We had two mules on our old farm–Bob and Mike. Bob was blind in one eye and Mike died from the grass founder. Bob got old and died a peaceful but lonely death.

My dad was from Mississippi, outside Oxford, and my mom from North Carolina, where I grew up. The old farm was in Randolph County. The old man up and left us and my mom rented out our tobacco allotment and got a job in a mill in town. Later on my grandpa moved in with us. He’d lost half of one arm to a cotton gin back in 1919. Everyone called him “Nub.” He was eighty-two when he moved in and I was ten.

I’ve lived down here most of my life. Did the Southern thing and left, determined to never come back, and came back a few years later. The old farm place was sold years ago and is a trailer court now. I live in a city and work as an editor. I love sweet potatoes.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Southern writers don’t have to make a thing. Good grief: everything just happens right before their eyes.

both challenged and enthralled us. We read over 200 stories and ultimately chose the amazing dozens you will soon click to read.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
My favorite memories are sitting in the dark on the porch while Daddy told stories after he had worked in the fields all day. Across the road, in a swamp, the frogs’ chorus often grew so loud, I couldn’t hear my father’s voice. We fought mosquitoes until Mother finally said, “Come on in, girls, time for you to go to bed.” My brothers stayed up with Daddy, Ray playing his Sears Roebuck guitar and learning songs from his Roy Acuff song book.
Inside, I leaned my head in the open window trying to get just one little breath of fresh air. No place is as hot as south Georgia in summer.

A new SLS from Mr. Hogan:
I play upright bass in an Americana/Bluegrass band composed of myself and three other family members. We call ourselves East of Zion. Can you hear the wind in the live (black) oak trees? – apologies to Don Williams. And speaking of Williams’, another line of Don’s applies as well: “those Williams boys still mean a lot to me, Hank and Tennessee.” That works perfectly for me. I play southern music in an Arkansas Ozarks band and Hank Williams is almost the first singer I ever heard in my life. We do an occasional Hank song ourselves. I also have a Ph. D. in Literature and am a big fan of Tennessee Williams – in particular I like the Richard Burton film version of Night of the Iguana and I’ve always enjoyed The Glass Menagerie. I think that sufficiently covers the hillbilly-literary dichotomy of the south well enough for now.

“My Southern Legitimacy Statement is the opening paragraph of my novel, Stepping on the Cracks: Early on a humid Saturday in late August of 1952, Dirty Billy Williams was waiting with the other paregoric addicts at the backdoor of Powers and Moore Pharmacy when a particularly brilliant idea caused his eyebrows to dance and a chuckle to cough its way up and out of his sunken chest. After plunking down his buck -and-a-half and signing his name in the ledger kept fastidiously by Dr. Powers himself, he slipped the small bottle of morphine-laced liquid carefully into his pants pocket and kept his hand closed around it. Mindful that the good doctor didn’t permit riff-raff to frequent his soda fountain, Billy fairly bounded across the street to Berrey and Marks Pure Oil, where a nickel in the outdoor Coca-Cola machine yielded six ounces of a sweet mixer to cut his bitter daily legal limit and the unlocked bathroom gave him the privacy to take a leak while downing his needed morning cocktail in one long, eager slurp.”

I was once approached in a bar somewhere in the outskirts of Virginia by a toothless man who clearly stated via drunken whimpers, ‘You are pertier than a catfish and that’s a compliment ‘cuz catfish is real perty.’ I love to catfish. I was born and raised in Virginia. I am a catfish.

I love the South deeply, and I am loyal to grits, scrapple, and storytelling.

I’ve lived so long layered up with wool in Connecticut, I sometimes wonder whether Georgia was a dream. Up here, the land is rocky and shoves itself into the sea. Unlike the islands of Georgia, where the land eases itself towards the sea until it is mushed up and happy to be hidden. The snakes up here have no venom and stay in the garden buried in warm holes. Unlike the mean snakes of Georgia, who always dare you to come near. But if you look hard enough, you can find those snakes here, particularly in New York. They walk on two legs and dare you to come near.

