Beech Tree News Network

If I ever hear a real Southerner say “husking” corn (It’s “shucking”!), I’m running to the nearest church with an old-fashioned altar and bawling my eyes out.
Yankees all went to Florida at first, now they are here… cheaper living.  And they have brought with them bagels and garlic, not to mention raw green beans, rare meat and sugared-cornbread.  It’s called REVERSE MIGRATION and NORTHERN OSMOSIS, which has resulted in somewhat tainted “southspeak” and Dixie customs.
And the sinful shame of it is that some Southerners don’t have enough self-assurance to keep callin’ a dog a “dog”.  Some call it a “DAG”. Some now say “dinner” in place of supper.  You don’t pop-open a can of vieenies and call that dinner.  And you for sure don’t ring the dinner bell at night…except in an emergency! This “dinner” thing at night comes from English aristocracy, which if you recall we fought a revolution to get away from that.  If you remember England’s King Henry VIII told each of his successive wives, “Honey, there’s no use you getting’ new drapes and furniture; I’ not  gonna’ keep you long.”  And he didn’t.  He had at least two beheaded.
Statistically it’s said that one-third of all Americans call themselves Southerners.  This may be the case, but in the South I knew, and know; our talk is different, our walk and our names… our manners and our propriety, not to mention our perceptions.  An old-fashioned Southern woman might say, “My chickens mess in my flowerbed”, but she would never refer to a farm animal as a “bull”, “boar”, or “ram”.  It would be a “male hog” or cow or sheep.  One lady I knew said, “gentleman cow.”
Also, “Our mare found a colt.” Too, the word, “pregnant” was thought somewhat crass: “I hear Viney Fay Skipworth is looking for a baby.” Or, “I hear Billy Carlene Rigsby and Delbert Dunker are keeping company.”  That is to say they are dating.
Southerners never use three words when twenty will do.  Women: “Do y’all remember that girl that married that Richardson boy?”
“Wasn’t that Emmy Lou Smith?”
“No.  Emmy Lou Smith married Strother and Udine Holmes’s boy, Jimmy.  I’m talkin’ about that girl with a crooked leg.  She married the Richardson boy from the holler.”
“No, she didn’t.  I know in my own mind she married Odel Blocker; they had that boy that had to go to the penitentiary.”
This was a four-way conversation among women who were related.  Two were sisters; the other two were double first cousins.  This was in a hospital room of a close friend of all of them.  However the patient seemed to be a per-so-na non gra-ta.  A close friend…? Fact is, the women were still ironing all this out when they came for the patient to take her to surgery.
Once, the blue-collar South went North to earn a better living.  Now many have accumulated enough where-with-all to come back.  But they are not stopping off. They are going all way to Florida in droves___ some for the winter; some to stay.  So many there now the whole peninsula may break-off and sink in the ocean.
It’s been said that folks want to go to Florida for the same reason they want to go to Heaven:  the weather is nice, and their people are there.
The South I grew up in is rapidly changing.  I know that.  But I know who I am, and where I came from; those two things are one and the same.  I know that my life has gone the way it has because I came from a certain people--- from a place I’ll never forget.  That place is who I am; a place where good men prayed on their knees at church, and women with big hats sat in the choir, and an old maid wearing high-button shoes sat at a pump organ and played, “Higher Ground”.
Kindest regards…..