Author: MacEwan

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Alas, I dwell in the midwest, but my namesake's buried in Alabama. Crimson Tide. I think about the South, and I want the South to think about me.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Lee Wright was born, raised, and educated in a tiny textile mill town just across the Georgia line from Chattanooga. In spite of that, he managed to learn to translate things like “I knowed that he’d get throwed outta school for drankin’ ‘n’ when he growed up, he wuddn’t gonna ‘mount to nuttin’.” into actual English sentences.

SLS: I grew up cutting out biscuits on my grandmother’s formica countertop while wearing an apron that belonged to her mother. I am on a first name basis with my relatives that have been dead for over a century and can tell you about every feud that has happened in my home county for the last fifty years.

Southern Legitimacy Statement I grew up barefoot and poor in southern Georgia. During the summer months, I worked in the tobacco fields. Mama and Daddy were my parents. I speak and write in the language of the South.

My Southern Legitimacy Statement is both brief and simple; I was born and raised in Georgia, and I always referred to my 5 ft tall paternal grandmother as Big Mama,

Southern Legitimacy Statement In August there was always the river. On dog days, school beckoning, the joy of uninterrupted time between the morning and evening chores long absorbed by a sun that had flattened your expectations of what summer would bring, I seemed to always find myself at the river. Some people are drawn to fire, others to water, moving water that is, even if the movement is nearly imperceptible, and in my South the summer heat warned me away from fire. It was the river inching through the thick woods that lured me to come, preferably alone, to come and clear away a spot to sit among the dead leaves and rocks and branches, to come and immerse myself in the stream of thoughts and dreams and ambitions that, yet unbruised by the world, raced inside the visitor sitting above the patient river.

southern legitimacy statement: I am legitimately Southern, though I have moved across the road from the 1820 farm house where I grew up in rural Virginia. That house had seventeen rooms, seven of which were falling away, so we let them. A big snapping turtle lived under the sagging porch. Down the road from us was a house Thomas Jefferson had designed for his poor cousins who moved out of our house when that miniature Monticello was ready.

Yea! A mule story! Southern Legitimacy Statement I was bred, born and raised in Demopolis, Alabama. I’ve always lived in the South, and I’m about as stereotypical as anyone can be. My sister has two of the columns that were in the Georgia Confederate Hospital in her house. Our great, great granddaddy Snowden recuperated in that hospital. I grew up with a black maid who I thought was mama, and the white lady in the house I wondered why she spent the night with us every night. As I’ve aged I discovered that eating cheese grits every morning for breakfast will make you fat—twenty-five pounds fatter to be exact. I once owned a Jersey milk cow and made my own butter, sour cream, buttermilk, cream cheese and drank a gallon of fresh milk with one third of it sweet cream floating on the surface. Anastasia raised me three calves in all and we milked her daily until she dried up for her next calf. The years I owned the cow, I was er, plump to say the least. I really do have a daughter who Pony Clubbed a mule. And I eat turnip greens from Cracker Barrel every day of my life.

SLS-I come from Ozark hillbillies in Arkansas and Missouri. They could sing a tune, shoot a squirrel, pick cotton, and tell a good one. I grew up in the north, but live in North Carolina. I favor collards over spinach and know how to cook fat back. I reckon that makes me southern enough.