Alexander Payne Morgan :: Cargo Cult ::
SOUTHERN LEGITIMACY: I lived all my life in Georgia until I graduated from the University of Georgia. My mother was born in Paducah, Kentucky, and her mother in Tennessee. My mother’s grandfather used enslaved labor on his farm, fought with...
Les Brown :: Chicken House ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am a North Carolina free-range mountain farm boy. I crawled all over our Blue Ridge, swam with water snakes in the icy cold Stillhouse Branch, (that I now own). aptly named because my great grandfather operated...
Edward Burke :: Marlovian Moment ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Edward Burke (dba strannikov) now lives for the second time in his life south of the Red River demarcating Texas from Oklahoma. He grew up in South Carolina, and growing up once there was plenty, although he...
Andrew Johnson :: Big Bottom Fish ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I visited the Asbury revival in Wilmore Kentucky for five days. The people there were hospitable and friendly, epitomizing Southern Charm. In the town and the city, I frequently heard “God Bless You.” It felt like a...
Epiphany Ferrell :: The Amazing Chicken Man
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live in Southern Illinois, emphasis on Southern. North of us is “downstate,” and sometimes they like to say they are Southern Illinois but they ain’t. Southern Illinois – especially the “Southern Seven,” meaning the southernmost seven...
Danny Barbare :: Pisgah Mountain
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Basically, I’m 60, and I have never left the South. I went North one time to get vitamins. And Thanksgiving once. Other than that, I stayed stuck in Greenville, South Carolina and other Southern states. My accent...
Ettore Cassetta :: Ghost Country
Southern Legitimacy Statement: My maternal grandfather was born in the south of the Marche region, southern Italy, in 1930. In 1948 he joined the Carabinieri Corps in hopes to find stable employment after the war, and was sent southern still,...
Adrienne Pilon :: Roots
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I live pretty far south of the Mason-Dixon line, in central North Carolina. Though I’m a transplant, I make a mean batch of chow-chow and a sublime bourbon pecan pie. And those bitters mentioned in this piece?...
Lee Ann Sontheimer Murphy :: Home Again
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I am Southern by nature as well as birth. I like my tea sweet, spring finds me digging in the dirt to plant flowers and vegetable. I eat my okra fried and on Sundays you’ll find me...
C.E. O’Banion :: Fire Ants
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Born and raised in East Texas, I’ve lived in the bogs of southern culture my entire life. From a town with a Baptist church so big it transmits sermons to New Orleans, to college in Baton Rouge,...
Anthony Picardi :: infection ::
Southern Legitimacy Statement I moved to a small farm on Virginia’s Eastern Shore in 2004. Last year, we finalized a conservation easement on our entire 64-acre farm so it would be perpetually preserved. The community of woods, pond, fields and...
Richard Weaver: “In the Year of the Mullet”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was born on the same day that George Armstrong Custer died, though “Autie”, as he called his adopted self, and I never exchanged letters. But that don’t make me a soldier or a Southerner. The first...
May Jordan: “Walking Through”
Walking Through A Sunday lit with sunlightmade the mountainof snow we accumulated, shine as if a glacier at dawn.I was up-stairs getting dressedfor church when suddenly,my husband called for meto come down in a hurry . . .a giant, chestnut...
Poetry
Essays
