Southern Legitimacy Statement: I have spent my entire life at the foot of one hill or another in North Carolina. When I was a little girl, I spent my summers with my grandma and pawpaw.
They were farmers, but my pawpaw ran a little country store over by the road…just co’colas, nabs, moonpies and such. They had 23 grand-younguns so he kept a whole shelf full of every kind of penny candy you can think of. Whenever we would go visit, he would give each youngun a tiny little paper poke to fill up with as much candy as the bag would hold. Well, grandma dipped snuff and in the evenings we would sit on the front porch and string beans or shuck corn or cut up cucumbers to make pickles – whatever the garden was producing that day and I was always amazed at how far that woman could spit. Still am..
I admired my grandma and in my eyes she could do no wrong, so when I went to fill up my candy sack, I filled it right up to the edge with Tootsie Rolls. I would tuck one under my bottom lip and let the spit build up, then I would get grandma to spit for an example and then I would give it a go. Grandma would always clear the porch and her brown tobacco juice would land in the holly bush, but my Tootsie Roll spit would splat right there on the porch. Grandma would keep a straight face, but I could see her belly jiggling as she chuckled at my efforts. After dark, when pawpaw closed up the store and came home, we’d still be sittin’ on the porch with all the spit puddles. He would get mad and start fussin’ – using his favorite cuss words like “dad gimmit!” and “drot take it to the dickens!” while he stomped over to the spigot at the pump house to fill a bucket with water and wash the spit off the porch. The first few times, I thought I was in trouble, but then, I saw him wink at grandma and he tossed me another handful of Tootsie Rolls.
Donna J. Dotson “Gus”
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Jo Heath “Sweet Tea and Ice”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: Excuse me for being southern and for not. I've lived all but two of my seventy-five years in the deep south, defined here as lower Alabama, and yet I drink unsweet ice tea with sucralose, and everytime I'm introduced to my place, or my duty, or sometimes my manners, I wiggle and stretch and work my way out and around.
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Jennifer Green “Keeping a Dead Mule Down”
Southern Legacy Statement – Half Mexican, Half Redneck. I use that to describe my heritage.
Upon hearing that: my mother's family gets upset and offended, my father's side laughs and hollers. I'll let you decide which is half is which half.
From ages three to eighteen, one year of my life was spent in Southern California, the next in North Georgia. The odd-numbered years were in smoggy cities, people giving me odd looks for ordering sugar in my tea, and mocking me when I say “ya'll.”
I was fired from my first California job because customers insisted I insulted them by saying “sir” and “ma'am.” When I got older: I chose fresh air in the woods, people that became your new best friend when you share the counter at Waffle House, and smiles when I reply to statements with “sho'nuff.” Now, I'm the boss and all my employees know full well to treat all customers with respect and address them with “sir” and “ma'am.”
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Schimri Yoyo “Root For The Home Team”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I spent four plus years of undergrad in Greenville, SC--the Buckle of the Bible Belt--and I've got plenty of stories to tell.
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Diane Thomas-Plunk “The Call”
SLS -- Born and raised in Memphis, Diane Thomas-Plunk is highly skilled in the three B's of Memphis -- blues, barbecue and beer. These may be enjoyed individually, in various pairings, or -- best yet -- all together.
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John Davis, Jr. “The Legend(s) of Mailman George”
SLS: John Davis Jr. is a sixth-generation Florida native. His poetry has covered the South like kudzu, including a prior appearance in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. Now he's trying his hand at a little down-home fiction. He hopes yall like it.
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Barbara Nishimoto “Identifying Trees”
Southern Literacy Statement
I was born and raised in the North, but now have lived most of my adult life in the South. When I first moved my mother acted as though I were moving to another country and told me all the stories she had collected from the tabloids she loved. When she visited during the summer she rolled and tied a hand towel around her head, a desperate hachimaki, and stuffed tissues around its edges to catch the sweat before it fell into her eyes and down her cheeks. “Eight o’clock at night is the same as three o’clock in the afternoon,” she said. “That’s why horses go crazy and impale themselves.”
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Erin Kelly “Sound No Trumpet”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I talk slow. I eat etouffee, jambalaya and boudin. I've clapped my hands to gospel in hot, crowded churches, and visited Catholic psychics. I've gone through many Louisiana winters in short sleeves and shorts.
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Jackson Culpepper “Judgment House”
SLS: Growing up in south Georgia, I have a Stockholm Syndrome-type relationship to temperatures over ninety degrees and one hundred percent humidity. But the devil can have his damned gnats.