SLS: We’ve been here twelve years, having moved from Southern California. After my first “covered dish” (we referred to them as ‘pot luck’) I knew I was firmly in the South when my cilantro and black bean salsa was overlooked for a congealed salad with a pretzel crust. I didn’t take it personally and can now create a fine presentation for any covered dish occasion, any time!

Nothin’ like spendin’ all day on your hands and knees in the woods diggin’ ‘gensang’ and ‘yeller root’, to fund the next expedition to the top of that hill with a couple friends, a tent, and all the natural light you can carry. Cept, maybe the addition of a string of redeyes caught from Kinni Creek.

Southern Legitimacy Statement

As soon as there was a boat to Virginia, my family was on it. More or less. I grew up in Georgia, and when I go other places, people tell me I don’t have an accent. I don’t consider that a compliment but I don’t think it’s true anyhow. Also, I am one of those Southern women writers, yes, one of those.

I love the South deeply, and I am loyal to grits, scrapple, and storytelling.

I have lived in North Carolina for twelve years. I was born in Rolla, Missouri and now live in what my relatives would call the “big city” of Raleigh. I am somewhat doubtful about writing a Southern legitimacy statement because I have serious doubts about my legitimacy, or at least that of my mother. But I’m a true Southerner, laid back to the point where I probably spend more time in traffic commuting from Durham to Raleigh and back than actually working.

My father grew up in the western Missouri with no running water, plumbing or electricity. That might not be Southern, but does that sound familiar to anyone here? My daddy’s grandmother’s claim to fame is that she could pour a dishpan full of moonshine into a jug without spilling a drop. I may not be a moonshine drinkin’, sweat-drippin’, pickup drivin’, yankee hatin’ redneck who eats greasy bacon, runny eggs fried in lard with grits, and sits on my neighbor’s sagging porch drinking beer and smoking cigars, but I like to write about them, and I do enjoy an occasional meal of shrimp and grits.

I lived in the South–Alabama and Georgia–about 20 years.

I was born, raised, and have lived my entire life in Louisiana. My high school’s mascot was a rebel foot soldier, and our flag was the Confederate flag. My Me-Maw’s pecan pie was the product of a secret miracle recipe that to this day cannot be reproduced. My grandfather wore his best overalls to church. Although I’m now a vegetarian (an unforgivable offense where I’m from), I can shoot and skin anything, set crawfish traps and run a trot line (but never on Sundays). I learned to swim in ponds, out-swimming water moccasins and mosquitoes. The good and the bad, the exquisite and the brutal, the refined and the raw, I am and always will be a proud Son of the South.

I have always been Southern in my heart. William Faulkner and Truman Capote are my favorite authors. Grits, kale, collards, all my favorite vegetables. I love the South.

For more than 30 years I have lived in North Carolina, which last I knew, was still considered part of the South even if the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area probably has as many Northerners as Southerners living in these part nowdays and you can’t find a meat and three vegetable restaurant or hushpuppies any place. Please let me know if you have kicked us out of the South. Before that I was from Appalachian Pennsylvania and West Virginia which are lot like the South except we say you-ens instead of you all. My story also takes place in the South. So, I guess I got my bases covered. I understand you like under 1,000 words and I tried but I guess, like horseshoes, it doesn’t count because I got 1,150 words. Hope you still like it. Lydia, Janine and James are really good Southern people. Leticia and Bobby, too.

d prefer to let the work speak for itself as much as possible. Its set in Lousiana and up the Ohio river. And though it doesn’t all take place in the physical south, it all takes place in the mental south. The river mind.

Although after living in the South for over thirty years, I still find it more natural to say “You guys” than “Y’all,” I hadn’t realized how Southern my progeny had become until a recent dinner with my son and his family. My son, who was born and raised in Atlanta, prepared curried chicken over grits.

