Category: Essays

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I’m a debutant, a beachcomber, and a native of South Carolina. The place of my most vivid memories was my grandmother’s farm — shucking corn, snapping beans, and hand-churning peach ice cream. Daddy’s Home It’s 5:00 and today,...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Now retired, I devoted the past thirty-six years teaching at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. But I was born in Johnston County, raised in Burlington, responded to frequent calls from Emerald Isle, the lower island of the...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: In 2004, after living in Savannah, Georgia, for three years, a stray dog wandered into my front yard. I guided him to the back yard by his blue collar. My other half printed out “Found Dog” posters...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in a small town in South Carolina among the rivers and pines and sandy dirt roads. My mother, a French Huguenot from Charleston, SC, taught me that we have the ocean in our blood...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: Sela wrote about herself instead of writing a SLS but we forgive her. Read the following essay and you’ll see why. “I am a ninth grade student at Mamaroneck High School. I am fourteen years old, and...

Southern legitimacy statement: I was born and raised in Florida and am still living here, two miles from Georgia. My dad and grandparents were also native Floridians, and I can’t find a maternal or paternal ancestor who was born or lived...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: My grandmother raised me on cornbread and southern stories, the anecdotes of her girlhood among the cotton rows. The Wool-Gatherer I buy the strawberries grown and shipped from Watsonville because my grandmother’s hands once picked them there....