southern culture

Just don’t say "moniker." It’s pretentious.

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I’m an unapologetic name collector. Usually I find them in phonebooks, but I’ve been known to eavesdrop on conversations at Wal-Mart and a few other places, wander off an aisle or two, and quickly scribble down stolen names from snippets of conversation. Sometimes I thieve entire conversations, but that’s a story for another day.
When I travel, which isn’t terribly often, I’ve been known to snag entire phonebooks so I may, once safely home, flip hungrily through foreign books and update my list. It’s a long list, but you can bet I’ve never been stuck for a character’s name. Not once. For me, nothing makes the writing go faster. There are actors who can’t get into character until they find the right pillbox hat or slip on the perfect pair of wingtips. When I’m writing fiction, it’s the name.
There’s a lot of mojo in the perfect name. That’s why all these uptight new parents now spend an extravagance on naming services for their bouncing baby whatevers. It makes me laugh, especially since a generation or so ago people were having too many kids to even care. There was a formula: name the first boy after his dad, and all ensuing boys after various uncles or near-relations. John. Robert. William. Girls were named after grandmothers and aunts , or flowers, as long as the name wasn’t too ugly or the female relative too morally loose. My ex-father-in-law’s name is LD. No periods. It’s not short for anything nor does it represent his initials. Granny Fason just had too many damn kids and very little creativity. He has a brother named JD. You see what I mean.
Not many couples have seven or eight kids anymore unless they’re a Duggar. At least they have a whole Bible full of names to choose from. Now there’s research into meanings, hidden, obvious, and historic in a name. It has to stand out, give the child a head start in an ugly, competitive, eat-‘em-alive world. Forget the fat books full of baby names, over-pay some opportunist to name your kid Apple.
Actually, that’s good advice when naming characters – forget the baby name books. Otherwise everyone in your stories will sound like soap stars. Chance. Trace. Skye. Unless you’re actually writing soaps…or those bodice-rippers I used to read in junior high with Fabio (there’s another one) on the cover.
I like the phonebooks because those names are real and they cross several generations of naming trends. A good small-town, southern phonebook can take you to naming places you never thought possible. Twanette. Loyce. Crescentia. Eulid. Vernadean. Eightha. Thurl. And those are my throw-aways. I have hundreds of others I’d use in second. Names like Portia, Sulie, Ever, Warfield, and Rueben just write their own stories.
Some are just too unbelievable to use. For example, I went to school with a girl named Listerine Piggee, bless her heart. Another gal who sweated on the first day of school was Vagina (pronounced va-geena) Sumpter. Luckily, calling roll on the first day of school the teachers always lilted, “Miss Sumpter?” giving poor Va-geena the benefit of the pause. I’ve used this roll-calling trick myself when face-to-rollbook with an unfortunately named student. I do appreciate an unusual name, but not when it victimizes. No character – living or created – should have to answer to Listerine.

My rebellion’s getting mighty lame

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The thing about the Christmas tree being all lovely and twinkly and such is that removing it makes the house too drab to live in. That’s what I’m going to tell everyone who drops by my house in, say, February and finds us still Holiday Festive in the living room.
When I lived in the older part of downtown, such things didn’t really matter. Everyone down there is eccentric and no one thinks a thing about it. So what if your house is still dripping flashing icicle lights after Spring Break? Those old turn-of-the-(other)-century Victorian monuments are charming with a little off-season bling. Kind of like my grandmother wearing a tiara just because. The point is, when you live in a quaint old house, it’s adorable.
I don’t live there anymore. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a certain comfort that comes with a new house and its reliable plumbing, electricity, roof, and trees. Yes, trees. Downtown, I had monstrous, ancient trees that sloughed limbs at surprising intervals. They look a lot smaller when they’re forty feet up in the air – a lot like the Hindenburg, which looked like a small silver football until it hit. The collateral damage was similar. I don’t miss the bats, either.

My new neighborhood is a circle instead of a block, and has a Homeowner’s Association complete with dues and rules and pinched-faced retirees who are terribly concerned about dog poop. They can also get worked up about whether or not someone’s gutters are cleaned out regularly. A forgotten string of Christmas lights twinkling softly over the front porch in, say, February might actually get me a little jail time.
The tree stays, and I plan to turn it on every single night. If the lights last long enough, I’m going to redecorate it for St. Patrick’s Day, open the blinds, and let it scream neon-green across the whole of subdivision/suburbia.

Remembering Iva

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It’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead. But Christmas is coming and we’ve been dragging out all the old photo albums, and there she is. Iva. Maw. My ex-grandmother-in-law and the meanest woman I ever met.

