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.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I, DB Cox, am an ordained Southern musical minister. I preach to the blue multitudes that gather in the cheap juke-joint playgrounds along the back roads of the great southeast. I can be found in the early-morning hours bent over a Fender Stratocaster, playing with an ache in my tone that can only hint at the dark secrets hidden behind my cheap sunglasses. I am a psychedelic redneck aging without grace-wearing my hat pulled low over one eye, working hard to maintain my spot on the musical fringe, constantly searching for a sacred sequence of blue notes to save us all.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I have been to a one-room Baptist Church in Shelby County, Alabama, and watched grown men, reportedly sane, reach into a box and pick up pissed-off rattlesnakes. I have hunted and eaten poke salad. I have stood outside a narrow cafe just outside five-points in Birmingham, where I was born, and devoured a chili-dog and Grapico lunch special in the hot sun. I have driven my sister to a very successful fabric shop run out of a tin shack next to a pay-per-pound trout pond five miles east of Vincent. And though I am frequently dismayed by hoakey orthography to depict the “colorful” lilt of the southern tongue, my own tongue uncurls against my will with each mile as I drive home from Chicago, where I live now, to Westover, where I started out, until by the time I get there, my speech is run-over with obese vowels like an old dead tractor run-over by kudzu and I end up sounding like Andy Griffith.

Ten things I predict for 2008
Based on the response to my last list which suggested that I was being a bit too pessimisstic (gasp! and I thought I was being funny!). My dad once told me that it’s always EASY to predict disaster, as it’s a safe bet something lousy is going to come […]

As for Southern Legitimacy: I couldn’t possibly be more Southern. Paw-Paw is a cotton farmer, Aunt Jean’s favorite phrase is “for cryin’ in the cow butter!”, and the little old ladies in the grocery store used to run up and touch my head so they wouldn’t give me “ojo.” If the preacher’s sermon went long, he’d apologize for holding up dinner. “Kudzu,” “The Lockhorns,” and “Tumbleweeds” were all staples in the morning paper where I grew up, though I’ve never seen mention of any of them elsewhere until now. I left home, but it’s shaped me, and most of what I write is about the love/hate relationship I have with my Southern past.

What? Who said you can’t have sweet tea and grits together? It’s not about the rules, it’s about what’s good. Breakfast or dinner, I say you can!

From the summer of 1989 to the summer of 2001 I lived in South Carolina. Before moving there I had not heard of the Gullah language and many other things. For the first eight years that I lived there, I read regional histories, old letters, diaries, cookbooks, etc., and took notes. Then I spent the next two years arranging the notes. The result was my Sisters Grimke Book of Days, which was published by Oasis Books (England) in 2003.

The best barbecue is pork with slaw. The best pork barbecue with slaw is Polar Freeze in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas (unpaid advertisement). Their slaw has a bite to it, and after decades of wondering how they get such flavorful cabbage, I have discerned that they spike their slaw with turnips. That’s my opinion, not a fact. All of it is. Now I know I’m going to start a new war between the states by those darned Texans who call beef-slathered-up-with-red-sauce and slapped-on-a-roll-sans-Cole-slaw the best barbecue in the world. All I can say about that is they have a right to be wrong. Also, it’s a shame how young’uns don’t gather up at the Polar Freeze of a hot summer evening with the mosquitoes lighting on their Off-scented limbs like they did back when.

Why am I Southern? I date Yankee girls because they’re easier to dump. I even managed to part ways with one at a Kentucky Fried Chicken. That’s gotta earn me some bonus points or something.

I was born amidst the Blue Bonnets of East Texas and chased horned toads and armadillos across sandy roads until Mom called us for supper. We later moved, and I was reared along side the sugar cane fields in South Louisiana. We lived so close to the “Big Easy”, we could hear an old cornet wailing the blues and the classy sounds of jazz played on a stride piano, the sounds commingling and drifting like dark fog down the bayou on a Saturday Night. A thousand frogs lined the bayou and sang chorus while on a moonlit night one could hear the lovely solo of a mocking bird, its melody carried on the silver wings of moonbeams. Willow trees lined the bayou, their branches drooping and touching the slow moving current as the soft lisping sounds of little waves touched the banks of the bayou. ‘

And in high school, every Friday night, we played high school football and dated the cheer leaders. Saturday we tail gated at the local University and watched SEC Football. Man, to be a southerner in football season tops the grits, sweetened tea and all the other trivia your southern writers talk about. I bet all their dogs are porch dogs!

