Category: Essays

Southern Legitimacy Statement...well, I poked a dead mule with a stick once. I know where "yonder" is. The first time I traveled north of the Mason-Dixon line I got in an argument with the assistant to the assistant manager because their restaurant did not offer grits on the breakfast menu. Speaking of grits, I like mine with red-eye gravy. I believe Dukes mayonnaise and Cheerwine are part of the vegetable food group. I know how to clean a squirrel. I may or may not have Wilkes County, NC moonshine in a Mason in my cabinet. Did I mention that I know where "yonder" is? Eight generations of my relatives are buried in the red clay of North Carolina, and I reckon I will be too. Right over yonder...

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I'm a native Floridian, born in Hialeah, seasoned lightly in Belle Glade and served up in West Palm Beach. I consider myself a Cuban Cracker.

Southern Legitimacy Statement How I miss the Virginia countryside, the dusy red dirt, the soft summer rain, the green of the Shenandoah Valley, the damp heat of the swampland where I grew up. I'm so proud Virginia went Obama's way in the election. The Old Dominion ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be. How I love her, even now from the other coast, and I always will.

From the earliest Mule, late 1990s.

The best thing about this essay besides the essay itself? We've asked Jeanne to write more for us. Betcha' can't wait until next month ... Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up in Virginia and live in Norhern California now. In imagination and memory Virginia will dwell within me as long as I live as a place of summer rain, the brilliant maples of October on Barton Street, cozy nights and peaceful walks in the woods at Skyland, a walk in a blizzard up to Columbia Pike to buy a jug of Gallo Port, wanting poems in a bottle, and such memories that make a life that's a lot about the place where it happens.

Southern Legitimacy Statement In my house, Saturday nights meant fried chicken and mashed potatoes and Buck Owens on the little black and white that sat in the corner by the fireplace. Like a proper southern man, Daddy grew all our vegetables, raised beef cattle and filled the freezer with venison. My mother taught me how to make hot biscuits and red-eye gravy when I was in elementary school. Our neighbors sometimes called the police when our rabbit hounds got a bit stirred up and bellowed all night. I never knew there were people who did not put sugar in their iced tea, didn't eat cornbread with their white beans, and didn’t say y’all when addressing more than one person until I went to college. I never wanted to go anywhere else. Why would I? The South has Emmy Lou Harris, the Mississippi River, Flannery O’Connor, flaming red azaleas, catfish and stone-ground corn grits.

Southern Legitimacy Statement I learned many a lesson at the hands of the women in my life, from my mama to both my grandmamas, to my aunties on both my mama and my daddy’s side, but there was one critical lesson I never actually mastered to anyone’s satisfaction, not even my own children--making a decent pan of cornbread. For as far back as I can remember, there has always been some well meaning relative in my life trying to explain the do’s and don’ts of cornbread making to me. Pull up a chair, sit awhile, and listen to some of my kinfolk explain the Holy Southern Art of Cooking Cornbread.

Southern Legitimacy Statement I live in Bergamo, a lovely medieval city in northern Italy. No big deal, considering that 130,000 other residents here are doing the very same thing right now. The only difference is that while most of them were born here, I grew up on some prime North Carolina swampland that only a reptile or the U.S. Marine Corps could call home. Twenty-eight years of expatriate life and an intense love/hate relationship with Italy have indeed made a foreigner of me in both of my homelands. Perhaps the essays I have written about my life here in Italy as a gay Southern Wasp-turned-Buddhist and my childhood in the American South are an attempt to unite the two worlds.

southern legitimacy statement: I’m a native Floridian who likes to honk at cows and eat collard greens with vinegar. I’ve seen a swaybacked horse suck watermelon and I’ve seen a nasty canal gator eat the family pet. I don’t mind summer, as long as there’s ice in my sweet tea and a box fan near my bed. I eat grits for breakfast with real butter. I live near the Gulf of Mexico and never tire of the smell of a salty breeze. I do not fear Hurricanes like I should, although I do fear skin cancer.

SLS: Okay, so this story takes place on the outskirts of Missouri, BUT my large extended family all eat at Nana’s house at Thanksgiving. No matter what! And no one gets to bring COOKIES & GOOP because Aunt Shelly always makes it. And new in-laws never know what sidedish to bring becuase us mother-women have all of them accounted for, some already appear in multiple forms. And Nana’s sister, your Great Aunt Bev always ALWAYS brings a watergate salad to.die.for.

SLS: I was born in Arkansas, and I'll probably die there too. These days, I teach at an Arkansas university, in a small town on the edge of the Ozarks. Some day, I'll move for good to Newton County, still as deep as the backwoods get, and revert to a life governed by seasons instead of clocks.

Southern Legitimacy Statement Both my parents hail from the South. When they married, my mother's family called it a "mixed" marriage because she was from Alabama, and he was a Texan. Almost a different country, as far as they were concerned. I was born in the middle of a blizzard in Fairbanks, Alaska, the daughter of a father who was in the Army Air Corps. Alaska was then just a territory, but by virtue of my parents being southerners, and military people, I was born a Southerner. A misplaced Southerner, but a bona fide one. When my grandfather died on his farm in Alabama, we moved to the farm to help grandmother, who wanted to keep to her farming ways. It was there I learned how to make grits, how to hitch up a mule, how to pick cotton and dig potatoes. I was never very good at milking the cows, so my morning chore was gathering the eggs--and I was afraid of the pecking hens, but too afraid of my father's wrath, NOT to do this. We had an outhouse until my father built a real, in-house bathroom, and my momma got to have the first flushing rights. I learned from an uncle how to find the stars, from an aunt how to make perfect sweet tea, from my grandmother how to "put up" canned fruits and vegetables, and from my momma how to use plants and trees for medicine. My great-uncle offered to teach us kids how to make homemade wine, but this never happened. And from my father and brother, I learned how to play chess, hunt and fish. I guess that all makes me Southern, and I feel real pity for people who don't understand anything I've written here.