My grandmother Memaw Hasty was from a wealthy family in Marietta, Georgia, but she loved pig's feet. That always seemed really bizarre to me. How could someone who never went out in public without wearing a corset and full makeup love to eat pig's feet?
She would correct improper English in a heartbeat but she liked to eat pigs feet.
I realized that her love of pig's feet makes her a unique person right about the time I realized that Southern stereotypes abound in books and movies, and if we are going to dispel them, we best get busy. Makes me want to pitch a fit, just thinking about it. Or I might need to have a tantrum. Or throw a hissy fit. Pick your favorite. [right, Memaw as a young girl in a tree]
The New York Times published an article yesterday entitled Is It Southern Food, or Soul Food? and it's a pretty provocative article, albeit one that makes a lot of observations without really delving very deeply into them. Take a minute to read it.
I love this: "A lot of Southern cooking comes from just figuring out how to keep things from spoiling in the heat." So true. It's hotter in the summer here. Southern cooking, like everything else, evolves. Most buildings are air-conditioned now, thank God. So we can cook a pan of biscuits in the middle of the day without fainting.
"You had to know how to clean a fish or kill a squirrel" is another great quote from the article. So true. My dad used to talk about eating squirrel, or brains, or other things I wouldn't touch. My Thompson grandfather shepherded his family through the Depression really well, though, and his kids always had food [he owned a country store] and shoes for school [he would go into Augusta sometimes and hustle pool for money]. Southern life fifty or a hundred years ago wasn't just about dealing with hot weather, it was about survival, especially in the late 19th century after the devastation of Reconstruction.
Food stereotypes are hard to dislodge, but there are other stereotypes equally as annoying to southerners.
So are southerners more lazy because of the heat? You normally don't see southerners out running in 90 degree heat in the middle of the day. I've known my whole life that in the summer it's best to stay indoors or at the pool or lake in the middle of a summer day. There is a stereotype, however, that we are lazy because we let the heat slow us down, but not everyone fits that. My father used to try and mow the lawn in the middle of the day and he got heat exhaustion several times, and came close to heat stroke. Common sense had nothing to do with it.
I don't think we are lazy, just because we don't have to shovel snow all winter. Are all New Englanders thrifty and industrious, as movies would have us believe? I doubt it. Is everyone in California a pot-smoking, aged hippie? I've never been there but I doubt it.
In my mind stereotypes are fun to joke about but they can also be harmful. I always wonder when I apply to work for a company outside the south if I am perceived as a dullard or a jerk.
The other stereotype I encounter all the time is that Southerners are portrayed in movies as usually evil or stupid. I was watching the movie Kingsmen: The Golden Circle recently, and enjoying it, and the character of the US president, played by Bruce Greenwood, was as southern as fried chicken [based on his awful accent] and an utter jerk. The character played by Channing Tatum wasn't much better, although he was more idiotic than evil.
It's gotten to where when I am watching a movie and the bad guy character is introduced I am waiting to hear if he has a British accent or a redneck one. The British accent usually happens in the higher-budget movies, just FYI.
One of my favorite movies is Forrest Gump, but the chief annoyance there is that so many of the Southern characters are either stupid or mean. The nicest character, in the long run, is Captain Dan, because he takes care of Forrest financially for the rest of his life, and of course Captain Dan was not southern.
I remember trying to watch the movie Cape Fear, years ago, and I found the southern bad guy so annoying I turned the movie off because the bad guy was both stupid AND evil.
The final stereotype I want to address is that all southerners are racist. The south is a very culturally diverse place and if we are all racists, why are so many African Americans moving back to the south? Why are there so many Hispanic people here, and Asians? Turn on any TV station in the South and you will see a lot of brown faces.
Tyler Perry is a southern guy and a brilliant writer/filmmaker and he chose to build his new state of the art studio in suburban Atlanta.
I am always amazed when non-southerners come here for a visit, or even live here for a few years, and presume to know everything there is to know about us. If I did the same thing with any other region and tried to hold myself out as an expert after only a short time there, it would be laughable.
The longest I've ever lived outside the south was the 3+ weeks I spent in Kazakhstan adopting my son. Does that make me an expert on Kazakh culture?
Lord no.
How do we combat the insane notions that outsiders have about us?
I keep plugging away, writing novels, that hopefully one day will be turned into movies, and maybe in some small way I can dispel the ridiculous stereotypes about the south. We are all different races. We are good folks and bad folks. We are rednecks and we are high falutin' folks. We like NASCAR and we like museums. We eat fried chicken and sushi.
Most of our teenagers don't even sound Southern any more, because of TV and movies and the influx of folks from other places.
I am not alone in my quest to end the stereotypes. Others have paved the way for me.
National publications like Bloomberg have noticed others are moving here all the time, as evidenced by New Yorkers Flock to Booming Sunbelt as Trek South Resumes. If we were all all evil redneck idiots I doubt anyone would want to move here.
My friend Chuck Reece over at The Bitter Southerner is destroying stereotypes right and left. He was featured recently in Meet the 31 People Who Are Changing the South, in Time magazine.
This guy below, Andy Griffith, is my hero. He built a career on actually using the southerners-are-idiots stereotype to his advantage. Every time a city slicker went to Mayberry and tried to best Andy he showed them he wasn't an idiot. Ditto for Matlock. He looked like a stupid country redneck lawyer but he always won because non-southerners underestimated him.
So what can be done? I don't know the full answer to that. I plan to keep writing about the South, and embracing the wonderful things about this place I love, and I will try not to vent too much about how we're portrayed in the media -- just enough to stay sane, not sound too bitter.
Y'all be sweet, and stay in the air conditioning.