Born and raised along the graceful river traces in Louisiana, I kept a keen ear and eye on things around me. I must have known that one day I would write about all the feuds and fistfights, scandals and scams, and hellfire and salvation that brought color to our little world. In between time, we feasted on a mess of what folks today call “soul food”: cornbread and collards, grits and gravy, catfish and hushpuppies, sweet potato fries and pecan pie, hot water bread and purple hull peas. We had no special name for our “cuisine” — just “food.” It costs a lot more once you give it a fancy name.

Southern Legitimacy Statement
I was born in Alabama, and I now live in Maryland. Maryland is a Southern state, you know. It’s below the Mason-Dixon line. Llots of Yankee transplants would say different, but Yankees don’t have a clue about Southern geography. There’s home (the South), and “up North” (everywhere else). There are home folks (Southerners), and Yankees (everyone else). I make scrumptious fried chicken and biscuits. I believe barbeque is the food of the gods. My blood runs sweet tea.

I am 8th generation Virginian recent transplant to Berkeley CA. Willa Cather is a distant cousin, or was. I love Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams too.

My mind went South in 1964. I was 16, playing football on
sorry-looking fields in front of twenty people on Saturday
afternoons. A teammate bought a magazine and we saw what
Friday Night Lights looked like in Valdosta, Georgia: ten
thousand people in the stands, the gold-and-black uniforms
shining like silk. I started wishing I’d been born there, not
realizing I might have had trouble benching the Valdosta
playbook. My fantasies moved to Knoxville. I dreamed next of
hurling my then-170 pounds at ‘Bama fullbacks, denying them
the checkerboard end zones of Neyland Stadium. Football
passed. Country music took its place. I would boom-box the car
radio and broadcast George Strait and Shelly West to the
unenlightened folk of my backward northern town: New York
City. For the record, I have spent (not done) time in Virginia
and Maryland, for sundry purposes, all of them legal. I have
eaten Southern cooking there and, when he was with us, I never
missed Justin Wilson on the TV. Thanks to him, I now use
Louisiana Hot Sauce on selected breakfast items.

Ain’t it just like a bunch of Southern folks to have to qualify how Southern they are to other people claiming to be Southern on a site devoted to Southern Letters, so that the other so-called Southerners won’t question the validity of whatever it is they are about to say about some peculiarity of Southern life, their life? Ain’t that just like us. ‘Cause it don’t really matter none to us about what gets said about the South so much as it does who is do the talking. I mean, my granddaddy was born in Tennessee; and if he got to telling me about a flood that that flooded the river over forty feet above the bank when he was little, no doubt I’d have known by his word exactly what happened in the biggest flood in a half-century. But if I didn’t know where he was raised, and I couldn’t hear him tell it in person, then I’d have been real skeptical about a story like that myself. ‘Cause I don’t want somebody else from outside the region telling our stories. So, normally I feel no need to validate my Southern Blood— but I’ll gladly do it here: Born in Nashville. Raised out on Piney River. Schooled up on the Cumberland Plateau. Still here. I’ve seen the Grand Ole Opry live no telling how many times. I know what a hogsucker is. I know what a pole cat is. If someone says they measured out a rick, I know what they measured and what the final dimensions are. I’ve heard the old stories. I’ve listened to the tales.I’ve made my pilgrimage to Rowan Oak. I can bring ten orange pekoe tea bags to a quick boil in a medium sauce pan. I can bring the water down to a simmer, and slowly pull the flavor from the leaves in the bags. After they’ve simmered long enough, I can pour that hot tea in with two and a half cups of sugar and enough water to make a gallon and a half out of the sweet medicine. Then I can pour it over ice (maybe a tiny bit of lemon), and go on living another day. Been here all my life. So if ya’ll don’t mind I’d like to tell a story about some places and folks I know.

