from "Through the Cumberland Gap"
by Doris Betts
(Spring 2002)
In my mother’s Bible as well as my father’s
blood-and-thunder books and my Saturday movies, women had little to do
except keep vigil or anoint the body. I had grown up preferring the stronger
stories featuring men: Absalom hanging by his hair and Jacob wrestling
the angel. Whoever aspired to be Dale Evans? Women are almost unnecessary
in traditional western films, where Gabby Hayes and other male sidekicks
are better partners in hostile territory.
As a girl, I was not much interested in women and did not
plan to become one. I wanted to be like the male gunfighters and lone
horsemen. For hours I would practice in front of a mirror that trick of
merely narrowing both eyes with anger, a tiny movement sure to strike
terror into crooked card players and rustlers.
from “Chicago as the Northernmost County of Mississippi”
by Anthony Walton
(Spring 2002)
 "It
took my experience in the North to teach me that I am first and last a
southerner." Black migrants preparing to leave the South in Goin'
to Chicago, courtesy of California Newsreel.
My father went north with the intention of leaving Mississippi
in his rearview mirror, and he still largely feels that way. My mother,
on the other hand, longs for New Albany and Oxford, for the stretch of
Lafayette County that lies between them, where she grew up in a more gentle
and privileged, if that is the word, environment. My father, who endured
some of the worst of life for African Americans in Mississippi, can often
be heard to say, “I call it ’Sippi ’cause I don’t
miss it,” or, more trenchantly, “It wasn’t Lincoln who
freed the slaves, it was the Illinois Central.” So why do I embrace
this place . . .
 from
“The Southern World of Britney Spears”
by Gavin Campbell
(Winter 2001)
In Mississippi I got off the interstate and began driving
south down Highway 51. I struggled hard to see the Magnolia State for
what it was, not for the romantic notions so lovingly groomed by blues
aficionados. Nevertheless I found myself periodically looking for weary
old black men toting battered guitars and looking for rides from the devil.
I saw none. Though the ghosts of the great Mississippi bluesmen may haunt
the state, it’s Britney Spears territory now. “Ooops . . .
I Did It Again” snaking out of the speakers at the Osyka Exxon confirmed
that.
from “The Dead Mule Rides Again
by Jerry Leath Mills
with drawings by Bruce Strauch
(Winter 2000)
 Is
there a dead mule in it? The author's survey of twentieth-century southern
authors has led him to conclude that there is indeed a single, simple,
litmus-like test for the quality of southernness in literature. Drawing
by Bruce Strauch
What others make of my work I can only surmise, but I should think that
many scholarly purposes might be served by what I offer here. Practitioners
of hermeneutic exegesis may turn to an exploration of the epiphanic potentiality
of the dead mule within its various interpretive and intertextual reticulations.
Semioticists may determine that one person’s mule is another’s
magnolia, while New Historicists may find in these signifying mules subversions
of social and philosophic fabrics thought previously to rest unexamined,
especially in earlier authors. For me it is reward enough to know that
any bookseller, handing a work of southern fiction across a counter, can
now quote with deep conviction that poignant line from Richard Wright,
“Well, boy, looks like yuh done bought a dead mule.”
from “The Anatomy of the South”
by Fred Hobson
(Spring 2000)
North Carolina is reputedly the “Mind of the South”
and Alabama the “Heart of Dixie.” . . . If North Carolina
is the mind, Virginia is above it and serves a cerebral function as well.
Virginia is for lovers, yes, but in an ethereal, metaphysical sense. Lovers
of the true and good and beautiful. Duty. Devotion. Sacrifice. Chivalry.
. . .
South Carolina--located on the lower part of the face--represents
the mouth of the South, Dixie’s voice. . . . Mississippi is the
guts of the beast, the stomach with a Bible Belt wrapped around it. Forget,
hell! Mississippi, like Alabama, is visceral.
