Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up with my great-grandmother half the time and she inspired me to paint and write. She left Georgia in a covered wagon sometime after 1867 - when she was born - to live on a Texas farm near Texarkana and to marry a musician/composer who taught high school bands all his life. When I was two I remember a tornado coming to the farm, a wagon, and then pitch black outside. But I spent most of my growing up time in Wisconsin. My great-grandmother became bedridden when a drunk hit the car my grandmother was driving killing my great-grandfather in 1943. I often lived in their house with its many paintings of southern landscapes and darkly genteel poetry and all the stories of cousins and tornadoes. My grandmother never lost her Texas accent and didn't want to. My great=grandmother was terrified she would wake up in her coffin. She died in bed at the age of 97. I for felt her pulse because my grandmother was afraid to. There was none. **