Whistlin' DixieA Yankee's Song of the South
by Wendel James Potter
April 22, 2007
I once met a fellow from Alabama who told me, "Southerners don't talk funny. Yankees just hear funny."
There's always been a huge misconception about the South. Some folks up North tend to think Southerners are less than learned. The drawl is mistaken for the mark of slow thinking. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Many of our great literary talents hailed from south of the Mason-Dixon line. Faulkner came out of Mississippi. Thomas Wolfe was a Carolinian. My favorite columnist, the late, great Lewis Grizzard, honed his sharp-tongued wit in Georgia. The King of Gonzo journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, was born and raised (and raised hell) in Kentucky.
My Good Wife's family are Kentuckians. While Karen has been a Nebraskan most of her life, that rich Dixie culture shines through every now and then like a lazy, blue Kentucky moon.
Not long ago, I was startled to hear Karen, who was reading the paper and had come across something of more than passing interest, exclaim, "Now wouldn't that just tear the rag off the bush!"
In nearly 30 years of marriage I had never heard that expression. But even my response was less than Yankee. "Say what?"
And the thing of it is, when my wife delivers these choice little Southernisms, she does so with an accent that's not noticeable in her everyday way of speaking. It's just something about those Southern roots.
As far as expressions go, I'm still learning. Regarding the accent, I don't have to spend very much time at all with my in-laws before that Southern drawl and those expressions find their way into my own speech pattern. I'm soon "y'all-ing" with the best of them. It just seems to rub off.
Now, perhaps one reason the South has been blessed with great writers is because those folks down there with literary talent are also blessed - with some of the most colorful characters on God's green earth about whom to write.
The beauty of it lies in the fact that these people aren't trying to be characters. They are just being themselves. They are honest.
Take Karen’s maternal grandmother. She settled in Nebraska and lived here for the last 20 years of her far-too-short life.
To the family, she was Grandmother. No first name, no last name. Just Grandmother.
I swear that, when she was 5 years old, she was dunked in the river by a Baptist minister who proclaimed, "I baptize you Grandmother." And the name stuck.
The first time I ate dinner with my wife’s family, Grandmother was there. She had thick, coal-black hair, chain-smoked and weighed about 30 pounds. She didn't eat. She made Gandhi look like a glutton.
However, she had one other peculiarity at the dinner table. She never addressed Karen’s dad. She spoke instead to her daughter, Karen’s mother. "William doesn't have any potatoes," she'd say to Betty. "Does he want potatoes?"
"Bill?" Betty would ask him. "Do you want potatoes?"
"No."
"No, Mother. He doesn't want any potatoes."
I later asked my wife, "Why does Grandmother use your mom as an interpreter? Why doesn't she just ask your dad if he'd like potatoes?"
"Because," she said, "Grandmother never talks to Daddy."
Grandmother called most of us "Honey." If she'd had a hard day, she'd say, "I'm just tarred (tired) and drug out, honey."
She truly was a character. She cooked for many years at a local café, and I have to say, with all due respect to the present cooks, the food was never better than when Grandmother was in the kitchen.
Food, I found out, is a great part of the Southern culture. When I visited Kentucky with my in-laws, I found out how good ol' American home cooking is supposed to taste.
My wife’s other grandmother (this one we called Grandma) had a heart condition, and she phoned my father-in-law and told him, "Billy, you better get down here if you expect to see me alive again." So we all went down there, to Kentucky, to see poor, ailing Grandma before she passed on.
When we got there, after a two-day drive, Grandma was much better. As a matter of fact, she was in the kitchen. Cooking for her relatives. I guess the fact that her son, Billy, had come all the way from Nebraska just made her feel good. It was a miracle!
Hallelujah!
What was even more of a miracle was Grandma's fried chicken. I had never tasted chicken like this in my life. I had to have the recipe!
When I asked Grandma how she prepared her chicken, she just smiled and said in her clipped Kentucky accent, "Why, honey, I don't do anything special."
Whatever her recipe was, I was hoping they had put Colonel Sanders on a rotisserie when they buried him, because he was surely turning over and over in his grave knowing that someone made better Kentucky fried chicken than he!
Summer breakfasts were tremendous feasts at Grandma's. There were stacks of sliced tomatoes fresh from the garden, smoked bacon, thick hunks of toasted homemade bread and fried eggs swimming in the skillet. I think the grease was even made from a secret Kentucky recipe.
And to go with the food, there were stories, steeped in local color.
Like how Uncle Bo wanted to go rabbit hunting, but he'd broken his leg. So his friend came by, carried Bo out to the truck and strapped him to the top of the cab, where he could ride more comfortably. And off they went a huntin'. And a drinkin', I suspect.
There's also my wife’s Aunt Lucy. When Lucy fell off a ladder one year around Valentine’s Day and broke her shoulder, she called Karen and told her, "Honey, I know if you lived closer, you'd come by with one of those big chocolate hearts, and we'd sit here and eat chocolate until 2 in the morning and just talk about them that weren't here."
There's so much more to say about the Southern tradition, seen through the eyes of a Yankee like me. Food, stories, colorful people.
But especially those people.
Copyright 2007 Wendel James Potter
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