Poetry Editor’s Note:
Each April the Dead Mule publishes a Poet Laureate of a Southern State at the top its list of fine poets. This year’s honor goes to Cathy Smith Bowers, Poet Laureate of North Carolina. Born in South Carolina and Southern to the core, Cathy is the sixth in the Dead Mule’s April Poet Laureate Series.
So help me welcome Cathy to our Big Ole Southern Family.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I once had a migraine in Savannah. I saw the cherry blossoms blooming in Macon. I ate shrimp and grits in Charleston. I survived a family vacation and a freak storm in Ft. Lauderdale. I did not “Eat at Joe’s” in Nashville, but I saw the sign. I drank wine and fell in love with a bearded man I’ll never see again in Makanda, Illinois, and while that might not be the official south, it seemed pretty darn close.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Hey Ya’ll. My name is Jenny Billings Beaver (used to be Jenny Elizabeth Billings – SO OLD FASHIONED) and I have lived in North Carolina my entire life. I grew up on a dairy farm – in fact, I lived so far in the country that we didn’t get cable, pizza deliveries or any-kind-of-traffic until 2002. I didn’t have a bike, I rode around our 30 acres on a golf cart – that was long after we moved out of our marigold yellow mobile home with white shutters and grassy green carpet that sat under a weeping willow (it died when Hurricane Hugo came through in 1989). I drank only sweet tea the first 18 years of my life, still call my grandfather “Poppa”, love me some grits and sausage (with a lil’ mustard, of course!) and for god sake – married a man with the last name “Beaver” on Halloween. Bless my heart!
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I’ve lived in NC all my life. When I travel North, I often find I’m the only person in the room without an accent. I believe in seeking forgiveness for my sins, but I can’t make myself ashamed of committing adultery. I understand why Southerners never move North to retire. I refuse to eat anything I can’t pronounce. If it weren’t for vampires, I’d have no use for garlic. I know what a “potteridge” is and know that to correctly pronounce it you have to slur at least one syllable. I believe in being polite to your face. If you have to ask for chili on a hot dog, somebody ain’t from around here. I deal with my high blood pressure by getting no exercise. I only drink cheap domestic beer and I never drink just one. I’m only grammatically correct when I choose to be.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was raised on cornbread, fried chicken and okra in a small town in South Carolina. My great grandfather fought in the Civil War. I have a photo of him with his mule. That mule is now dead.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I come from cotton farmers on the one side and subsistence farmers on the other. I grew up in a parsonage that was located on a hill above a road that forked three ways; each fork led to a separate washboard red dirt road. During the summer they poured oil on the roads. The smell of those roads is embedded in my memory.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Everybody’s dead and visiting the graveyard just don’t feel the guilt like a good plate of almost black collards, a streak of fat, a streak of lean, two cathead biscuits to sop up grandma’s molasses. It’s about being here in the barren field with a winter wind kicks up the dust and spirits run length wise down the empty roads. I don’t know if northerners are haunted by the dead or not, I’ve never been one. I’ve been here all my life, one thirty mile loop and you can visit every grave that’s inked in the back of this ole Bible passed down to my daddy and he stole it and passed it to me and I don’t know much about southern except that’s all I have ever known.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
How many people can claim to have had a pet roach as a child? I can. For all kinds of reasons, that confession has to legitimize my southern roots. What else can it say? The roach lived in a mayonnaise jar in my closet for a little while, and then it died. I became a poet at an early age. Eventually my mother let bring a kitten home from next door.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was conceived on a houseboat on the Ashley River in Charleston, South Carolina and was born in Monroe, North Carolina first year of the Baby Boomers. I got my undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. My kin, Irish immigrants to North and South Carolina, fought for the Confederacy. I drive miles out of my way to eat Lexington Barbeque, and belong to a band of pirates and sailors, Brothers of the Coast, located in Savannah, Georgia. I live in the town of Black Mountain in western North Carolina.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
When some of the phrases you remember hearing in your childhood are: “I swannee,” “Bless your heart,” and “Law have mercy,” you were probably brought up in the South. So, I reckon I’m Southern enough to suit The Mule!