I honestly can’t remember a moment of kindness from that woman that wasn’t followed up by some horrific stab in the back. Or the eye. That was her M.O. – make you feel comfortable for an hour or so, then viciously attack the very thing you care about most. Iva talked about you behind your back and to your face, both with a cruelty that could take your breath away. And no one was spared. For Iva, truth was relative. If she thought about some imagined wrong done to her enough, then it really happened. The telling and retelling of the lie made it true enough to her to invoke a confrontation. Iva was a tornado dropping out of the sky, decimating everything in its path, then just as mysteriously lifting back into a harmless cloud.

From a distance, Iva was fascinating. I only knew her in bits and pieces, but what I know is that her mother was a cold, silent, stubborn Native American of various tribes, depending on who told the stories. Iva picked cotton and lived scarce, even when she married Ben Prouse (or Prowse – spelling was optional in that part of Faulkner County). Ben was a red-headed Irishman who must have been in the Navy at some point, but who ended up in Naylor, Arkansas with Iva. They had three children, the youngest dying as a child from a burst appendix. Ben died from a heart attack many years ago and the picture of him prone in the coffin at his funeral is still in a photo album somewhere. Iva took the picture. I’m still haunted by the image of a woman leaning over her husband’s casket with a Polaroid flashing. It’s unsettling.

My timeline’s a little fuzzy, but not long after Ben died, Iva retired. She’d worked at the Children’s Colony (now the Conway Human Development Center) for a number of years. I’m not sure I understand how she worked with mentally retarded children, because it didn’t suit her personality at all. At any rate, there was an accident at work involving a kiddie train ride that circled the Children’s Colony estate and Iva had been on the train with her charges. I’m not sure if or how badly she was injured, but the state paid her a nice settlement and she went home for the duration.

There, she made life a particular hell for her remaining son and daughter, as well as their spouses, children and ex-wives. Oh, the stories I could tell. I’ll leave everyone else out of this, though, because in the end, Iva is enough.

She dated a lot for a church-woman, danced every Saturday night in El Paso, and had men sleep over, much to the disgust of her relatives. She even married a couple of them. One in particular was a strange man with a metal plate in his head who sold some of her belongings at the Naylor Auction. He eventually shot himself in the head right there in her house. She was in her seventies, then.

Christmas in Naylor followed a predictable pattern. The celebration was always on Christmas Eve at my in-law’s home, and the house was festive, food and children everywhere. Just as predictable was Iva’s yearly Christmas tirade. She’d pick a target each year and hammer-down. After years of this, I quit trying to understand why she wanted to ruin everyone’s good time and simply counted the minutes until it happened.

Some Christmases ago, it was my daughter. Iva’s cruelty dropped out of the sky and landed squarely on Emily in the middle of her yearly Naylor Christmas Eve. She was seventeen. I understand the ensuing scrap between her father and “Maw” over the attack ended with Rick wishing “the old bitch would just die” and Iva’s furious stomp off across the road to her house to do just that.

When her son looked for her on Christmas morning, he found her on the toilet, dead from a heart attack.

If there’s a lesson here, I’d rather not attempt it. Out in the County, things are what they are. The family, extended and close, breathed a collective sigh of relief and buried her. I’m sure that like all good people, they try to remember the better parts of Iva.

I keep writing bits and pieces of her into my stories. She’s not the kind of character to write “as is,” though, because she was her own literary cliché. No one would believe her unless I made her a little kinder, so I’m giving her a sort of eulogistic synopsis here. In my stories, she’ll just have to be a little less Iva.

Found Bits

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I’ve got time on my hands and it’s lovely. Nothing like losing an hour or two scanning what’s out there, especially since I never have time unless it’s some break or other. Something more important always needs doing. Even when I’m busy, though, I have no trouble finding the delightful and bizarre online. I’m actually famous for this. Ask my friends. Here are today’s found bits.

I began on Ebay, of course. Nothing kills the hours like looking up bizarre items there. I found a sea green Olivetti typewriter that I neither need nor have a place for. I love my computer. I do. Just the thought of slinging my fingers at typewriter keys again (thequickredfoxthequickredfox) makes me a little edgy. Remember correction paper? Enough said. Just because I’m technologically spoiled now doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a gorgeous, industrial-age typewriter. This one in particular is just sexy.

A few clicks later I stumbled across A Good Blog is Hard to Find. What a delightful gaggle of southern writers! A good blog is hard to find, but this one had me instantly. I’m still pouring over past posts trying to catch up a bit. Another southern writing group blog (grog?) that you must immediately see is The Debutante Ball, a collection of southern writing women whose books are debuting this year. The group changes yearly to let in another crop of freshly publisheds – kind of a literary Junior League.

I howled at Knit1Read2‘s old post about southern hair, and the latest on downtown parades. Naturally, this led to Hair History, and to Hair Archives. All those meticulous vintage do’s – I tell you, I was born too late.

I know it’s a stretch to begin websurfing typewriters in Ebay, take a left at southern writing grogs, and finally end up howling over the definition of Full Gospel Hair. It’s a lovely way to avoid Christmas shopping, though, and I highly recommend it.

