Southern Hospitality
Southern Hospitality You can become rich, you can become a blonde, you can even become a Republican, but the fact is you just can’t “become” a Southerner. Pretty much you are or you aren’t, and not even an address on your driver’s license can alter that fact. So when my mother moved my sister and me south of the Mason-Dixon line, we were nothing but a bunch of hopeless, hard-edged square pegs in a world of unaccommodating round holes (so much for southern hospitality!). We couldn’t have appeared more alien to this strange territory if we had been dropped right out of a spaceship. Everything about us was not only different but strangely enough—shorter: our names (not one of us had a hyphenated first name), our haircuts (women in the South chose to ignore the shorter, shaggier styles of the 60s), the number of syllables in our words, and most importantly, our bloodline. We drank pop, not soda; our mother’s sisters didn’t mind being called “ant”; and when we visited the john, he generally had a last name too. We eventually came to realize that no matter how long we lived in the South, we would always be outsiders to these bred-in-the-bone Southerners. The lucky thing for us was that Southerners, although humble as all get out about most everything else, are pretty darn self-righteous about being southern. We had all kinds of friends and neighbors willing to show us how being them was so much nicer than being us. We had a lot of unknowing teachers in those early years, from the lady at Roses five and dime, who steered us to the dotted swiss curtains for my bedroom to my Girl Scout leader, who [...]