The Last Steps

The Last Steps
By Franklin P. Smith
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Hospice Visit

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Pat stood at the threshold of the doorway. He wondered how to approach the little girl in the bed that was holding a stuff pink bunny. He had handled himself well with all the adults that were waiting for the final step in their lives. He didn’t know about dealing or talking to a child about what they were about to experience.

He knew the rule of thumb ‐ let the person doing the talking and take the direction in what they wanted to talk about. This was probably the same approach to take with a child.

“Hey, I’m going around talking to people here for a couple of weeks,” Pat said sitting down next to the bed where the little girl was. He felt really awkward in being and talking to this little girl.

“Hi,” the little girl replied.

“What’s your name?” Pat asked.

“Sally,” replied the little girl. Pat notice the little girls fragile little body. She had red hair with freckles dotted across her whole face. Pat figured that she was around nine years of age.

“How are you doing?” Pat responded.

“Not too good,” Sally replied. “I am so tried and want to sleep all the time.”

“I noticed your bunny.” Pat paused briefly. “Does it have a name?”

“Harry,” Sally replied.

“I’m a writer and I wrote a story about rabbit name ‘Harry’. Its call Harry the Easter Rabbit. Would you like to hear it.” Pat said in a low voice.

“I am kind of sleepy now. Could you come back tomorrow?” Sally asked.

“I can do that,” Pat replied

“Yes, I can. Is there any certain time that you would like me come back?” Pat responded.

Pat came the next day and told her the story, Harry the Easter Rabbit, and told her about the other stories that he had written for children. Sally ask for him to return the next day and the next day to tell her another story that he had written.

In the beginning Sally wouldn’t smile too much but Pat found the key the third day when he told her about how people saw him.

When I was young man I had a dark black beard, I would not shave at times and people would tell me that I look like a big grizzly bear. All I had to do stand up and growl at my children and tell the big grizzly bear would get them if they didn’t clean up their rooms. Being over six feet tall and weighing over 240 pounds, people told me that really look like a big bad black grizzly bear with a two day beard. Now days with my beard turning snowy white and my long handle mustache, my grandchildren tell me that I’m ‘the old walrus’.

Within four days Pat was looking forward to seeing Sally telling her his stories. He could see her eyes sparkle when he would start to tell her one of her stories.

On the sixth day Sally surprised Pat with a startling question. “What is dying?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Pat responded. He knew that a child could spot an adult telling them a lie a mile away especially if they were serious in finding out about what they were asking.

There was a dead silence between the two.

“What do you think?” Pat asked her.

“Mommy tells that I will be happy. I will be seeing Grandma and Papo when I go to heaven,” Sally said in a meek voice.

“Sally,” Pat stop talking trying to regain his composure. “One person told me that it will be totally different than anything that anyone has experienced.” Pat paused momentarily.

“I’ve known people who have gone and come back. They aren’t afraid anymore of doing what you and I will be doing.” Pat paused speaking looking away from Sally.

There’s nothing to be afraid of.” Pat stop talking and looked directly at Sally. She had had her eyes fix on his during the whole time that he had been talking.

“Most of the people I know are afraid of the change,” Pat stop talking and touch her small hand.

“Remember I told you of those magical words in Harry and the Ralph stories. Well, I believe that is what waits each of us. All the Love that we can expect,” Pat stop talking for he could feel his eyes filling full of water. Sally was so sweet and innocent.

He knew that in a matter of days she would be gone from the earth and only her body would remain.

“I guess that is my answer,” Pat replied to break the dead silence between the two.

“I will come back tomorrow and tell you about my Grandfather. He was a character among characters.” Pat said turning his head where she would not see the wetness on his cheek.

Pat came back for several days he adjust his stories where they would either make Sally smile or laugh just a little. Each day he could see her getting weaker and weaker.

The day came when Pat when to her room and the room was empty.

He knew what had happen.

This was the day he stop coming back to the hospice to talk to the people.

