Every now and again, a non-native will ask me what’s so special about being a Southerner.
Well, just everything is all.
We’re a colorful lot. Southerners don’t just eat a biscuit, they eat a cathead biscuit and loudly remind you that when they were growing up they were so poor their mama would hold up a ham and tell them to sop the shadow.
Southerners are obsessed with large reptiles, quality pine straw, and oddly shaped vegetables.
When I worked at my hometown newspaper in my twenties, I became an expert at photographing bell peppers shaped like Mickey Mouse and, one memorable time, a tomato shaped like “male genny-talia” according to the old farmer who brought it in. These, and photos of four-foot-long rattlesnakes always made the front page. It beat the heck out of a picture of the publisher posing in his Shriner’s fez. Again.
Southern men believe that if you shoot something, anything, you must “strop” it to the hood of the car and parade it around town. You call that disgusting, we call it supper.
Southern women live by a simple set of rules that keeps the chaos at bay:
Never wear sweatpants in public—or private.
Always keep a “funeral casserole” in the freezer.
Always say “The” Kmart out of respect.
Never use a toothpick in the K&W parking lot because, sure as you do, somebody’s going to remember you were the yam queen back in ’75 and they’ll talk about how you’ve just let yourself go.
Always make sure to have a burial plot in the “good” section of the cemetery or have the good sense to lie about it and say you do.
Always wear “big har” for important, life-changing events such as attending ACC Tournament games or when the Southern Living cooking school comes to town.
Avoid using “party” as a verb unless cousins from South Carolina are visiting, in which case it’s okay to say “par-tay.”
Southerners may move away from their homeland, but a Southern man will always call his father “deddy,” no matter if he’s a big-shot Co-cola executive who has given up grits for polenta and shad roe for sushi.
I don’t care how much a transplanted Southerner thinks he’s left that foot-washing, fire-baptized, collard-eating world behind, if “Sweet Home Alabama” comes on the radio, he will growl “turn it up” and wonder out loud for the umpteenth time why “Free Bird” isn’t the national anthem.
Which, now that I think about it, is a mighty good question.
Over the past few years, I’ve grown to appreciate what it means to be a Southerner. We’re proud and quirky and stubborn and funny. We don’t just say we like collard greens, we say that we’ve eaten so many we have to wear kerosene rags on our ankles just to keep the cutworms off.
We don’t just say we’ve caught a big fish, we say it was so big we had to use a hoe to clean it and then we sold the scales for dinner plates at the flea market.
We are most fond of saying that if we had two homes—one in the North and the other in hell—we’d rent out the one up North and live in hell.
We never turn the TV off, unless a body is lying in state in our living room—a more frequent occurrence than you might think—and we understand that y’all is nature’s most perfect—and versatile—contraction. As in: “Do y’all want to keep y’alls’ forks for y’allses’ peach cobbler?”
We’re proud to be from the land of kudzu and honeysuckle and lightnin’ bugs and tent revivals and Junior Cotillions and sugar-shocked iced tea.
I hope y’all like these tales, true and imagined, from a Southern woman’s point of view.
Shine, yes, I do.