When I was growing up, there was this book floating around our house called Speaking Southern Like It Should Be Spoke, and it was more or less a dictionary of Southernisms. What I can’t say for sure is whether or not it was mean or nice. Like, was it playful self-parody, or mean razzing from the outside? I’m not sure, and it’s even harder to tell since I can’t really find much out about that book online, almost like it only exists in my memory. And on this one random site. I’ll need to rifle through some drawers in my parents’ spare bedroom the next time I’m home to see if I can find it.
Anyway, what got me to thinking about Southernness was tonight’s potluck at the Yarbro-Dill estate, which was Southern-themed and so ridiculously delicious that it defies description. Maybe that’s just my own proclivities busting through the crust there; we’ve done an Indian food night and an Italian night (which I missed due to a case of the barfies) but I tell you, that Southern home cookin’ just practically begs to be lumped into a giant pile in the middle of your Dixie plate and shoveled into your mouth with reckless abandon. The color palate of all the food (save the pomegranate-cranberry deliciousness) was yellow in color and therefore simply had to be mashed together with a hunk of cornbread and shoved down the ol’ gullethole. I defy you to find a better way to feed yourself.
This idea of Southernness is something I find fascinating because I am one of these people who loves and appreciates where I came from and the undeniable Southernness of it, while still rejecting the idea that Southern equals ignorant and racist and hyperreligious. I did my fair share of rebelling against that idea in high school and college by purposefully altering my accent to squeeze out the majority of the drawl — saying “ahn” instead of “ohwn” was the biggest challenge of my life — but now I’m glad I’ve still got quite a fair amount of South in my speech. I never managed to get rid of it all and I can’t tell you how grateful I am because of that. I go home and people accuse me of being a Yankee (walking around downtown Saltillo on River Day with a camera I was told I seemed like a tourist); everywhere else I’m just a country bumpkin. So I can enjoy the awkwardness in both places, and take comfort in the knowledge that I have a home, but I’m not necessarily trapped by my roots.
As I left the potluck, I listened to this voicemail from my mom and grinned like a moron re: its country sweetness:
Southernistic from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.
Part of being Southern is being told that you’re a joke. That you’re inferior. Southerners tend to shoulder an inferiority complex that most people don’t quite understand. I love knowing so many Southerners who are, in fact, fucking awesome, and who understand that the whole Southern underdog thing is just part of the story, not the whole story, and who blow right past that narrative and supply other much more interesting ones instead.
I’ll tell you what else I like: Going to a potluck where everyone else cooks amazing dishes, and feeling the need to contribute, and having the option to offer up pear preserves prepared from a harvest taken from a tree on your family’s land that’s been producing for four generations. And then having actual people enjoy that contribution. I don’t know. It makes the world feel a lot more manageable that way.
the south is awesome. i came here for a reason. that’s all i’m going to say.
Aww. Makes me miss home. Thanks for sharing this.
Your mom’s message sounds like my mom’s messages and when your mom says she loves you and you smile it made me smile.
Hells yeah, pear preserves were AMAZING. Oh god yes.
my mom is from central mississippi. while she’s lost much of her southern accent after thirty some-odd years up north, she still says things like “high-air” (hair) which always make me smile too.
before spending summers with my grandparents in mississippi, i always brushed up on the dixie parlance by reading some steve mitchell.
last thing: when my little brother was young, my grandmother asked him if he wanted a “straaaaaaaaaaaw” for his chocolate milk. and he said, “nanny, we say STRAW.”
I moved here from Chicago when I was 18 (by myself)–11 years ago–and there’s just something about the south that agrees with me. I have a hard time trying to explain it to my friends and family back home, as they always say, “But it’s so bible-banging and racist and sheltered!” Which, to an extent, it is. But you’re right–that’s not the whole story. Although, I think you have to live here to get the big picture, understand the whole story. I don’t think it’s apparent to someone who visits here as a tourist or simply knows someone who lives here.
There’s something very kind and comforting about the south, and every time I make the drive back from Chicago and hit the Tennessee state line I know I’m heading back home.
Ah yes…. the “you talk like a Yankee” thing. Actually, I got that even BEFORE I ever left home. I think it’s because my mother has ALWAYS talked “proper” and you’ve never heard an “ain’t” or anything of the sort pass her lips. I’m not exactly sure why that is so, as my mom grew up in the sprawling metropolis of… Dyer! That’s even smaller than the smallest of my two hometowns. And she grew up on a farm – I’ve never lived outside the city limits anywhere but once, and that was only a mile out. Yet my (Columbus, OH & Knoxville raised) significant other guffaws when I insist I’m not a country girl, I’m a city girl (OK, I’m a town girl).
I’m with you about the Southern-ness thing tho and for many of the same reasons. I love the semi-anonymity of the city sometimes, but it also pleases me to be somewhere where I can’t set foot in Wal-Mart or go out to eat with my mom and not see someone we know. My grandmother and I went to the same elementary school. And even though none of my family lives in them anymore (though one lives across the street), to drive by the corner where the houses on the corner lot and the two adjoining were all built by one great-grandfather for my other great-grandfather – and just up the street, where I spent the first seven years of my life.
I used to be jealous when I was a teenager of my friends who lived in Memphis and Nashville and Knoxville, wishing I had grown up in the city too. No more. You just don’t get in the city the kind of things we got growing up in more rural West Tennessee, even though we’ve not actually lived there in a while, you know? I’m glad of it these days.
In any case, loved the post (and fully agree with all).