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Copyright Feb 11 2005
By Franklin P. Smith

**This is an excerpt of Franklin's story as it was too long for the Dew. The total piece contains several stories within the story of various visits to the hospice. If you would like to read the entire piece, please contact Franklin at his site, listed under Dew Contributers.**

COFFEE

Coffee has always been a staple here in the mountains. All my family was, and are, coffee drinkers. Granny kept a pot of coffee on all the time. Fresh coffee for breakfast then the grounds removed and scattered in the garden or flower bed, then the big enamel pot was put on the warmer on the wood stove for whoever came by or returned during the day for a cup of coffee.

As I think back to the way folks drank their coffee, I notice that today nothing has changed much in the way one prepares his treasured “cup”. Granny always drank her coffee black. Papa and mama stirred in cream and sugar. Uncle Ed would fill his cup almost half full with cream, add sugar and stir it up, then fill the cup with coffee. Then he would pour it out in a saucer and slurp it from the saucer. Papa always said Uncle Ed drank a little coffee in his milk. My uncle Walter Buckner also poured his hot coffee in a saucer, blew on it to cool it, and then drank it out of the saucer. We had fresh cream and it sure made the coffee taste much different than the powdered cream that is added now. There was also “Postum” in a can, which was substitute coffee made out of molasses and wheat, etc., but we never drank any of that. There is also “instant” coffee, but I never could get it to taste right. When Ma Maw ran the Street Car Diner in Marshall, you could get a cup of coffee for a nickel, with unlimited refills.

Mama would always fix her cup (cream and sugar…later one of those tiny saccharin pills when they became available) and drink on it all day. It didn’t matter if it were cold, hot, warm or somewhere in between. She would drink ‘til the cup was empty, then fix her another cup and drink on that the rest of the day. Papa always had to have his hot. If it got the least bit cold, he would pour it out and perk another pot. Pa Paw Canter (my grandfather-in-law), would drink his right out of the spout almost. I’ve never since seen anyone drink their coffee that hot.

We had a good friend who carried the rural mail. He would stop back by his house and pour himself another cup of cold coffee and crumble a biscuit in it. As long as he lived, he always drank another cup of coffee along about 11 o’clock in the day with a biscuits that Louise had made before he went to work early that morning. When mama taught school at Flat Creek, she would go to the teacher’s lounge each morning and pour a cup of coffee. She would drink on that until lunch, pour herself another cup and sip on that. She had a plant in her room and at the end of the day if there was any coffee left, she poured it into that plant. It grew to the ceiling and was so green and full. I guess even plants like their coffee. I remember JFG coffee that came in the can. When the A&P was in Marshall, mama started buying 8 o’clock coffee beans. We were thrilled that A&P had a coffee grinder and we could pour in the beans and grind them up. Even if you didn’t care much for coffee, that smell would make you crave a cup. When we went to the lake or the creek fishing, Uncle Ed would take some ground coffee, put it in a pan with water and boil it over the fire. That was some strong coffee. He said coffee weren’t no good unless it would float a number 9 horseshoe. One sip of that and you would be wide awake this time tomorrow. That was the beginning of Espresso, I suppose.

The way we drink coffee has changed a lot over the years. There are specialty coffee shops that serve only coffee, many, many different flavors of coffee and most times at about five dollars a cup (Styrofoam). They invented de-caf coffee with the caffeine removed for those that don’t drink coffee to stay awake. There are about as many flavors of “cream” you can add to your coffee to make it taste like this or that or the other. Even sugar has changed. You can add refined sugar, unrefined sugar, substitute sugar, turbinado sugar. There are so many flavors added to coffee and to cream, they whip it, froth it, ice it and generally dilute a good cup of coffee until you can barely taste the coffee in it. When we were in Italy last year, their coffee was even stronger than Uncle Ed’s campfire coffee. It was so strong and thick, it wouldn’t pour out of the cup, and you had to drink it with a spoon, like syrup. Don’t leave the spoon in the cup, or it would melt the spoon.

I love coffee in summer, when you can take your freshly brewed cup of coffee and go outside in the quiet, sit on the porch, listen to the birds and enjoy your cup. My mind takes me back to those days on the creek bank with that bitter, strong cup of coffee with my Uncle Ed, the aroma could be smelled for miles, sitting with mama on her front porch rocking, drinking coffee and talking, Granny Doshey using her apron as a pot holder to carry that big enamel coffee pot from the stove to the table. Such wonderful memories and so blessed am I to have them. I wonder if young folks today will have such sweet memories when they go in Starbucks and smell that wonderful smell.

