Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda was appointed Poet Laureate, 2006-2008, for the Commonwealth of Virginia by Governor Timothy M. Kaine. She is the author of several books and anthologies. Her poems have appeared throughout the United States and abroad in numerous publications. Her many poetry honors include three Pushcart Prize nominations. She has been named a Virginia Cultural Laureate for her contributions to American Literature. And yet, when the Mule asked her for poems, she replied by saying, “How kind of you to write to request a poetry submission.” The last three poems are from Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda’s newly released book, River Country.

Please welcome our newest Poet Laureate Mule Poet, Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I said to my friend Tim, “I don’t know how poets in other parts of the country have anything to write about. We seem to have such a monopoly on the bizarre, the pathetic, and the passionately contradictory.” I said this after telling him about my mother’s seventh husband’s father who lived in the same four-room house with his wife and his ex-wife. They were sisters. They lived in the same community where everyone I knew under the age of 18 was taught to say “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” and switched or backhanded if they didn’t. It is the South’s brutal civility, stubborn independence, intolerant faith, and other everyday idiosyncrasies that constitute the seemingly inexhaustible source of the Southern writer.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it help if I say that I was so homesick for South Carolina two weeks ago that I got into Google Earth and called up a tiny corner of Williamsburg County, my mother’s birthplace, and then moved to the small town of Sumter, where I was born, to find the exact neighborhood where I once played with my brothers in the dirt with our coal bucket in the backyard? It’s possible that living where I have lived for twenty years, southern Appalachia, could make me a southerner, but that’s not the case. My roots are in South Carolina, and when spring comes I’m like a dog catching a scent in the air. I want to get in the car and drive down the mountain to the low country where I was born and bred, where generations of my family were born and bred. Two years ago I brought my mother, Mama, up near me to live, and you’d think that having her with her equally southern accent and charm ten miles down the road in a cozy nursing home that I visit almost too much would make me feel as if I’d brought the most important part of South Carolina, my father already buried down there, up to me. I’ll tell you the truth. When the two of us get together and sit on the porch (since I picked her nursing home because it has a porch and flowers she can tend and horses across the street that we can watch and all the loving care you’d get in a big extended family living in a big house the way her family did a few generations ago), it’s almost like being back on her porch. But it’s not quite the same.
Would I lose points if I said I qualify for Colonial Dames but am not at all likely ever to join? Having moved away from the South Carolina where my family had lived for generations without straying far, having married a man from New Jersey, having borne a son who doesn’t talk like he comes from South Carolina—these things should not be held against me.

I currently live in Meadowview, a rural town in Virginia near the border of Tennessee, and work in Emory, an even more rural town in the interior of Meadowview (Emory is a village within a town, a very small village within a very small town).

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I live in the Deep South—southwest Louisiana. I am a Cajun woman who loves her culture, its traditions, music and food. I am the Gumbo Queen. I make a mean crawfish étouffée. I can gut and skin a catfish, play bourrée (A Cajun card game) and sing hundred-year old songs in French. I love our coastal wetlands, mossy oaks, Cypress swamps, prairies, muddy bayous and all manner of flora and fauna which thrive in our natural areas, especially those organisms which can be baked, stewed, roasted, fried or fricasseed.

