I was born and raised in the deep south. For the longest time I thought I was a typical southerner, but lordy mercy I was mostly a country girl. When I was thirteen I made up this story about a hick girl named Elba Rayfield. My best friend’s father used to act as my straight man and we would carry on this amusing routine about country life. But low and behold in my day to day life I had real buddies with names like Libby Love and Patty Jo and Lou Fannie. In my Elba Rayfield skit I would talk about eating hog jowls and cracklin’ bread, never really noticing how every Monday night my family ate a similar supper at my grandparents house. Granddaddy would commence serving collard greens or turnip greens or mustard greens with fried chicken, black- eyed peas and cream corn at about 5:30 in the afternoon. My grandmother might comment as to how he hadn’t fried enough chicken and he’d send back simply, “Ah P-shaw Evelyn.” Whenever, to this day I disagree with someone, I say, ” ah P-shaw Evelyn.” I lived that lolly-gag, slow-poke life up until the very day I had to skee-daddle up north to college in Nashville.
Right off I noticed that these southern city folks dressed different. For the first time I saw turtle necks and cordoroy.
“So, where are you from?” They would ask.
“Florida”
“Oh, great beaches,” they would mush.
“No, I’m from northwest Florida. It’s rural like south Alabama. It’s pine trees and soybeans and cows with cow plops,” I would reply. I didn’t make many friends.
During that first year at Vanderbilt I saw things I never knew existed. I saw fall for the first time and when the leaves turned red and yellow I gathered them up and sent them home to Florida in a manila envelope. During the first snow flurry I stood at my dorm room window and cried at the beautiful whiteness of it. At the end of my freshman year when we drove out of the rolling hills of Nashville I was startled at the flatness of my home state. I had never noticed it before. I was struck by the college-acquired flatness of my accent, too, so lickety-split I dropped it and returned to “lordy mercy” at the state line between Opp, Alabama and Glendale, Florida.
By golly, though, the years of school kept me marching northward, eastward to Chapel Hill, North Carolina and to the fine Commonwealth of Virginia. My husband would have considered a settled life even as far north as Maryland, but, “I will not live in the northeast,” I told him. Here I am in the heartland of the genteel south and my “P-shaw Evelyn” is like a foreign language. And I have to say that in the south I knew growin’ up we did not live in Thomas Jefferson homes or even know what a Rotunda was for that matter. This is a life I like though, and if I add a dash of rural south-ism every once in a while I get along quite well. My husband and I refrained from naming our daughter June Bug and settled on Emma instead. Still if we’re headed out I’m liable to say, “Okey-dokey sweet pea go weaky-squeaky before we hit the road.”
“But mom, I don’t have to go,” She’ll whine.
“Ah, p-shaw Evelyn,” I’ll say and send her to the potty anyway.