If you Google something like “Southern storytellers,” you can read comments that cover everything from why Southerners tell you more than you want to know when you ask a question to why folks in these parts have a love affair with Duke’s mayonnaise.
If you ask if Southerners are natural storytellers, just consider the words of author Eudora Welty, a Jackson, Miss., native: “Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers...great talkers.”
I would say that’s a pretty broad generalization, but some Southerners are bad to generalize, no doubt. In fact, author/humorist Roy Blount Jr. said flatly: “Southerners all like to generalize. That is the only way in this world you are ever going to get down to universal truth.”
Generalizations or not, I do believe this region has more good storytellers than any other. Why is that? I don’t know. You might Google it for 89 opinions.
I’ll say this: There’s just something about growing up in the South that lends itself to telling a good yarn. Maybe it’s because we’ve seen a lot and like to talk about it. Maybe it’s because we don’t hide our imperfections; they sometimes sit on the front porch. Maybe we’re more frank. Maybe it’s because we glory in the slow, musical cadence of Southern talk.
So Eudora Welty was right: We love a good yarn, and there is an abundance of expert yarn-spinners out there.
I will also say this: If a person was raised in the South – yes, I know, people are reared, rabbits are raised – he or she will often stay a Southerner even if the person moves up North or out West or wherever. Roy Blount Jr. wasn’t born in the South, but he was raised here, and he still writes Southern stuff like “what barnyard animals might be thinking.” That’s the subject of one of his 20-something books.
Author Imani Perry, whose latest book is titled South to America, was born in Birmingham, left there at an early age to be raised in New England, and now lives just outside Philadelphia. But she still considers herself a Southerner, a product of Alabama. She toured the South for her book and wrote about what she saw and experienced, the good and the bad. I bet she feels comfortable when she goes home to Birmingham.
Actually, when a Southerner who’s been away comes home, he or she feels pretty dang good, if you’ll pardon the generalization.
The famous Willie Morris, on returning to the South, said: “I haven’t been this happy in a long time. It’s a sensual texture of things here. It’s the wood smoke that’s in the air on a dreary winter day. It’s the chicken and barbecue that they sell in little stores and service stations. It’s the conversations about people from the past with old family names that intertwine.”
I think I’d like a good pone of cornbread with my soup beans tonight.
Phil Hudgins is the senior editor of Community Newspapers Inc. Reach him at phudgins@cninewspapers.com.