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Biscuits every Sunday morning: Preheat oven to 450. 2 cups flour, ¼ tsp baking soda, 1 TBSP baking powder and 1 tsp salt in the blue pottery bowl Mama gave me. Cut 6 TBSP butter into chunks and cut into flour, add 1 cup buttermilk, easy now, moisten until JUST combined. Turn dough onto the old board, perfectly floured. Gently pat biscuits out and cut into rounds. Bake 10-12 minutes. Serve with salted ham, eggs lightly scrambled, fried apples, and, of course, fresh tomatoes. Every Southern girl knows how to make a Southern breakfast.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I’ve lived in the South nearly all my life. My crawfish boils will clear your sinuses for a week, and I will put just about anything in my fridge into the pot. Though I don’t know about mules, I know that horses make 50 pounds of poop each day, which I have to scoop from their pasture.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born below the Mason-Dixon Line in Washington, D.C., a North/South limbo gumbo to a French mother who hated Southern France and a father who loved Charleston thanks to his long gone Citadel days. My dad’s Beaufort, SC ancestors fought in Petersburg in the War of Northern Aggression and his grandfather has an elementary school named for him on Parris Island. I am a Southern girl because way before I lived in Charleston and Myrtle Beach I knew I had a high humidity tolerance and felt comfortable driving without hubcaps. I still know how to avoid all of the sketchy roads in Charleston and I’m mistaken for a native by the tourists every time I visit this fine city—it must be my floppy straw hat and blue flip flops. Today as a Tar Heel I’m hopelessly addicted to bacon, I freak while driving in snow, and I love to spin tales that may not have a point.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I am a proud Virginian, the Dogwood state. If I was going to get switched, it wasn’t going to be from a branch of the dogwood. And I did get switched on occasion because my grandmother believed, “Spare the rod, and spoil the child.” She had to make up for Poppie’s lack of discipline. He’d let me play Barbershop and lather his head with Old Spice, and taught me Solitaire which he played by pulling his chair to the bedside, the cards laid across the peacock bedspread. He scooped out oysters from the stew so I could savor the liquid. We ate jelly-roll cake together. When Granny’s day ended, we sat on the porch swinging, the morning glories closed by now. She played the harmonica and, Tango, the dog howled. That old house still stands, and beside it the apple tree I climbed.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I have eaten fried squirrel, instructed by my parents to be careful to avoid the lead shot.
I can detect a phony Southern accent on TV or in movies in three-quarters of a second. Shockingly, almost no non-Southern actor can master one. Not even DeNiro or Streep.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in the South, raised in the South, left the South, and came on back to the South. I capitalize South. Margaret Mitchell grew up playing on land her great-grandparents bought from my great-great grandparents. If you go back far enough the Dickson’s and the Dixon’s are the same dang folk. My first book was half-about the Civil War. I know how to make cornbread without looking at a recipe and it doesn’t have sugar in it. I think that’s a Yankee thang. At least I know a Yankee who puts sugar in his cornbread.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Does the Southwest count? My grandfather was one of the original dust bowl Oakies who found a home for himself, and eventually his family in Los Angeles where I was born in 1967 before moving to Northern California at age 4, and then later as an young adult I lived in Las Vegas NV for five years. Otherwise I spent six weeks at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio Texas and four weeks at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi Mississippi. I know what it is to be hot and swarmed by bugs the size of mice. I understand the pointlessness of drying off after a shower in the Gulf Coast region during summer. And to this day, I can’t turn down the biscuits and gravy on any menu anywhere, especially if the gravy has alligator sausage.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
A daughter and granddaughter of women christened “Dixie” I was called Dixie by my father for three days, until my mother came out of the anesthesia and said, “Bless her little heart, I can’t do that to her.” Both my parents were born in Raleigh, NC. Their parents, grandparents, great grandparents, and so on back into the humid mists of time were Tarheels. We know how to suck the sweet from honeysuckles, how to soothe a bee sting with tobacco, when to flip a pillow to sleep on the cool side, and the charm of talc-soft red dirt stirred into a dust devil by a Chevy Impala on an unpaved road. Unlike the colonists from above the Mason-Dixon Line, I know “ma’am” is not just for addressing the elderly and that “barbeque” is a noun, not a verb. I also know that your mama’s sister’s husband’s children’s offspring are your cousins. And that you and I are also probably cousins of some degree. Who are your people?
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I married into the South, have in-laws named Bibba and Boots, prefer Waffle House to Eggs Benedict and never use y’all as a singular form of address. That’s about the best a Brooklyn boy has to bring to the table (and I will show up at that table for greens and fried okra).