Kevin Blankenship served as a Poetry Co-Editor of the Dead Mule.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I drink tea that’s sweet and eat cornbread that ain’t. I somehow feel responsible and guilty all the time, I’m polite to all, I put my enemies back on their horses and I let them tilt at me again! I raised chickens and rabbits in the dirt in my backyard before and after school. My daddy took me hunting on Sundays. While I stood frozen and dumb, amazed at the birds and the four-leggers who sprung from their hiding spots, my daddy would shake his head at me, and with an expert shot, drop them. His shot was so expert he had time to chastise me with a look - before he took down the quarry. Hell even the dogs would look disappointed in me. I rarely rode my horse, and instead just enjoyed feeding him ’til he looked like a barrel with legs. But when I did ride him I tried to joust - I jousted against posts, and bottles set on rocks - and fell off… losing to branches and made the horses laugh and laugh. I fall in love too much. Girls have told me, I’m TOO SWEET. Every summer I forget about the chiggers and I get well over 300 bites on my ankles that make me lose about a week’s worth of sleep - and so I write these insane stories. I practiced getting rid of my “Y’all”, and “might could” - because I wanted to be a punk rocker, and I never knew that I could be a southern punk. I’m always miles behind.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it suffice to say that I wish I was from the South—I have ‘Southern Envy’ or whatever you’d like to call it. We all know the best writers come from the South. Who wouldn’t want to read Carson McCullers or Ellen Gilchrist? Who wouldn’t want to write like them? I almost went to LSU for my MFA, but then I couldn’t afford it. Oh, and there was that time I had a mullet in college, but that was really an accident.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up in Joliet Illinois, which is just Southern enough to have kidnapped from the Southern repertoire. Joliet is just close enough, tough enough, and within close proximity enough to the South to qualify as Southern. If you travel a little further east into town and purport not to know what collard greens and grits are, you may get beaten up. If you don’t have just enough quarters to play Lynyrd Innard’s on the jukebox, or have perused the poetry of Joe Bolton—who hails from Cadiz, Kentucky—then one has yet to experience the finest art the South has to offer regardless where one was raised.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born in a swamp. Really. I have seen alligators crossing the road. I have (illegally) eaten said alligators. When I was in middle school I had to write “‘Ain’t’ is not a word” 28,366 times thanks to one English teacher (supposedly a carpetbagger) whose mission it was to beat the southern out of us. So I grew up and studied linguistics in college. I now pray silently for the day when a teacher tries the same trick on one of my children, so I can throw my weight around in defense of our culture. We must not be punished for our dialect. Ya’ll.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

As most of yawl may or may not be, I am a self professed proud country boy from the Bar B Q soul food and Blues capital of the universe—Memphis. If there is anything I need in the world to survey outside of women (plural) and my family, its my Rifle, my pickup truck and house shoes, and a news paper or two won’t hurt none either. And please, don’t look at me funny when I am in a restaurant and pull out my hot sauce, because it is way different from Tabasco.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I am Southern because I was born and have always lived in the South. I am not sure I could be objective enough to point out what qualities I might have that are Southern since I have never lived anywhere other than here, but I know that I do have some of those qualities. Well, at least the ones that someone from North Carolina would have.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Land surrounds my home, so beware of the dog.
I eat beans from the can and I love pot liquor.
My boots track mud, my pickup blows smoke, and I still pledge allegiance to the flag.
Sundays are devoted to God and NASCAR.
I’m southern and country.
The kindest asshole you’ll ever meet.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born and raised in the Carolinas. My long distance family members live in Virginia, and have passed down the great love that I have for gravy and biscuits in the morning and beans, fried potatoes and cornbread at dinner.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up mainly in Missouri, which would probably make me a Southern Yankee…

I recently moved to North Carolina, with my wife, who is a native Texan from a very Southern family. I came to learn how Southern her family was in an entertaining, and semi frightening, manner. One of her brothers jokingly called me a Yankee. Hearing this, my wife’s grandma became agitated, and demanded to know what a Yankee was doing in the house.

So I guess you could say I am Southern through migration, marriage, and initiation.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My life in the South began with the ridiculous transition from a metropolis in the land of the rising sun to a small town in Georgia five minutes from the Alabama border. A child without any English speaking skills absorbing all the goodness of southern hospitality. I lived on Dixie Street in a historic house and had an accent recognizable by locals in Colorado during summer vacation trips. I forgot my native language and was forced to attend Saturday school sessions for Japanese students living in the United States. I have grown, as has my love for the South.

It’s a full slate of Poetry at Its Finest. Starting April 1st and we’re not fooling. Helen Losse, Poetry Editor, put together an amazing collection of the best poets, just for our dear Mule readers.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up playing baseball on fields with chicken wire backstops and no outfield fences. We named our dogs after the ones on the Beverly Hillbillies. We weren’t farmers, but we raised two acres of potatoes, an acre of peanuts, and slaughtered a black angus bull every other year. We named the bulls after famous explorers. The biggest dare was riding a bike across the top of the textile mill dam.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

In one sense, my response to the idea that “southern legitimacy” is something I need to demonstrate exists in the form of a poem: “cause i’m from dixie too.” (It appears in my book a half-red sea.) On the other hand, since this a requirement for all contributors to The Dead Mule, my poem is not exactly apropos! So I will simply say that I was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee.

[Don’t miss the Dead Mule interview with Evie. Just click on “essays.”]

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have lived in North Carolina my whole life (except the first 6 months of it and the first 6 months after graduation from undergrad when I lived as far away as Virginia). I grew up in Pasquotank and Perquimans Counties, went to college in Greensboro and ended up in Charlotte.