I’m from Grayson County Kentucky which may not be the deep south but to most folks it is the south as I learned when we moved to California back in 1955 ten years before the state started tipping into the ocean from too many people, cars, freeways and earthquakes where friends called me “Kentuck” and others just “dumb hillbilly” and a teacher once accused me of abusing the English language and I said I abused it no more than Bill Shakespeare and he said get out of my class…

Justin Smith was born in a border town in deep South Texas, and he’s spent most of his life trying to figure out if that qualifies him as Southern or not. His favorite pastimes include listening to unordained pirate radio preachers on the AM dial and drinking cheap bourbon.

Bred and buttered in Lynchburg, Virginia. Been frog gigging and fishing with a hula popper. Had chiggers and poison ivy. Went to college at Virginia Tech. Know how to make buttermilk biscuits and blackberry cobbler. Love my mom and got more dogs than cats. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

Reared in Mississippi; married in Louisiana; raised a family in Texas. When I get north of Kentucky I get shortness of breath, cold sweats, blurred vision. It’s a weary existence far from home.

I grew up and continue to live in the flatwoods outside Baxley, Georgia. Aside from that, my story serves as my SLS. If that’s not enough, we must have drastically different interpretations of what constitutes “southern-ness.”

SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY STATEMENT:
Not countin’ schoolin’, I have lived in the south, in the North Carolina mountains, for my en-tire natural life to this very point in time. My father is partly to blame for this. His humorless ancestors (judging by the few pictures we have) were among the earliest settlers of Ashe County, although I don’t believe it had been so identified when they got there. Named after Samuel Ashe, a patriot of the Revolutionary War and notable jurist of the Superior Court bench, Ashe County is stuck uncomfortably in the northwesternmost corner of the Carolinas with Virginia on the immediate north and Tennessee just to the west, right in the saddle of the wandering Blue Ridge Mountains. Jefferson is the county seat, and Jefferson is where I grew up. If anyone ever knew how my father’s family first found themselves clawin’ out an existence in this cold mountain town, they have long since been silenced by slow, inexorable time and no record of that journey was left behind. So no one knows for sure. I suspect they must have migrated to the mountains sometime before the town and county were incorporated, such that it appeared to everyone thereafter that father’s family was simply indigenous to the area, as if like rhododendrons they had sprung up out of the cold ground at the beginning of time. It is doubtless no secret therefore that I carry what is almost certainly compromised genetic material, but that, I s’pose, balances out about right with knowin’ where yer from.

I was born in Forrest City, AR. Moved to Russellville, AR when I was four. Went to college in Boca Raton, FL, for a year to play football. People thought I was dumb because I talked slower than them. By about mid-semester most of the team was coming to me for help in Composition One. Wore boots, a red flannel, and Wranglers out to my first ever club in Fort Lauderdale and got some funny looks. After one year, transferred back to Arkadelphia, AR, and now attend Ouachita Baptist University. I still play ball.

My grandfather’s grandfather was a doctor who graduated from Vanderbilt and was a field surgeon in the General Sterling Price’s southern cavalry–the War broke him and he became an alcoholic, though he was sober enough to deliver my grandfather. The family story goes that the Johnstons–my grandmother’s people–were related to the Civil War Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Albert Sydney Johnston. My grandmother’s father was a spy for the South at 14 and when he died at 84 still had the saber scar on his bottom where a Union captain sliced him and cut off the back of his saddle as he escaped from an inn after throwing a cup of coffee in the face of a black man who sat at the table across from him–this story was told with pride when I was a boy and at the age of five it made me sick. Martin King is my most beloved American and my childhood friends were blacks, hispanics and dust-bowl whites from Oklahoma, Arkansas, etc. My mother was a graduate of Stanford, but as a boy at a poor school I said “k-a-i-n-t” instead of “can’t” in order to fit in and not embarrass my less fortunate friends. Half the South after the Civil War and the Dust Bowl ended up in California, where I was born. That’s how my people got out here, and they were still talking about the burning of Atlanta when I was a boy.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in Austin and was born in San Antonio, which are technically in the South but fall more in the Southwestern category. However, I did go to summer camp in Tennessee, which inspired this story, and I am currently raising three gulf coast box turtles (exclusive to the South) in my bathroom.