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
My grandmother used to talk about Louisiana and the heat and the humidity and how her brother would take his boat into the swamps and pull catfish the size of dogs right up out of the water with his bare hands and when she married my grandfather born in Chicago they spent a miserable year down there before moving away never going back.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Having retired from teaching at a university in Ohio in 1995, Harding Stedler moved to Arkansas to spend retirement. Besides writing poetry, he volunteers at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
When I first crossed the North Carolina state line in August, 1980, my radio sang, “We love you, North Carolina.” I was driving my first car, an AMC Gremlin, one of the worst cars ever built, hauling all my possessions from my childhood home in St. Louis to Chapel Hill, where I would spend the next eight years. That jingle on the radio surprised me because I never heard anyone sing, “We love you, Missouri.” The southern half of Missouri is in many ways a colonial outpost of the South, and growing up there can induce a derivative sense of identity. I now live in Greensboro, North Carolina and like it very well. It’s almost as if I belong here.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I have lived in Tennessee my entire life—born in Memphis, raised up and educated in and around Knoxville and worked most of my adult life in the Nashville area.
There were many stops at small towns on the way, which taught me more about life than my time spent in the halls of academia or power.
There are some basic things I understand being a Southerner. It is possible to say a great deal while actually speaking very little. A man’s clothes and car do not really tell you how much money he has in the bank. Simple things are the best—fresh eggs, having the time to paint your own porch, your children playing barefoot in the yard, an extra sunny day in late fall and plain whiskey over cold ice.
Being Southern is something you feel in your bones. You are tied to the land, your spirit grafted to the communities of mamas, daddies, granddaddies, grandmas, aunts, uncles, cousins, preachers, teachers friends and enemies that help raise and shape you. When I cross the Cumberland Plateau on Interstate 40 headed to East Tennessee, I feel the pull of all those places that gave birth to me deep down inside.
I am not afraid to say, as a Southerner, that I get angry – viscerally so in some cases—when the South is the butt of the joke. Basically, folks, we don’t give a damn how you did it up North.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I spent years vacationing in the South, visiting friends, relatives, and have always been taken by it’s unique charm and history. In the recent past, I spent countless hours as a disaster relief volunteer in Louisiana and Mississippi, my work in shelters after hurricane Katrina has left me to feel that the South will always be part of my life.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I lived in Charlotte, NC, where I worked as the assistant national editor on the Charlotte Observer.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I am certainly what you would call a southern woman. I grew up in East Tennessee, married then moved to the Western North Carolina mountains then moved even further south to the upstate of South Carolina. Now divorced, I attend a small southern woman’s college while wading hip deep through the world of perm rods, hair spray and tease combs. Hairdressing keeps the mortgage payments current, and my asthma doctor’s budget in the black.
I live in a world where ya’ll is a token word in most conversations, ice tea is strong and harmful to one’s pancreas and grits is considered one of the four essential food groups. I also live in a world, that although I’ve been called a southern gal all my life, I don’t always feel like I fit in. Maybe that’s from being nerdy, somewhat bookish, and exhibiting no real talent or interest for sports of any kind, fishing, hunting, beauty contesting, baton twirling, clogging, shagging, or the baking or the frying of southern culinary delights. I also couldn’t tell you who is in the running for this year’s NASCAR driver of the year award if my life depended on it.
But where else but here in the south can you get peaches and strawberries picked fresh that morning? Where else does the hint of snow send two thirds of the county scrambling to the grocery for a week of supplies? Where else can one spend the summer partaking in the battle of trying to get something to grow in your backyard besides fire ant colonies?
What I am is woman who lives in a place I can’t imagine ever leaving. I raised my kids here, my grand-kids were born here. My four cats were deposited upon my doorstep here. I’m a southern woman, and quite content with the label. Now can someone pass me a glass of that iced tea? I’m rather parched.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
Someone in my family says ‘yonder.’ Need I say more?
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
I was born in Petersburg, VA during the Korean War and lived there for the first few years of my life. Later on during the mid-seventies, I lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I was stationed for a while in the army at Fort Benning, GA. My wife was born and raised in Savannah. My parents and several of my siblings live in Florida and Virginia. My best memory of the South was a week-long camping trip I made to the Smoky Mountains in the seventies.
Southern Legitimacy Statement:
As I’ve said in the past, my Southern Legacy stems from my father’s side, born in Florala, Alabama.