My great-grandfather was supposedly Cherokee. But his last name was Driggers AND he may have changed it to hide from the law. So . . .

And then there was that time in high school when I said “ya’ll” in front of a German exchange student and then had to explain. Good thing he didn’t ask me the name of what I was eating and drinking at the time. Heaven forbid I had to explain an RC cola and a moon-pie.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I live in Louisiana. Most of my recent writing has taken place on airplanes or in airports on my travels between the South and the Non-South. We are our own breed. As Flannery O’Connor put it, “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I have one uncle and my wife has one uncle. Both uncles are certain that the War of Northern Aggression is still being fought. Either will bend your ear, at supper or a funeral, about how the South is on the cusp of victory because them fools north of the Mason-Dixon still don’t realize the war never really ended. My wife and I bristle a little at this talk, and wish we could dissuade our uncles, but how could we? They’re South Carolina boys, and we both had the poor sense to be born, schooled, and settled in North Carolina. What could we possibly know about the South?

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I grew up in Michigan, but my mom is from Tennessee, so I suppose my first language was Southern. Every summer my mom would drive us kids down to Chattanooga to visit with my Gran and other relatives. Banana pudding, Rock City, sweet tea, cobwebby Confederama*, 8-ounce Cokes = childhood summers. Funny that I married a Nashville musician — I’ve lived here almost 20 years now.

*Confederama is now called The Battles for Chattanooga Museum. (Rolling my eyes.)

Folks, if you don’t know Carter, then you ain’t been reading the Mule.

my southern statement thing:

I lived the first major chunk of my life near Little Rock, Arkansas and the second big chunk, the one I’m in now, in Birmingham, Alabama. Sometime in there, I spent four years in Memphis. Yes, my life has been sort of like a Civil Rights Movement bus tour.

I’m grateful for the experience and mindful of all my beautiful neighbors along the way.

Southern Legitimacy statement:
I grew up on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas. When I was a boy, I had a redboned hound named Red. My sister, though, had a cat named Dog.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

My favorite food is chicken and sausage gumbo—and I have to add boiled crawfish too, yeah. I’m plenty educated, but my accent still drips with that Cajun patois, cher. I love Cajun, Zydeco and Blues music—I play it in my pick up loud enough to drown out those rappers booming out of those rap mobiles. If God is not Cajun, I’m not sure there can be a heaven. Oh yeah, I think beer is food.

I was born, raised, and still live just barely south of the Mason/Dixon line, also known as the Ohio River. I eat okra and fried catfish and buttermilk cornbread. I know how to make doughballs to catch the catfish. I read Faulkner, I’m bored by Updike. I cried all the way through Their Eyes Were Watching God and can just about begin to know what Flannery O’Connor meant by “Good Country People.” I subscribe to The Oxford American, I don’t subscribe to The New Yorker. I listen to Muddy Waters, I’m bored by Tony Bennett. I knew all the words to “Goodnight Irene” and could belt them in roadhouses before I could read. I consider Robert Johnson one of the best poets of the twentieth century.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it help if I say that I was so homesick for South Carolina two weeks ago that I got into Google Earth and called up a tiny corner of Williamsburg County, my mother’s birthplace, and then moved to the small town of Sumter, where I was born, to find the exact neighborhood where I once played with my brothers in the dirt with our coal bucket in the backyard? It’s possible that living where I have lived for twenty years, southern Appalachia, could make me a southerner, but that’s not the case. My roots are in South Carolina, and when spring comes I’m like a dog catching a scent in the air. I want to get in the car and drive down the mountain to the low country where I was born and bred, where generations of my family were born and bred. Two years ago I brought my mother, Mama, up near me to live, and you’d think that having her with her equally southern accent and charm ten miles down the road in a cozy nursing home that I visit almost too much would make me feel as if I’d brought the most important part of South Carolina, my father already buried down there, up to me. I’ll tell you the truth. When the two of us get together and sit on the porch (since I picked her nursing home because it has a porch and flowers she can tend and horses across the street that we can watch and all the loving care you’d get in a big extended family living in a big house the way her family did a few generations ago), it’s almost like being back on her porch. But it’s not quite the same.

Would I lose points if I said I qualify for Colonial Dames but am not at all likely ever to join? Having moved away from the South Carolina where my family had lived for generations without straying far, having married a man from New Jersey, having borne a son who doesn’t talk like he comes from South Carolina—these things should not be held against me.