Written by: Judy Ricker

Poke Sallet

Jennifer Saylor, Freelance Writer
Southbound #1: Poke Sallet

DAMN it’s hot. Still hot. Close to setting records, lately. It’s a fiery 88 degrees F even around 5PM, and in the low 90s in the midafternoon. Yesterday a friend who couldn’t take the heat anymore asked to borrow my old AC window unit so she could sleep at night.

Today I dug up a box fan for my bedroom and last night I kept an ice pack in my bed.

During summer my mind tends to turn to things Southern even more than usual. Because heat and the South just go together. I’d like to start a new regular blog series I’ll call Southbound, where I write periodically about something distinctly Southern. I’m open to ideas if y’all have any requests or suggestions.

And I’d like to start with poke sallet.

Poke (or pokeweed) is a shamelessly common weed native to North America, South America, East Asia and New Zealand. It grows everywhere here in WNC. Its stalks are succulent and purple-pink, and it grows hanging bunches of green berries that turn dark when ripe. It can grow to be around ten feet tall, but I usually see it a few feet high.

It’s common as hell, poke. You’ve probably seen it.

Here in the American South (and the Southwest too) people cook and eat the leaves of young poke plants (taller, older ones are too tough). The plant is poisonous, though, and you’ve got to boil the leaves three times, discarding the water each time. When finished, the dish is called a mess* of poke sallet *, and typically you flavor it with salt, pepper and animal fat (usually in the form of fatback, a ham hock or bacon grease). Some add sugar, too. This makes a spinach-like cooked green not unlike collards, another Southern favorite (one I enjoyed quite recently in Savannah).

* in my experience, a “mess” is a lot of something edible you cooked and/or collected; you can have a mess of beans or a mess of pottage

* near as I can tell, “sallet” is an old-timey word imported from Middle French to Middle English from the Old French word salade, or salad

Louisiana even has a Poke Salad Festival.

Elvis Presley, who started out life as a poor kid from Mississippi, probably ate poke. At least he sang about it in his cover of Tony Joe White’s “Polk [sic] Salad [sic] Annie,” which should probably be called “Poke Sallet Annie,” and would have been called that if Nashville had ever had a proper copy editor. I’ve also seen this song called “Pork Salad Annie.” It’s poke, people, not pork (and sallet, not salad, but never mind). In the beginning of the song, Elvis even explains what poke is:

Some of y’all never been down south too much, I’m gonna tell you a little bit about this, so you’ll understand what I’m talking about. Down there we have a plant that grows out in the woods and in the fields and it looks something like a turnip green and everybody calls it poke salad…

I don’t think poke looks much like turnip greens. But “Polk Salad Annie” is still my favorite Elvis song.

Here’s a sweaty, 35-year-old Elvis in a trademark white sequined jumpsuit, doing kung-fu Elvis poses and performing “Polk Salad Annie.” He’s still slim and incredibly sexy, and also fairly stoned on something, prone to insert weird vamps and puts the microphone into his mouth. This video is sad and weird and really kind of amazing.

Annie was a “wretched, spiteful, straight-razor totin’ woman.” Her mama worked on the chain gang, her daddy was lazy, and her brothers weren’t good for anything except “stealin’ watermelons outta my truck patch.” And her granny? Just listen.

Elvis Presley, Polk Salad Annie, 1970 (Go HERE to watch the video)

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If you don’t feel up to picking and cooking tender specimens of a poisonous weed, or if you live somewhere where poke doesn’t grow, here’s another Southern-style salad recipe that involves boiling water, sugar and veggies. It’s cheap and simple and involves no cooking and only 4 ingredients:

Adrienne’s Cucumber Salad

INGREDIENTS

* cucumbers, thinly sliced
* 1 small white onion, thinly sliced
* 1 cup white vinegar
* 1/2 cup water
* 3/4 cup white sugar
* 1 tablespoon dried dill, or to taste

DIRECTIONS

Toss together the cucumbers and onion in a large bowl. Combine the vinegar, water and sugar in a saucepan over medium-high heat. Bring to a boil, and pour over the cucumber and onions. Stir in dill, cover, and refrigerate until cold. This can also be eaten at room temperature, but be sure to allow the cucumbers to marinate for at least 1 hour.

