So on Friday night, coincidentally while watching Diane Sawyer's riveting hour-long special on the Children of Applachia, I googled "southern people." I can honestly tell you now that I do not recall specifically what I thought I would find when I entered those terms into the search bar, but I can tell you that when I did, this is the first image that the search returned.
There are a lot of disturbing things about this photo, and it's probably best we not get into all of them, but I'll address the most disturbing thing to me, because many of you were probably thinking it already: were it not for her Jabba-the-Hutt figure and classy as all get out Burger King crown, this picture could've easily been of yours truly. And let's be frank, I've been known to wear a Burger King crown from time to time. Okay, it's been said now. Let's move on.But it was an item a little further down the list of web results that inspired my aforementioned excitement: Y'all Magazine. A magazine for, about and by Southerners. My first thought was holy shit, y'all. There is a magazine that speaks my language. So I started doing a little reading and digging through the web site, thinking I'd pick my favorite feature of the magazine, blog about it and link it up. In the midst of this search, I came across a column called "What Southern Women Know."
Now most of the reading I've ever done on this topic was written by a woman named Jill Connor Browne, and if you aren't familiar with Browne and her Sweet Potato Queens, you should be, and I can tell you with certainty without ever having met you that your life is sad and lacking. But those of you who are fellow SPQ veterans will understand my glee at having come across a column whose very title inspired visions of Brown's signature southern sass and hilarity. I was expecting to be bowled over, to giggle, to perhaps even chortle, should I be so bold. Plus, I'm pretty familiar with things that southern women know, a lot of which just are not appropriate for sharing in a family friendly venue such as this. Those things, and also how to make really good tea, sweet or otherwise.
I digress.
With such expectations, you can imagine my dismay when I got two paragraphs in to this schmaltzy bull shit and realized it was about death and dying.
First there was that boy. The one I first loved at 15, who had tortured me through childhood until the day I realized I loved him. At too young of an age, pancreatic cancer snuck up, grabbed him by the neck and dragged him away to eternity. Next went my brother with a sudden stroke. A beloved uncle died 10 days later then Mama, oh dear, sweet Mama, went home to see her precious Jesus when an aneurysm erupted. Two other uncles have departed for their home in glory.
Now this is all really uplifting, of course, but it wasn't really the subject matter that bummed me out so excessively. It was catching sight of the phrase "Mama went home to see her precious Jesus."
Here is the thing about obituaries in the south. Every time I go home, I read the obituaries in our local newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, and every single time some lovely old grandmother of 17 named Fannie or Betty or Sallie Rae has passed on into the light to hold hands with Christ and sing "A Closer Walk With Thee" while St. Peter plays the ukulele and a chorus of angels does choreographed interpretive sign language. It seems that there is some sort of posthumous competition going on to see just how ridiculous and flowery and over the top these obituaries can be, and they never even give me the information I wanted to know in the first place, which was how the old broad even kicked the bucket to begin with.
Now before I go prep my inbox for the influx of hatemail I may be about to receive, let me clarify -- faith, spirituality, it's all beautiful, it's just not for me. I'm glad Sallie Rae was a 76-year member of the local M.B. church and that she always brought homemade chicken fried steak to the church potlucks. I just don't want to read about it in her obituary.
I'm a journalist, I can't help it. We don't use words like "passed on" or "passed away" or say things like "The Smith family lost Johnny on Sunday." He's dead. He died. And that's that. Straight, factual, succinct and to the point.
And so, I realized two things while reading "What Southern Women Know." 1.) I didn't know any of that stuff. And 2.) Maybe the reason for that has something to do with there being two kinds of southern women. There's the gentile, innocent ones, and then there's the ones like me. But the typical southern woman has the duality to be both, I thought, which reminded of a joke one of my co-workers told me yesterday that I felt summed up the juxtaposition perfectly.
What's a Southern Baptist?
Someone who doesn't drink around other Southern Baptists.
cheers,
elizabeth
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