I currently live in Meadowview, a rural town in Virginia near the border of Tennessee, and work in Emory, an even more rural town in the interior of Meadowview (Emory is a village within a town, a very small village within a very small town).

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, I’m a related to Margaret Mitchell on my mother’s side of the family and I once kissed Butterfly McQueen. It doesn’t get any more southern than that, ya’ll.

Jillian was raised by a pipe organ builder and a Montessori teacher, neither of whom have accents or ancestors who participated in the War Between the States, but her mamma makes the hands-down best pecan pie anywhere in the world. As further proof of her southern legitimacy, please note that Jillian dated a NASCAR fanatic (yes, she’s been to Bristol) and a paintball junkie, then married an Arkansas catfish farmer’s son, who is, as her father-in-law puts it “landed gentry”. If that don’t make her southern, nothin’ will. You wanna fight about it?

Southern Legitimacy Statement:

I was born a “Telfair baby” here in Savannah, Georgia. Telfair was the Woman’s Hospital that faced Forsyth Park in historic Savannah. My parents walked next door to have me as they lived in the Round House, meaning the porch went all the way around, circling the old home , built before the Victorian era at 10 East Duffy Street.
When I would “go missing” they’d find me taking a tour of the hospital with one of the nurses showing me off. I got off onto the social ladder in this way.

Being Southern means knowing the etiquette handed down by the genes and knowing when to draw out that twang a little longer when there was an audience. I milked it for everything it was worth.

My father was assigned to the USS Savannah, a Naval Destroyer Escort that made her maiden voyage from Savannah. He met my mother as she was walking her dog through Chippewa Square (famous now for Forest Gump’s “life’s a box of chocolates”. They were
married shortly after they met and went on to raise eight children in those huge houses that the south is noted for from way back. I was raised on hoe cakes and cane syprup and grits with tomato gravy.

The south is more than tradition for me. It’s a religion of heritage and pride. I’ve traveled the world since my birth and the one redeeming factor with all people all over is when they hear the southern accent, a huge grin comes over their faces and they ask you to say …waw ta (water) again and again. Being a true southern belle is an institution that isn’t found anywhere else in this world and reason enough to be proud of the passion found only in the great tradition called “Dixie”. I’m a proud part of that institution and endear the tradition in my heart and I wouldn’t trade Dixie for all the high cotton on earth.
~Susan Kathryn de vegter~

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I am Southern because I choose to be. I was raised in the very cold Midwest. I then moved to sunny Los Angeles where I met my husband who was born in Baton Rouge, LA. Every time we would go to Louisiana to visit family and friends we never wanted to return to California. Then Katrina. We decided that we would rather be in the muck with our friends than two thousand miles away, frantic with worry and helpless to do anything about it.

Less than a year later we sold our house, packed up our animals and bought a house in Lafayette and I couldn’t be happier. The people are friendly, lunch is an enjoyment of company, not a meeting and then there is the matter of crawfish and po-boys!

Southern Legitimacy Statement
Although I was born beneath the Mason-Dixon line, I grew up in the Midwest, and only after graduate school did I return for a decade to my southern roots. First my wife and I lived in San Marcos, Texas, where our next-door neighbor was an elderly woman named Eula Sutherland, who hailed originally from Georgia and who would invite us at every opportunity into her apartment to share long conversations and her homemade cake or pie, sometimes which had ants crawling on it: she never seemed to notice. Next we moved to Blacksburg, Virginia, taught at Virginia Tech, and fell in love with the Blue Ridge Mountains. When we finally returned to the Midwest, we had grown so accustomed to the effusive friendliness of the people of the South that we at first thought everyone we met was brusque and rude. Since then, of course, we have adjusted, and, indeed, are probably brusque and rude ourselves.

My friends here in Ohio are always asking me to tell them about where I grew up. They love to hear stories about entertaining myself in the piney woods of south Alabama by stirring for doodlebugs, tying strings to Junebugs and flying them like kites, making necklaces from chinaberries, and watching the boys play ball on sandspur lots. They want me to have them over for purple-hulled peas, vegetable eggs (otherwise known as eggplants), fried anything, sweet potato pie, and Luzianne coffee. And they know my #1 comfort food is grits. Even my Yankee husband knows that.