I have some of this stuff in my fridge right now, and let me tell you, it is delicious on a hot summer day no matter where you live. I don’t use the dill because I have none on hand at present, so if you don’t either, don’t let it keep you from peeling you some garden cucumbers and making yourself some cuke salad.

Happy summer, y’all.

Note from the Editor

I would like to remind everyone reading the Dew that while I have below two different articles on New Orleans and Katrina, there were many other areas of the Coast that were destroyed by this storm. For some reason there remains a lack of articles and interest in the news media about Mississippi and Alabama.

But they could use help too.

I do have a link on the sidebar for Mississippi (look for the logo I have here) and a website where they discuss what is occurring and what help is needed in that state.

On the Scene: Ten Days in New Orleans

Entertainment Weekly
On the Scene: Ten Days in New Orleans

Aug 8, 2007, 05:14 PM | by Vanessa Juarez
Categories: Music

EW's EDITOR'S NOTE: EW's Clark Collis and Vanessa Juarez spent 10 days in New Orleans to research a piece for the print magazine (which hits newsstands Aug. 10). Here, they share their thoughts on the experience.
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When our managing editor suggested — nay, demanded — that we spend two weeks in New Orleans researching a story about the recovery of the music scene in the wake of the Katrina catastrophe, two thoughts sprang to mind. The first was: "What the hell has gotten into Rick?" The second was: "Who cares? Let's get ready to party!" After all, it had been almost two years since the hurricane caused the levees to breach. Presumably, New Orleans was as good as, well, new. Otherwise we'd have heard more about it, right?

Well, no. What had gotten into our editor, during his own fact-finding trip to the Big Easy a couple of weeks before, was the realization that in New Orleans things are, as a wise man once said, pretty f---king far from okay. And, once we'd arrived in the city, it didn't take us long to agree. You don't have to be a Woodward and/or Bernstein to notice on even the most cursory of drives through, say, the Lower Ninth Ward, that the area looks like it was hit by a hurricane two weeks, and not years, ago. True, houses no longer actually lie on top each other as they did after the neighborhood was flooded, but some three out of four homes in the Lower Ninth remain unoccupied — and nearly all still bear the gruesome marking that indicate whether the National Guard had found bodies inside.

The Lower Ninth is where you will find the house of rock 'n' roll legend Fats Domino (pictured), which has been renovated. But many other musicians who used to live here — and in other, similarly still devastated neighborhoods — currently dwell in other cities or in FEMA trailers. The latter may sound cozy, but, as we discovered upon entering one, are cramped and fairly hellish. And with recent reports of people getting sick from exposure to formaldehyde, conditions in these aluminum boxes are officially unsafe. One retired trumpeter who has been living in a trailer since Katrina told us that, at first, he joked that his new living quarters were so narrow he could only eat spaghetti. He went on to inform us that he had long since ceased to find his living situation even remotely humorous.

In fact, these dispossessed musicians must also dwell in a place inside their own heads, which can be every bit as suffocating and depressing as their physical quarters. As Bethany Bultman, founder of the New Orleans Musicians’ Clinic, told us, “Everyone — myself included — is suffering from post-traumatic stress. Stress-related stroke. Stress-related heart attack. They’ve all increased since Katrina, they’re everywhere.” Many of the stories we heard were certainly tragic. We also heard tales of anger and hope and resilience. Actually, we heard a LOT of tales. Everyone had a story and everyone knew two or three — or ten — other people whose histories they recommended we hear. Initially, two weeks had seemed like an extravagant period of time to get our story, which you can read in the issue on stands this Friday. In the end — despite having the pleasure of chatting with such legends as Fats Domino and Cyril Neville and Irma Thomas as well as a host of less well known local musicians — it, perhaps inevitably, felt like we were only scratching the surface of this problem.

So, New Orleans is no longer the party town of legend? Au contraire. If you want to have a good time, the birthplace is jazz is still very much the place to go. Most of the tourist-friendly areas like the French Quarter or Frenchmen Street survived the disaster relatively unscathed. Our (corporate) credit cards got a severe workout as we caught great shows at such venues as the Maple Leaf, Preservation Hall, Tipitina's and Snug Harbor (try the gumbo — it's sensational!) While the city's musicians may often be having a grim time in their personal lives, they remain determined that you should have a good one. One, indeed, that you will never forget.

