Southern Legitimacy Statement: I have lived in Birmingham, Alabama off and on my entire life, with brief stints in Mississippi, Florida, and New York City. The following essay is, in essence, an extended statement of my Southern legitimacy.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: There is at least one dead mule in my family’s history. My uncles “accidentally” killed the family plow mule with a hammer blow between his eyes, then tried to bury him but rigor mortis set in and his feet stuck up about two feet about the ground when they rolled him in the hole. Being rural Southern Children of the 1940’s guaranteed their resourcefulness and determination and so they buried him anyway. My grandfather discovered him when he went looking for the mule that had run off. My uncles were 10 and 13 at the time of the “incident.” I’m a child of South Carolina’s low country, story telling and black water runs in my veins and family history. I’m a fading Southern Belle who believes and says; ” Here in the South we don’t keep our history in a moldy old book on a dusty old shelf, WE LIVE it EVERYDAY!”

SLS: I got my first name, Margaret, from my paternal grandmother, Margaret Harmon Lupton, who rocked me and sang "Old Mrs. FIddle Faddle jumped out of bed, ran to the window and she stuck out her head, she cried John John the grey goose is gone and he must be on the town-o." She liked to be called Granny. Granny liked guiltless Metrical (sp?) caramels and kept a big box of them on her coffee table. I could have one. One time I spent the night at her house on Ingraham Street in D.C. and in the morning we had breakfast in her kitchen. Cheerios in cream with lots of sugar. When her Cheerios were gone, she picked up her bowl and drank the sugary cream. Then I picked up my bowl and drank the sugary cream. Granny said, "How rude!" I said, "But you did it." She said, "It's my house."

Generations of men in my family proudly have the middle name Leroy, including myself. And all of us have had home-cooked meals of squirrel or frog legs or venison and never turn down a slice of vinegar pie. It seemed normal, growing up, that my grandparents had a 45rpm jukebox in their living room with Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys, Elvis and John Lee Hooker on regular rotation. Dancing and carousing five nights a week at the Cain’s Ballroom wasn’t enough for them. As kids, during the deep, hot, shoeless and shirtless summertime, rather than go in the house for a cool drink from the kitchen faucet, we’d stretch our tongues out under condensation tube on the window air conditioning unit that always dripped a mud hole below it. And as the evening rolled in, after supper, we’d catch fireflies and dob their green, luminous butts on our ring fingers, make our childlike proposals of forever to cousins—well, at least the brief forever that was until the glow faded into the gloam.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: On my twenty-second birthday, in the spring of 1979, I had a crawfish boil, my first. Ninety pounds of red mudbugs on a picnic table spread with newspaper, my birthday cake sitting at the end of the table like an afterthought. I hadn’t been raised in Louisiana, but no one cared about any of that. My friends treated me like I was a local. After we ate we played pool at a bar downtown. Full of crawfish and Dixie beer, I drank shots of peppermint schnapps and flirted with the boy at the next table, telling him yes when he asked if I’d like to go to the city. We drove uptown, to Tipitinia’s---this in the days when tourists hadn’t yet discovered it was the best place in town---and later, long after midnight, to the Dungeon, just off Bourbon, where I would navigate the steep wooden stairs on my way up to the bar, trying not to fall, drunk with desire for this boy I barely knew. When the sun came up we took the old Hammond Highway home, driving through the bayous with the car windows open, WRNO cranked up loud, taking our youth and freedom for granted because we didn’t yet know any better.

Southern Legitimacy Statement: I have lived in Miss since I was born. I have run barefoot over its dirt for years. I expect to be planted in Mississippi just like my prized tomatoes. I want this dirt to be my final resting place. Amen.