I think my love of Southern writing blossomed the summer after 10th grade, when every ladies’ club around Bradleyton asked me to give a program about To Kill a Mockingbird. Later I was one of the founders of the Unofficial Pike County William Styron Fan Club and (the summer Nixon resigned) went to the first Faulkner Symposium.

What I miss most about living in the South is the voices, the accents, the “bless her heart” that no one in the Midwest seems to offer.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Though I live near DC now, I am still a country girl at heart. I grew up on the border of North Carolina, and I am here to tell you that the sky really is bluer there than anywhere else. It’s Tarheel blue actually. I miss mornings waking up to eat my biscuits with Karo syrup with Granddaddy in front of the wood stove. There will never be anything more enjoyable than running the paper route with Granddaddy in his ‘73 Dodge Ram and eating peanut butter crackers while drinking Mama’s sweet tea from a Mason jar. It’s times like those that my poems are trying to hold on to.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born and raised in the feudal mill village of Kannapolis, North Carolina in the 1950’s, have never lived outside the state, and don’t want to. When I was a child my neighbor Preacher Pethel ran a country store, plowed everyone’s victory garden with a mule during the week, and preached hell-fire on the weekends. If that’s not enough to get your Mule ear’s listening, then let me tell you that I eat banana sandwiches, okra, and collards, and drink sweet tea with abandon. Being southern, I am full of lovely loving contradictions and thus hate white grits which to my taste should only be eaten as a condiment for pools of butter; but I adore yellow grits, and stone or water ground grits. I think kudzu in flower is one of the earth’s great pleasures. I was born knowing the difference between eastern and western North Carolinians, and eastern and western NC barbecue [both noun and verb]. Of Appalachian Scots-Irish and Cherokee stock, one would think I would prefer Lexington-style cue , but I don’t, even though it’s just fine; rather give me some Wilson, NC barbecue anytime [although, now, in truth, the best cue anywhere, except in Italy, is at the Barbecue Joint in Chapel Hill]. Having been eastern Indian in my last life, I embrace Vedanta and Jesus [the real one not the current day self-righteous one], and given a choice between my fantasy desert island only meal of country style steak, lima beans, sweet potato biscuits, and grandma Gill’s pound cake or Goa Fish Curry, onion chutney, paratha, and raita, I’d probably have both and ask for more. Some folks might not consider most of my work southern enough, but I do. It don’t matter to me. My vale of humility has room enough for other’s mountains of conceit. Oh, and Neese’s sausage is just great, especially the extra sage. But sometime look out for Tom Thumb or Thingamajig from the Wilson County area, and watch out!

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
No one believes i grew up in rural north Georgia. Not even my family. I only have an accent when I’m sleepy or drinking. I don’t drive a truck, hunt, own a single rebel flag, and the closet thing to a mullet I can claim is a “rat tail” I talked my mother into letting my grow in 4th grade. However, I am the product of several generations living in the same small North Georgia town, where my parents and extended family are now experiencing the beginning stages of Atlanta’s northward sprawl. My theory is that, in response to Sherman, the city has decided to expand in every direction until it consumes the entire continent. I don’t know exactly how I feel about that, but I’ll give it some serious thought as I sip my sweet tea…

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Born raised and breeding kids in Southeast Virginia. Though I had to go to Buffalo to get hitched. Didn’t cross the M/D line till I was 19, and then for only a weekend. Unlike many, I know what’s it like to turn soil all day long, which is why I don’t do it.

Not only have I spent my entire life in Virginia, but I can pick a tick off a sleeping dog, burn that sucker with a match, and get back to the stove before the corncakes need flipping. My front porch is cluttered with furniture that doesn’t match and wasn’t meant to be used outside. I believe two things: 1) The only real cake is red velvet cake; 2) If a woman can’t tuck her money inside her bra, there is no point to wearing one.

I am not submitting poems about mules. They are far too personal. I did, however, listen to Tom Waits sing about a mule… “you gotta get behind the mule every mornin and plow” The recording was sold in the South. I know this for a fact because I bought it in the South, and then played it on my stereo — which I keep in the South — for just such an emergency.

I was born — or so I’ve been told — on the Outer Banks, North Carolina. And though I’ve never seen a mule there, I keep searching.

I was born in Greenville, North Carolina. My mother and father were born in North and South Carolina, respectively. I attended college at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee for two years (majoring in foolishness) and graduated from Tennessee State University in Nashville in 1977 in nursing. I spent almost 25 years in the desert of Arizona in the man-made paradise known as Scottsdale, yet I returned to Nashville last September because I felt a deep need to return to the South.