It is fair to say, though, that New Orleans itself does feel fairly forgotten, with the eyes of the media long since having turned to fresher stories. Perhaps that's just the way of the world. But it makes the fact that, as New Orleans icon Dr. John described it, one of America's greatest cities now largely resembles a Third World shantytown no less of a disgrace. If there were only some ways for you to help...

In two words: You can. It’s easy. Just go down there and hear some terrific music. Or check out the amazing architecture. Or get blind drunk on Irish Car Bombs at a Bourbon St. karaoke bar. A tourist dollar is a tourist dollar — and none will be turned away.

Or you can help in a more direct fashion. There are many many not-for-profit organizations assisting musicians in New Orleans. Charity workers who were kind enough to answer our multitude of questions include representatives of the Tipitina's Foundation, Renew Our Music, New Orleans Musicians' Relief Fund, Sweet Home New Orleans, Music for Tomorrow and the Musicians Village. It may be true, as we were told by one relief worker, that what musicians really want is a hand-up, not a hand-out. Right now, however, they are in desperate need of both.

(Go directly to the magazine article to get the links for the above Charities and Help Organizations.)

Birthplace of the Blues

I've never been to Clarksdale Mississippi, but I have a friend who lives there near the Sunflower River, home of the Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival scheduled for its' twentieth edition this coming weekend, August 10th, 11th and 12th.

Home to the Delta Blues Museum and actor Morgan Freeman, Clarksdale is a funky eclectic celebration of the arts nestled securely in a river heritage steeped with reverence for muddy water, blues and good times. The headliners at this year's festival include Denise LaSalle, Bobby Rush and Billy Rivers and the Angelic Voices of Faith. The festival features two acoustic stages, a main stage and a gospel stage. The Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival is funded by grants, donations and hard work by Blues Association members, a true bi-racial organization.

This festival has attracted worldwide interest in celebration of blues by collaborating on a sister festival in the Quebec Province of Lanada and featuring as one of this year's performers Rita Engedalen, a 2007 Norwegian Grammy winner. Small world, ain't it?

Sunflower River Blues Association
Box 1562
Clarksdale, MS 38614

Goodbye to Grandpa's Farm

Sue Groseclose Combs

http://rabbitruncottage.blogspot.com/

I am here to say goodbye to the land where I spent so much of my youth.

This was my Grandfather's farm. My Dad was born and raised upon this red clay. I spent every Summer for years in this very place.

When my Dad died, my brother and I made the decision to sell the farm to our cousin. The farm will remain in the family as it should be. There is building going on all around the little homestead....half a million and million dollar homes are being built on old Groseclose Road. So very different from the tiny house where my Grandfather lived.

The road was named for my Grandfather and his brother Bill. They were never apart a day in their lives. One owned a farm on each side of the road and spent their lives there, never venturing too far from it's rugged fence posts and ramshackle barns. One of my cousins now owns her father's tract of land and another will own Grandpa's. They butt up to a wonderful dairy farm so this area will, at least for a great number of years, thankfully remain family farms.

My daughter Grace and I walked down the old road and I took in the sights and smells and sounds....the cows mooing back and forth, warning one another of these trespassers.The songbirds calling to one another and filling the heavy air with music. The hornets busily building shelter. The sweet smell of fresh mown hay....the hazy late Summer sky.

The old house will be torn down soon. It has been empty for many years and needs to go but, at one time, the little white house with the tin roof held lots of laughing cousins....giggling as they tore through the kitchen chasing yet another barn kitten. My Aunt, endlessly it seemed, cooking over her beloved coal stove, would call out, "You' ins stop all that ruckus right now ya heah?" But we all knew she never really meant it. My Grandpa could always be heard to shout out, "Sister? Let the children be!" We could do no wrong with him. We would play tag amidst the wet laundry flapping in the breeze , tease one another about dropping a favorite toy into the deep well, or feeding the mules, horses and cows while we argued over what their names should be. Rocket! No...Buttercup. "Are you girls crazy?", the boys would shout almost in unison. How about Commando? *insert screaming girls* Princess! Princess! And no matter where we were, Barry, my Grandpa's beagle, was there as well. There were beans to pick and cows to milk, horses to ride and eggs to fetch from the hen house.