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Becky Meadows “Three Seconds”
Southern Legitimacy Statement: I grew up on my grandmother and grandfather’s farm, where we ate fried potatoes, green beans (cooked for an entire day or more on the stove in a pot), and cornbread. Fried chicken was a treat we enjoyed, and it was really fried—not the carbon-copy fried chicken found frozen in stores today. We ate tomatoes from the garden (straight from the garden). My southern heritage isn’t limited to food, though—I have the most marvelous southern accent that I have refused to relinquish for academia. I’m proud of my heritage!
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Christopher Rowe: High Water
“That was a nice cast, boy, your daddy’s been teaching you something right down there in Florida.” “Now, don’t start in again, Hiram. The child wasn’t the one decided to pick up and move off. We’re blessed to have him visit for the summer.” “I ain’t saying anything different, Martha, I was just commenting […]
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Ann Hite, “A Spider’s Bite”
I know I’m southern because I survived all the unwritten rules for women. You know: Don’t sleep with a man before you’re married. Don’t smoke in public. Don’t get a tattoo. Find a good man and marry him. Don’t wear white after Labor Day.
*The Mule just adores Ms. Hite's work.
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Jim Booth — Au Lecteur (a novel excerpt)
As a small boy, Jim Booth wanted nothing more than to be a goatherd wandering the ancient hills of his Southern homeland. Then he heard the gospel according to John and Paul and abandoned the pastoral life for the responsible hedonism of rock musicianship. Having failed gloriously in that endeavor, he took on the academy, ate it alive, and spat it back out as dark sarcasm in the classroom. Currently he writes occasionally award winning fiction and occasionally homeland security annoying bloggery. He lives in a heavily fortified bunker in an undisclosed location In Danville, Virginia just off 58 after you pass the Honda dealer but before you get to Carter’s restaurant.
*Editor's note: Mr. Booth's got a new book coming out and this story is an excerpt. Ahh, hell, let's get personal, Jim's even been to eastern NC and he and his lovely wife are charming folk (that's not just because they paid for my lunch, either). A review of his book "The New Southern Gentleman" is on Popmatters.com, written by yours truly, VMac. Use the Popmatters google-search and type in MacEwan and you'll find it.
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Parker W. Howard “The Big Tree”
I was born and reared with one foot in Memphis, Tennessee and the other in a farm in Forest, Mississippi. I left the South for college in Montana, England, and Seattle, then returned to Mississippi in 2002. I am most definitely a bone fide Southerner. In fact, I can say that I have actually plowed with a mule.
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Lance Levens “My Daddy’s Not a Hippophagist”
One great great grandaddy sent four sons to fight at Battery Wagner and Okalustee (Fla.), another sent three to die at Vicksburg. I scratch when it itches, even when the quality is watchin'.
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J.C. Frampton “Reena”
Born in D.C., reared in Maryland with excursions in the Carolinas and the Blue Ridge, I had Navy stopovers in Virginia and Texas and, while I currently find myself in San Diego for job purposes and such, hain't surrendered a lick of devotion to things like bluegrass w/ neckties on (BTW we have some of the best right here in SD), beat biscuits w/ white gravy and Jimmy Dean links, straight Jack Daniel's, fried chicken takes two hand washins to get clean again, and writers like Faulkner (Light in August my all-timer), Caldwell, Welty (Delta Wedding, oh yes), McCullers, Shelby Foote.
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Tracy Whitaker “Clover”
What makes me southern?
I live in Richmond, Virginia, so, one, location. Two, I have lived only once in the north, and that was for a year and a half. I worked in New Jersey for Ma Bell and people would ask me to “Say something” just to hear my southwestern Virginia accent. Three, I have attended and maybe even joined churches where women did not wear jewelry, makeup or slacks, and whose swirling, teased beehives were nocturnally swaddled in Charmin, preserving a hairstyle, that, when fully erect, could tower a good nine or ten inches, sometimes a foot above the natural hairline and the fellers they married. P.S. I have been previously published in Dead Mule, and if that don’t make you southern, Good God Almighty, what does?
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Andrew Killmeier “Death’s Janitor”
Southern Legitimacy: I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky on the banks of the muddy Ohio River. This story also takes place in the great Bluegrass State.
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Sean Ryan “The Okra Story”
The three boys came back from their “coming-of-age” cross-country trip in mid-August, a few days before their freshman year at Rutgers started. When they got back, they took their girlfriends out to a fine Italian restaurant (at the suggestion of one of the boy’s old-fashioned Italian mothers) with the remainder of their cross-country funds (an […]
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FeLicia A. Elam “Loretta Shine”
I was born and raised on a farm near Manchester, Tennessee, that my great-grandfather purchased after being emancipated. It is still in my family. My grandfather was a truck farmer who reared 13 children after my grandmother left him. I remember planting seed potatoes with him under the moonlight. Twenty years after his death, people still drive to my parents’ farm and ask about “Mr. Glenn” and his “Irish potatoes”.
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