My ancestors of the Haliwa-Saponi tribe in North Carolina have been there for hundreds of years, and my ancestor, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, was making “colored babies” at least four hundred years ago. I do enjoy collard greens, grits, fried chicken wings, cheese biscuits, chess pie, sweet potato anything, and hot water cornbread. I love Southern gospel and the gut-bucket blues. For these reasons and all of those that elude my conscious mind, and have not yet surfaced, I feel that I am indeed of Southern authenticity.

Kathryn Stripling Byer has not forgotten her southern roots. True, she is the current North Carolina Poet Laureate. True, she has received accolades and praise. True, she is very, very busy. But when the Mule contacted her, asking for poems. she promptly said, “yes,” because she is as southern and polite as we are.

These poems come from Byer’s new manuscript, more mountain women’s voices.

My place of birth is but one example of my Southern Legitimacy. But, entering the world by way of Newport News is not the only southern birthmark I wear. Years (actually more than two decades) spent in that place of perpetual summer (sometimes referred to as Florida) grant me the right to call myself southern. The place I call home now is but another example of my southern authenticy for I reside in North Carolina (though there are those who take issue with the north in the name). And I have to confess that my southern legitimacy is sometimes challenged because of my accent. Early childhood years spent in New England have made their stamp on my speech and the food I crave (no, I never have taken to grits). But, I do love the blue that is fondly called Carolina blue and the sound of crickets, the wonder of fireflies and the history of the land whose pulse beats so close to my heart.

Am I southern because I was born and raised in Wilton and Montevallo, Alabama? Am I southern even though I do not reside anywhere, as they like to say in the south, but am incarcerated on Alabama’s death row at Holman prison?

Does being sent out as a child by my sisters and other pregnant women in my neighborhood in search of a certain quality of dirt and then to the store to buy them boxes of starch to be enjoyed like candy on the porch in the evening qualify me? And what about my also acquiring a taste for the stuff? Almost as delicious as honeysuckle!

I think I know that I am southern when I remember growing up in a small town and hearing some folks referred to as negras. I often wondered who they could be talking about. It could not be me, after all I knew I was black. Ah well….you tell me!

Mr. Miller’s marvelous poem was previously accepted by the Mule. We are proud to publish it in the Spring 2007 issue.

I’ve lived in the Provinces of Eastern North Carolina all my life with the exception of a couple of years (not consecutively) up north. I know that BBQ is a noun and not a verb. The word “tote” is a regular part of my vocabulary. I believe in the basic politeness with which we were all reared and think if we adhere to our raising we are automatically politically correct and believe if you have to think about what you say before you say it, you’re politically incorrect even if you get the words right. That having been said. I don’t believe in political correctness and think art to be impossible to make if such is a consideration. (click on title to read more of Mr. Monroe’s SLS, it’s just amazing… one of the best ever on the Dead Mule…)

What makes me southern?
I wasn’t born in the south. I’m a transplant. I suppose I’m a bit like the kudzu — I started in one region and grew across the southern United States, or maybe it grew on me. There were some people along the way who would’ve liked to get rid of me. But the fact is: I am here to stay. The south and I have a lot in common. We’re both full of contradictions, nostalgia, a sordid past, and at times we’re ruled by these things. Yet there’s still a drive to understand, realize, to maybe even transcend the pain into hope or beauty.

Southern Legitimacy Statement:
-I was born and raised in Pageland, South Carolina, a town of 2500 souls and The Watermelon Capital of the World.
-My great-grandfather Dickson fought with the Palmetto Sharp Shooters in the Civil War. He owned a mule. That mule is now dead.
-I can’t pronounce the ‘g’ in words ending in ‘ing’ if you pay me.
-I would do almost anything for a plate of fried okra, collard greens, crowder peas and fresh cornbread.
-Yes, I still think of my father as ‘Daddy’.

Okay. Okay. Put away them shotguns and embrace just one more yankee. Born in Western New York, I moved to North Carolina twenty-five years ago. It was here I first saw the ocean, drank sweetened tea which was cold instead of hot, and discovered that “homecoming” was not always about high school football. I got my first sunburn, tasted fried okra, and made some of the most lovely friends a woman could hope for. If home is where the heart is, I’ve certainly found it. So, um, does that make me legitimately southern despite the fact I’ve never seen a mule?