There were barns to clean and tomatoes to gather (and throw at one another). There were picnics in the filed and at the dam. There were sparklers and fire crackers illuminating the stark darkness. There were boys searching for arrowheads and girls laying on their backs, watching the clouds roll by, playing, "What do you see?" . There were feather beds piled high with home made quilts atop creaky iron beds. There was an old coal stove in the middle of the living room and no television. Just a radio where my Aunt and Grandfather would listen to a country station late into the evening while rocking on the front porch. The cousins would giggle and tickle one another until my Aunt called, " Mornin' will come early enough now. Stop all that silliness and ya'll go to sleep." We would fall asleep listening to the crickets and those old country songs on that scratchy radio.

Those cousins are mostly all grandparents now and we are all scattered far and wide. We stay in touch via Christmas cards, email and the parents, aunts and uncles who are still with us. It was time to say goodbye to the little house but to smile as I remembered the smiles, the laughter, the love.

Going South - In search of Southern culture

By ROBERT KELLY-GOSS
Albemarle Life Editor

The Daily Advance, Elizabeth City, NC

Sunday, July 22, 2007

(article also in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution @issue opinion section - July 22, 2007)

There are few things that have perplexed me so much as Southern culture. As a child growing up between Los Angeles and Little Rock, Ark., I was pretty aware of my family's roots, but hadn't fully understood what it meant, if anything, to be Southern.

As I grew older I became increasingly aware of the negative connotations of my Southern heritage when I was enrolled into Little Rock Central High School in the middle of my sophomore year.

It was then that I learned of my grandfather's role as a proponent of segregation during the 1957 integration of Little Rock Central High School. He was on the school board and was an ally of the oft-reviled Gov. Orval Faubus' attempt to keep public schools segregated.

As I prepared to enter the school after years of living on the West Coast, my mother explained the history to me, concerned that I might find animosity thrown my way because of my grandfather. I got just the opposite.

Older teachers who remembered my grandfather praised his role. They would quietly pull me aside and offer me props for being his grandson.

I became increasingly uncomfortable over my grandfather's legacy. I was never exposed to racism on this level and definitely did not share the views that white Southerners held during the 1950s.

I began to develop distaste for what I saw as Southern culture at its worst. I was ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater and leave this Southern home behind me, for good.

But that would have been shortsighted of me, to be certain. Because, as I would learn over the years, Southern culture is a rich tableau that is drawn from many sources, pulled together to weave not only regional peculiarities, but a sort of odd nationalism that can only be found within the boundaries of Southern states.

North Carolina journalist and writer C. J. Cash wrote that the South is "not quite a nation but the next thing to it." It is a place intertwined with its history, for better and worse, and constantly struggling to establish its place in an ever-changing world.

Over the years I ran from the South, swearing I would never live within its borders again. I was, by my own admission, a Southern expatriate. But things change and, now of course, I live in North Carolina; a place where my father's people first arrived, next to Virginia, where my mother's people settled before moving west to settle Mississippi and Arkansas.

Through the years I have pondered what it means to be Southern and what is Southern culture. I love the food found throughout the varied regions of the South. And the music, be it blues or mountain music, takes me to the different landscapes found throughout the region, leaving with me a sense of place that I can't exactly put my finger on, but cherish just the same.

Many friends who hail from outside the South have asked me what the deal is with the South and Southerners. From the notion of Southern hospitality, to religious conservatism, to fried food or our variety of Southern drawls, people seem bemused by Southernness.

"I don't know," I answer them. "I guess you just have to be Southern to appreciate it." Yet, for myself, I needed have more understanding of what it is I appreciate.

On my search I decided to turn to two scholars whose life work is dedicated to studying all things Southern. I put some questions to them, and while I feel like I know a little more about the South, I'm not sure I can answer what it means to be Southern any more than I could pin down Southern culture in a paragraph.

"There is not a single Southern culture, ever," says Harry Watson, Ph.D., director of The Southern Studies Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "There's black culture, white culture, mountain culture, NASCAR culture, country club culture and so on."

