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Southern Legitimacy Statement: The simple fact of being a South Carolinian is enough to qualify me as southern, but i feel my inner southerner is a result of being a Barnet woman. A Barnet woman will rip a person to shreds with a wink and a smile. Barnet women are…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Spartanburg, S.C. to a resilient Renaissance woman and a long-haul trucker who would talk to everyone who crossed his path about civil rights. I spent my summer days barefoot in vegetable and flower gardens and spent the winters wishing for snow….
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I don’t know if any of my people were legitimate, but they were most certainly poor dirt farmers in the Carolinas back into the 1600’s. My folks consider sweet potato a vegetable, and salads wiggle like a hula girl’s hips. Is that a decent enough pedigree to…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: As I expressed three years prior, when you were so kind as to accept “The Neurosurgeon’s Rat,” my Southern legitimacy is honorary and based on my near-decade in Fayetteville with my wife and children as I pursued my master’s and doctorate in English from the U. of…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: …taught for five years at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, the oldest college west of the Appalachians where the Deep South used to send their favorite sons. In the years he devoted to writing his award-winning novel about the civil rights movement in Mississippi, The Children Bob…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: When I was 15, I gave away one of the best shirts I’ve ever owned: black, somehow fitted to my gawky frame, with white lettering that read “I (red heart shape) the South.” I sat beside a slightly older girl in geometry who borrowed my vanilla lip…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I come from Charlotte. When I was little, we went to church at Long Creek Baptist, and I was baptized by a preacher named Kenny, all the way under the water, but just for a second, hardly long enough to think I’d died. I never really had…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My family yanked me from Virginia and took me to Alabama when I was ten. Then they left me there when I was 18. I married a boy from Birmingham after getting my MFA from University of Alabama. Steal, steel, and still are homophones in half my…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in the South, raised and educated there, and still choose to live there. From my beginnings and my early perception of the world as I knew it, my political perspective has continually evolved over time. In many respects, if you examine the current political…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’ve lived South of the Mason-Dixon Line for over 30 years, going deeper South with each move. I save my bacon grease, fry my chicken in lard, and make a mean shrimp and grits. My Southern born and raised husband proclaims my cornbread is better than his…
Southern Legitimacy Statement As a native southerner and recovering Alabamian, I understand that we are definitely NOT living in a “Post-Racial” era. We have never spent enough time repairing the damage hundreds of years of slavery and discrimination have done to our collective psyches to be able to boast, honestly,…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born and raised in Oklahoma with sausage gravy and biscuits and grits. My paternal ancestors were removed from Georgia and Tennessee through the Trail of Tears. My family lived on their allotments in the Going Snake District in Indian Territory. My grandmother’s land was sold…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born about as far south as you can go without being in the Caribbean, and still people in Georgia tell me “Florida ain’t the south.” They said that crap when I lived in Texas too. Well, if fishing in a Louisiana bayou from a Jon…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in the Ohio River Valley, more specifically Southern Indiana, the South of the Midwest. My town bordered Kentucky so we argued about Hoosier and Bluegrass basketball while eating brain sandwiches, a regional deep-fried treat. We also ate vegetarian meals such as corn on the…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I practiced law for 25 years and ran a public education literacy organization in Mississippi for 15 years. On the Doorstep of Bukowski’s America Sam is an artist. He paints big, messy, powerful paintings. We’ve been friends for decades but there’s rarely enough time. I don’t see…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Vidalia, Georgia, but I now reside in Valdosta, Georgia, moving from onions into the swampy landscape to study Creative Writing at Valdosta State University. Though my accent may not show it, I am a Southern native who enjoys going barefoot and drinking sweet…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Having been blessed and honored to have appeared previously in the Mule, I’d proudly hang my southern legitimacy on that fact alone. However, if you need more, let me just point out that when you grow up in a small town anywhere south, Jesus is just about…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: People say football is religion in the South. To me, it’s the other way around. You’re born into your team (church), listen to the coach or the announcers (preachers), sing the fight songs (hymns), and chow down at the concession stand (suppers and picnics). The pilgrims on…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in Virginia, have lived here for 35 years. I know it’s in the South, but I didn’t recognize that at first. I thought the South was where I grew up—in New Orleans, in Louisiana, in an Italian family with a corner store. I trace back…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: We were a prototypical southern nuclear family. My Papaw came up in the Great Smokey Mountains, near Farner, Tennessee and Cherokee, North Carolina. When he was nine, he lost track of the time one summer evening, squirrel hunting up on the mountain, and he avoided a sound…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born in Richmond, Virginia and still live there. My momma was from Franklin County and grew up on bootleg money. My daddy’s from Johnson City, Tennessee. When it’s warm I try to jump in the James River once a day. As a kid, before I…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Native to Virginia and long-resident in Georgia, I’m as Southern as Southern can be. (Let’s not talk about the seven-year stretch in New Jersey.) A prominent Mid-Western poet once told me during a workshop, “I could listen to you read the phone book.” Flatware, USA If you…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My father’s family were Appalachian farmers from Letcher County, KY and my mother’s were German Jews who ran a kosher deli on Beale Street in Memphis. I live in a remote fold of the NC mountains now. I still talk slow, still love my mother’s home-baked challah,…
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised in North Carolina to parents graciously welcomed by the South, I have a strange kind of Southern legitimacy. My roots and birth certificate proclaim me as native, but my family’s heritage says otherwise. This reality is one that I can never seem to outrun….