But hey. Lets get real. In my neck of the woods Katrina came. Where are the sounds of the cornet playing the blues? The melodic sounds of jazz on the piano? The bayou is silent now. The thousands of frogs have been swept back into the marsh lands, and the willow trees lie twisted and torn along the banks. Occasionally on a still, pure and pristine night, when a tipping moon is full of silver moon beams falling to the ground, one might hear a single mocking bird, weeping for the time we lived before Katrina. Now we all stand in the sorrow and trauma of the aftermath, knowing things will never be the same as before and as we look forward, putting all the BS aside,we are not sure what the future holds for the “Big Easy” and South Louisiana.

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 (if I spell it southren you’ll get it, right?) boy who moved south and found himself surrounded by Yankees. I’m in Orlando. There’s not a hill in sight and the restaurants that specialize in “Real Southern Cooking” put sugar in the cornbread. I’m making my own red eye gravy

Southern Legitimacy Statement
I’m from Michigan, but only because my grandparents left Eastern Kentucky to pick potatoes here back in 1942. Also, I lived in North Carolina half my life and graduated from N.C. State.

With the exception of one summer at a northeastern university, I have never left the cope of the South for more than two weeks consecutively. For that matter, I have never left the cope of the broader boot of Louisiana and Arkansas for any sustained period. And when I felt homesick that one lonely summer, I became the only person (I believe) to pace the walks of Cornell University with the Ole Miss Rebel Marching Band’s version of Dixie blaring through his or her headphones. I told the greeter at the Walmart just outside Ithaca that the store was to be my semi-official Southern embassy. Furthermore: I wholeheartedly approved when my friend Flick convinced his fiancé to let him play the LSU fight song as their wedding recessional. I preface questions with preparatory preambles such as “Let me ask you this.” I went to a segregated high school in the early 1990s. I made a scene at a California wedding when I realized they didn’t have (nor had they heard of) a groom’s cake. I spend inordinate amounts of money traveling to Southeastern Conference football games that I can’t afford and that my favorite team often loses. I received my terminal degree in American History from a fine Southern institution (the University of Arkansas—Woo Pig Sooie!), specializing in Southern cultural and intellectual history, as well as Civil Rights and race relations. Finally (in a list intended to be representative rather than comprehensive), I feel no offense when seeing a Confederate flag, but feel simultaneously guilty for not being offended. And nothing is more Southern than a divided mind.

My life as a southerner, with the exception of a few visits south of the Ohio River, has been largely vicarious, but I shaped my career as a lawyer after Atticus Finch and my career as a writer after Lee Harper. I married a man who spent a summer sweating in the Mobile, Alabama heat, and who’d rather have sweet potato pie than pumpkin.

Angel’s Rest, Charles Davis’s first novel, shines brightly amid Mule writer successes. A friend of the Mule for years and years, Mr. Davis has had quite a career leading up to “novelist” writer guy. From former federal law enforcement officer to construction worker to novelist and toddler-master-dad, he’s been my friend as well as a mule-friend and I’ve enjoyed our chats. -vmac

My folks came to Texas from Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina, mostly right before the Civil War - farmers except for the occasional banker or cotton ginner. I grew up on a farm and thought a fine day was lugging a Mason jar of tea out to my Daddy when he plowed. I played in the sweet dirt while he rested in the shade of the tractor. I still ache for my mother’s fried pies, black-eyed peas, cornbread, squash and okra.

Now, I live in Houston - one-time capital of the Lone Star State and all-time capital of humidity and mosquitoes. Out my window I see pine trees, azaleas and crape myrtles getting ready for summer.

Here’s my story about a little town in Texas, fried turkey and ambrosia. I hope you like it.

I know I’m southern because I survived all the unwritten rules for women. You know: Don’t sleep with a man before you’re married. Don’t smoke in public. Don’t get a tattoo. Find a good man and marry him. Don’t wear white after Labor Day.

*The Mule just adores Ms. Hite’s work.