Watson says that, according to the preface in the "Encyclopedia of Southern Culture," Southern culture is defined as any place where Southern culture exists. It's a pretty broad definition, but then so is Southern culture.

For example, in Arkansas, along the Mississippi Delta town of Helena, the blues was born. Across the way in Memphis, a blues-hybrid we call rock and roll emerged while down in the Bayou country of New Orleans, Jazz made itself a household name. And all of those music forms, given to us through black Southern culture, carry with it so much history and subsequent culture that it's hard to lump the whole thing in one neat definition.

"I think it's just as convenient to say that Southern culture is a culture that is practiced by people who call themselves Southerners," says Watson.

Tara Powell, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of South Carolina. While growing up here, in Elizabeth City, Powell says she was attached to her Southern heritage in such a way that she wanted to intimately understand as much of it as possible.

That set her on a course of academic study years ago, focusing, in part, on one question: What does it mean to be Southern?

"It's a lot more complicated than I hoped it was," says Powell. "It's no longer necessarily tied in the way it used to be: whether you had family in the Confederacy."

Ah, the Confederacy. The South has the distinction of seceding from the union of states and establishing its own government, throwing itself into the Civil War.

A few diehard Southerners refer to that as the "War of Northern aggression" because Union troops fired the first shots at Fort Sumter, S.C. Southern states, however, had been threatening to pull out for some time.

The South's bid for independence was lost, of course, and a great deal changed during the subsequent period of Reconstruction and martial law throughout the Southern states.

It was that dark history of the South that gave birth to a sort of melancholy known in the literary world as "Southern Gothic." Proponents of that style of literature are numerous, led by the likes of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor.

Powell points out that Southern Gothic literature was based largely on a "love, hate relationship" with the South. And that is something I can identify with, hands down. It's part guilt, part love of one's land and part desire to examine where it is we come from and where we are going as a people.

The South's history of slavery and the racially motivated brutalism during the last half of the 19th century, into the 20th century, made it difficult for me to accept the South as anything other than a place I didn't want to be. It was that dark side of this Southern question that largely kept me at bay.

Powell says in her classrooms she finds the legacy of the South's past is something her students — most of whom are Southerners — don't want to broach.

"White students might have some guilt or shame," Powell says. "Sometimes their families were transplanted here in the 1950s and they say 'what do we have to do with this history?' Black students have a range of reasons why they don't want to talk about the South's history."

But Powell makes an interesting point about the South's dark past. From that suffering, she says, comes "a lot of richness."

"I don't defend the negative past but there is a lot of wealth there to mine in terms of figuring out how to be human and humane."

That wealth can be found, in part, through a unique mixture of personalities and ideas that seem to permeate in and out of not only Southern, but also popular culture.

Rupert Vance, once a sociologist at UNC, noted that the South is unique because, in many ways, it has not been assimilated into the mass culture that surrounds it. It has, in many ways, maintained a unique personality.

But, as Powell observes, even that personality is changing. Whether it's immigration and the introduction of new cultures, or economics, with the steady disappearance of tobacco culture, many of the unique qualities of the South are changing.

"The South is no longer as distinct as it once was," says Powell. "I think it would be a long time before I would have any sense the South would be just like everywhere else, though. Still, the foods we eat, the way we interact and the way the climate affects the way we live, those things change."

And even the oft-celebrated genre of Southern literature is changing, reflecting an evolving Southern culture. Powell says many Southern writers are looking at the South in ways other than its history. The Southern experience is now being viewed through Southern Jewish eyes, Asian eyes and even Hispanic eyes.

"Being more than white males exploring their guilt over class and racial history of the South," she says.

So does all that pin down Southern culture? Not exactly. I haven't even touched Coca Cola, Pepsi, the barbecue wars, rednecks or "Gone with the Wind."

And it's just as well because, as a colleague pointed out, this subject might well require a book. In the meantime, I'll take my 'cue with spicy, tomato-based sauce and dry slaw and I'll choose delta over Chicago blues just about any day. And I do prefer Coke to Pepsi.

Some Kudzu Photos

Same Spot in Winter.

Kindly taken by Sandy Kinght in Gulf Breeze, Florida while traveling thru Fairhope, Alabama.

Thanks Sandy!