The rest of the South is anatomically more difficult. Only Louisiana stands
out, with its winding, intestinal river emptying the waste of mid-continent
into the Gulf. And then there’s Florida, with its pleasure function
and profile, anatomically outsized and geographically a little off, but
nonetheless suggesting new Sun Belt priorities.
from “A Love Letter to Thomas Wolfe”
by Pat Conroy
(Fall 1999)
All the rest of us writers know when to pull back, to let
up, to ease off, to lower the flaps, to idle the engines, and to put it
on cruise control. We call it restraint, craft, form, and a hundred other
names. Only one of us in the history of the world tried to go to the moon
every time he sat down to write a sentence and this is the fabulous, otherworldly,
larger-than-life, myth-driven mountain boy, Thomas Wolfe.
from South Polls "A Double-Wide What?!#@"
by John Shelton Reed
(Winter 1997)
For her novel Devil’s Dream, Lee Smith wrote the great
country-music lyric, “On a double bed in a double-wide with a double
shot of gin, / I’m a single gal in a one-horse town sleeping alone
again.” When she sent her manuscript to her New York publisher,
Smith reports, it came back with the copyeditor’s marginal query,
“A double-wide what?”
It’s a safe bet that a southerner wouldn’t have to ask.
 from
“The Resurrection of Christ”
by David Sedaris
(Summer 1997)
Peter Paul Rubens,
The Holy Family with St. Anne, about 1635, oil on canvas, 68 x 56
in., purchased with funds from the state of North Carolina, collection
of the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Each year our elementary school class took a field trip
to the North Carolina Museum of Art. To prepare us for our visit, the
board of education sent us a roving arts ambassador, a trained cultural
cheerleader. To our fifth-grade class this person arrived in the form
of Mrs. Kingman. This was a woman who favored floor-length capes and appeared
to wear all of her jewelry at the same time. . . . Mrs. Kingman claimed
to adore the capitals of Europe, “the very idea of the Far East,”
and the livers of geese mashed into a paste and served upon crackers.
We were enchanted. . . .
Her omission of any religious aspects made the paintings
seem fresh and exciting. It was her hope that we might direct our reverence
towards the art rather than the subject, but for the students of our fifth-grade
class the idea was unthinkable. “That baby is Jesus,” the
Castle twins shouted in unison. “And the lady is his mother, Mary.”
“I’m well aware of who Jesus is,” Mrs. Kingman said.
“I use his name every time I catch my skirt on the car door. This
though, this isn’t Jesus. It’s a lump of paint. Several lumps
really, beautifully arranged upon a canvas.” She said it sweetly
but the twins reacted as if she were the devil himself, sent from the
fiery furnace of hell to command their souls. . . . “This figure
might look like Jesus,” Mrs. Kingman said, “but nowadays so
do a lot of people. You don’t see it much down here but visit my
son in Greenwich Village and you’ll think you’ve wandered
onto the set of The Ten Commandments.”
from “Roll Over, Escoffier”
by James G. Ferguson Jr.
(Spring 1997)
In the fall of 1994, we took North Carolina country ham,
sausage, and barbecue along with grits and Virginia bacon to France. Ellie,
my wife and collaborator on this project, took premeasured and sifted
flour to bake biscuits. We were at Restaurant Greuze in Tournus--two Michelin
stars for decades--home of Jean Ducloux, France’s exalted champion
of traditional cuisine. Ellie had twenty minutes in the convection oven
to bake her biscuits in between gouges and brioche bread for the luncheon
service. I was fixing bacon, sausage, country ham, and redeye gravy. .
. . When I asked for strong coffee to deglaze the country-ham pan, the
assembled staff from executive chef on down was incredulous. Someone swore
they heard Escoffier gasp or weep--they weren’t sure which. Ducloux
halved his first biscuit the wrong way, but he was in ecstasy as he devoured
the next five. He also could not get enough redeye gravy.
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