Celia is southern. She knows it, we know it… and Mule readers of our previous 10 years of literary excellence know she’s southern.

As a small boy, Jim Booth wanted nothing more than to be a goatherd wandering the ancient hills of his Southern homeland. Then he heard the gospel according to John and Paul and abandoned the pastoral life for the responsible hedonism of rock musicianship. Having failed gloriously in that endeavor, he took on the academy, ate it alive, and spat it back out as dark sarcasm in the classroom. Currently he writes occasionally award winning fiction and occasionally homeland security annoying bloggery. He lives in a heavily fortified bunker in an undisclosed location In Danville, Virginia just off 58 after you pass the Honda dealer but before you get to Carter’s restaurant.

*Editor’s note: Mr. Booth’s got a new book coming out and this story is an excerpt. Ahh, hell, let’s get personal, Jim’s even been to eastern NC and he and his lovely wife are charming folk (that’s not just because they paid for my lunch, either). A review of his book “The New Southern Gentleman” is on Popmatters.com, written by yours truly, VMac. Use the Popmatters google-search and type in MacEwan and you’ll find it.

I was born and reared with one foot in Memphis, Tennessee and the other in a farm in Forest, Mississippi. I left the South for college in Montana, England, and Seattle, then returned to Mississippi in 2002. I am most definitely a bone fide Southerner. In fact, I can say that I have actually plowed with a mule.

One great great grandaddy sent four sons to fight at Battery Wagner and Okalustee (Fla.), another sent three to die at Vicksburg. I scratch when it itches, even when the quality is watchin’.

As for my southern legitimacy: sweet tea. Once, when visiting family in Mocksville, North Carolina, I drank so much during the week that I had something akin to the sugar DT’s when I got back north. Snapple can not compare.

Born in D.C., reared in Maryland with excursions in the Carolinas and the Blue Ridge, I had Navy stopovers in Virginia and Texas and, while I currently find myself in San Diego for job purposes and such, hain’t surrendered a lick of devotion to things like bluegrass w/ neckties on (BTW we have some of the best right here in SD), beat biscuits w/ white gravy and Jimmy Dean links, straight Jack Daniel’s, fried chicken takes two hand washins to get clean again, and writers like Faulkner (Light in August my all-timer), Caldwell, Welty (Delta Wedding, oh yes), McCullers, Shelby Foote.

What makes me southern?

I live in Richmond, Virginia, so, one, location. Two, I have lived only once in the north, and that was for a year and a half. I worked in New Jersey for Ma Bell and people would ask me to “Say something” just to hear my southwestern Virginia accent. Three, I have attended and maybe even joined churches where women did not wear jewelry, makeup or slacks, and whose swirling, teased beehives were nocturnally swaddled in Charmin, preserving a hairstyle, that, when fully erect, could tower a good nine or ten inches, sometimes a foot above the natural hairline and the fellers they married. P.S. I have been previously published in Dead Mule, and if that don’t make you southern, Good God Almighty, what does?

Southern Legitimacy: I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky on the banks of the muddy Ohio River. This story also takes place in the great Bluegrass State.

The three boys came back from their “coming-of-age” cross-country trip in mid-August, a few days before their freshman year at Rutgers started. When they got back, they took their girlfriends out to a fine Italian restaurant (at the suggestion of one of the boy’s old-fashioned Italian mothers) with the remainder of their cross-country funds (an […]

I was born and raised on a farm near Manchester, Tennessee, that my great-grandfather purchased after being emancipated. It is still in my family. My grandfather was a truck farmer who reared 13 children after my grandmother left him. I remember planting seed potatoes with him under the moonlight. Twenty years after his death, people still drive to my parents’ farm and ask about “Mr. Glenn” and his “Irish potatoes”.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I grew up on a catfish and rice farm in eastern Arkansas. I must admit, I will take biscuits and gravy over grits any day, though.

I was born in the South, educated in the South, and have lived my entire life in the South. I drink sweet tea, grow antique roses, eat Creole tomato sandwiches, and own a copy of Longfellow’s “Evangeline.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in North Georgia in the Appalachian foothills. I know what cathead biscuits, protracted meetings, #9 turners and #2 washtubs are. I can read shape notes and sing from the Sacred Harp book. If that ain’t Southern, then grits ain’t groceries.