As a child, I ate up the image Carl strived to portray: An inspirational rags-to-riches tale of a go-getter emerging the hell of his sulfur-scented, Podunk Texas upbringing. With a community college dropout education, Carl...

I’m still true to my Southern roots.

I began to doubt that I would ever know the truth of what transpired, or who those people really were. But all that changed one rainy August afternoon, when I was surprised by a dead...

I know what it feels like to miss everything about him–the way he smells, the way his mouth curls up when he laughs, his voice.

Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.

That’s the nice way.

Every town has ‘THAT house’: the one that once held dark secrets. You know the house… the one no one will purchase? The one whose walls have seen blood? The one that even birds avoid,...

It wasn’t really a loud-mouthed, hyperactive little pig-tailed blonde that made Carl cringe. It was what I represented. While his upbringing was battered humiliation, I was spoiled, doted on, and spoon-fed by the world. I...

My parents won’t let me have a motorcycle, but they give me all the guns I want. I asked them for a motorcycle last Christmas and they told me I’d only kill myself. They got...

Many people, after spending a long weekend being stealthily seduced by this grand dame of the South, mistakenly think that they have gotten to know her: they believe (in error) that after a long stroll...

I like to think I am well-mannered. If I have the option at a breakfast place, I’ll go with the grits. That’s how Southern I am.

The decor was attractive and strong, but blander than she would have thought his wealth and position afforded him. Caren couldn’t see the point of having that much money if all of it led to...

We have terrorists coming into the country both through our Northern and Southern borders.

I’m always sketchy of people who don’t like grits.

My voice falls into Southern drawl when I am tired, drunk, or in trouble. Too often, my accent is attacked by all three of these realities.

Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people and...

Whenever a group of people who are designed to primarily unite around one thing try to unite around something else, the result is devastating for all.

You said you left Mississippi in 1854,” Ron says. He turns to Mamuwalde and asks “Were you a runaway slave?” “Not at all,” Cindy Lou answers. “Daddy freed him.” Ron’s jaw almost hits the floor....

Southern hospitality and Amish cooking – Ya’ll Come Back, Danki.

St. Paul line.” Saloons, hotels, banks, stores, and services from smithing to tailoring sprang up in rail stop communities.

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like...

But no one could say he hadn’t gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children...

{Summertime she speaks of winter, she eats ham, but speaks of beef, got a good man but, flirts with another. She might as well go to hell, cause she ain’t gonna be happy in heaven...

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

Explaining the myriad delights of a football Saturday in the South to anyone who has not enjoyed them may be impossible – like trying to describe the ocean to a blind man.

Sing me a love song in a slow, southern drawl to the tune of sunny days…

Mojo” around his neck.

My uncle is a Southern planter. He’s an undertaker in Alabama.

If there is such a things as “race”, there is only the Human one.

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt...

She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.

First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert’s been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her,...

Whuppins were like kid taxes we paid with our behinds.

…and should I die in her care, I would leave smiling because, I will linger in the hills beside her…

Sea and land may lie between us, but my heart is always there with you.

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

Snow flurries began to fall and they swirled around people’s legs like house cats. It was magical, this snow globe world.

It’s summer and time for wandering…

The curtains were not yet drawn and with the moonlight spreading across the room, I could see clearly. I undressed and slipped a soft cotton gown over my naked body. I pulled the blanket off...

The wind held the door open for me, and I appreciated it. Who knew the breeze was such a southern gentleman?

She went to the window. A fine sheen of sugary frost covered everything in sight, and white smoke rose from chimneys in the valley below the resort town. The window opened to a rush of...