sit yourself down and stop fussing. You’re reminding me of my Aunt Glynna with all this temperature takin’ and foil tuckin’. This food is fine.

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

Rebecca is a Northerner. You can tell because there aren’t any cheese straws on the snack table.

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...

Charlestonians had a particularly vicious and cunning game, developed after the War. They treated outsiders with so much graciousness and consideration that their politeness became a weapon. ‘Visitors end up feeling as if they’re wearing...

I’m fixin’ to invite her for dinner.

… a Southerner is BORN into the lifestyle,there just ain’t no choice about it.Yer either a Southerner or ya ain’t.

Actually, your mama has some sense, and would say, ‘She lives twenty feet away,’ but suit yourself,” Mrs. Olivier said.

We might be a bit slow on some things down in the South, but we know murder.

mudbugs” out of their burlap sacks. Other than an onion or maybe an ear of corn, if it wasn’t alive when you threw it in, then it shouldn’t be in the pot, she’d say. Did...

The food in the South is as important as food anywhere because it defines a person’s culture.

Just thinking how you’re just like Captain Wentworth and I’m just like Tina Turner.

I came to the state twenty years ago from the South, the gothic South. I’ve heard it called that, haven’t you, Mister Morgan? ‘Thought I was gettin’ away from all that. You know, the Tennessee...

No, it’s an echo chamber of sycophants and I can’t listen to some bimbo recite her newest purchases while pretending I don’t want to throw myself from the roof.

Thank you.

Now you’re just bein’ silly,” Linnie said and let out a laugh.

The enemy was not the Klan but the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through...

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...

There are turning points in everyone’s life when we have to fight, even if we have to do it by ourselves and in public.

At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen’s house) there was an enormous cat...

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

The South: Three-wheeled Piggly Wiggly shopping carts, grease-caked engine blocks, baby strollers with shredded black hoods, Soviet rocket parts, human skulls on spikes and orange-eyed Rottweilers on heavy chains breathing fire…