny made sure of that.

The South, above all else, distinctly retains a gritty, mystical cultural authenticity.  I have German legs, Swiss eyes, and an English brow, but all I feel is southern.  I don’t know exactly what a “southerner” is by single sentence definition, but I know its meaning intuitively from my experience, and I know it when I see it.  I allow myself the liberty of using southern dialect by removing “g’s” from the ends of words and referring to more than one person as “ya’ll.”  It wasn’t until two years after my second year of graduate school that I realized there is no such thing as “chester drawers.”  I plan to file a petition with Webster’s to make “Chester” the counterpart to “Dresser.”

###
And a bit of prose

My Granny
Wasn’t Granny-like at all: her hair was brunette,
body voluptuous, eyes scorpion green.

She had a lingerie drawer filled with red and
black negligees.

She kept secrets about everything,
hid to smoke her cigarettes, put sugar in the chili,
and turned the air-conditioner on in the winter.

She believed in Jesus as her own personal savior,
and she always talked about the coming of the “End Times,”
right after she talked about Grandpa cheating on her,
how she needed to do more exercises…

“Wun,” she would then say in her southern accent,
lifting her lean leg high into the air in an exercise
motion—sometimes she made it to “tew.”