Southern Legitimacy Statement

Once upon a time about 13 years ago, I was applying for something or other, probably a position (unpaid of course) writing a piece now and then for some minor website or magazine which deemed itself to the be the epitome of how to write about life in the American South.  For some unknown reason, I actually did the assignment with a bit of a sarcastic tone and submitted it never to hear from the place again...which was probably just as well.  I am attaching the piece below and hope at least one of you who might read it understands what I have intended to say about this farce.  

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Roger Hicks’ Southern Legitimacy Statement

Having spent most of my life in Southern Appalachia I tend to think of myself as an Appalachian first and a southerner second.  However, I have also spent most of my life on the appropriate side of the Mason-Dixon Line.  Nobody who lives north of the Tennessee border ever seems to know how to make sweet tea. Nobody who hasn’t lived in West Virginia (or perhaps Missouri) ever understands the Missouri Compromise.  I have spent days, weeks, months, years in places like Pipestem, West Virginia; Yee Haw Junction, Florida; Sand Mountain, Alabama; Marshall, North Carolina; and West Liberty, Kentucky.  I was born in Lackey, Kentucky, and my parents carried me home from the hospital through the front door of a small country store they owned.  The door on the other side of the room went into our living room.  I spent years hearing old men sit around the gas stove telling stories about life in Eastern Kentucky before “we went across the waters and fit the Germans”.  I went to a two room school in Knott County Kentucky and started selling Rose Bud Salve, Grit Newspapers, Cloverine Salve, and garden seeds door to door when I was about ten.  I grew up knowing how to find, catch, kill, skin, dress, and cook fish, frogs, chickens, hogs, squirrels, rabbits, ground hogs and any other thing that flew too low over the dinner table. I not only know what a Hoover Box is; I know how to make one and where to set it. I also know why it was necessary and appropriate to name that device a Hoover Box. I also know how to raise, pick, can, freeze, and cook things as diverse as shuck beans, plantain, poke, tangle gut, pickled corn, and cushaw. I developed lifetime resistance to starvation through development of survival skills. I reckon that probably qualifies don’t it? 

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And, I will conclude by saying, I reckon that is just about what I should have said under the circumstances. 

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