Chesaleen (bless her heart)

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The morning Chesaleen died she bought two silver bottles of black hair rinse, which is why when they found her late that night, straddle-slipped on the rain-wet cement steps, they assumed she bled the black blood of a terrible sin. Truthfully, her heart quit on the second step and there was no blood at all, black or otherwise, but that was neither here nor there. The sin was an old one and not a secret, and the sight was more interesting for the way she pointed up with one fat finger propped against the rusted stair rail, pointing in penitence or accusation and laying like a billowy squid in a puddle of her own ink.

Back before the town elders became Christians paying their wives back for assorted wrongs by going to church, they cooked corn whisky out behind Chesaleen’s barn. She was a sweet thing then, with dead parents and a little money and eyebrows arched up like a movie star. Chesalean knew how to play cards and drink one-handed corn. She had a thirsty wink for the men young and old, single and otherwise. Boys always began coon-hunting, but ended up midnight at Chesaleen’s where she was always wide-awake waiting with a cigarette clenched tight in her smile and one eye squinting for the smoke. She wasn’t even a Methodist.

On the way to church, Mama used to make me cover my eyes when we passed her house and Daddy would cough some. There she’d be, between my widening fingers rising out of her own weeds like a toss-headed witch. Chesaleen scared the hell out of me, just like she was supposed to.

“Good girls go to church,” Mama mumbled straight at my cupped hands, “Bad girls go to hell and burn forever til their blood runs black.” She’d look at Daddy and he’d start fiddling with the gas pedal and that was that.

Chesaleen just waived her housecoat a bit at us and we left her swallowed up in road dust.

There’s a story goes that once Chesaleen showed up uninvited to the Saturday quilting at the high school gym and brought a chocolate cream pie. She wore white rolled-up shorts and spiky shoes with her toes showing. She set that pie down on the table with her red fingertips, mustered up a big lipstick smile, and waited. Well, those good women never quit rocking the needles. They never did anything else either, and when Chesaleen left bawling Mrs. Humnoke went right over to the table, scooped up that pie, and threw it in the stove-fire.

“Smell that pie burn,” my Mama said through the quilt frame, straight down at me underneath it. Women and needles rocking in and out above my head and that sweet, burning chocolate.

Two weeks later Chesaleen showed up again, this time with a pretty lemon pie in her plain fingers and a buttoned-up cotton dress down to her knees. Still, the needles kept rocking and the women set their mouths hard against her. She just smiled pretty and spun around to the door. A few minutes later, it was Mrs. Brashear broke the quiet.

“I think she’s trying,” Mrs. Brashear was blonde and not a little pregnant and had soft spots now and again. She rolled out of her chair, waddled over to the table, and sliced herself a piece of that lemon pie before she screamed and fainted. Women leaping to catch the blonde bride failed before she hit the gym floor planks like a felled pine.

Well, that pie was full of maggots, crawling in all that lemon and meringue like seed pearls. I never told Mama that from under the quilt frame I could see Chesaleen wasn’t wearing any underwear. They were busy enough what with maggots and Mrs. Brashear half-dead from the fall.

When Freddy Brashear was born the next day he had a strawberry mark on his chin and everybody knew it was because his mama had eaten Chesaleen’s maggots.

(I’m not yet sure what to do with this piece. I play with it, find new directions, discard them – you know the drill. Chesaleen’s just a character I can’t leave alone. Maybe I’ll write a little bit more of her over Christmas break. Maybe.)

It’s all about the side dishes, y’all

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As I write there are scads of folks out there working the turkey. There are a few ways to do it right, and a thousand ways to do it wrong. Some of those cooking techniques are downright dangerous, and I’m sure we’ll all read about them in tomorrow’s paper. I’m not giving cooking tips at this late stage except to say that if you haven’t yet started cooking the bird by now, everyone’s having chicken fingers for dinner.

The turkey’s not really the point anyway. I know Paula’s probably whiteknuckled over such a thing, but deep down we all know the side dishes are the real star. Unless you’re serving one of those turducken monstrosities, but I can’t even wrap my mind around what it takes to put one of those on the table.

The staples – at least down here in Arkansas – are pre-FoodTV Network. That means canned green beans oozing in cream of mushroom soup, with a generous topping of canned, fried onion rings. It means sweet potatoes with brown sugar and tiny marshmallows. It means cornbread dressing with bits of boiled egg and whatever came in that white bag inside the turkey’s butt. It means butter beans and lumpy creamed potatoes. It means butter, butter, and more butter.

Now, you can bring something in addition to these staples, and should. A guest, whether invited or univited, should have some sort of covered dish in their hands when they show up. I know people in other places bring a bottle of wine, but that’s inadvisable around here. In a dry county full of Baptists it pays to know your crowd ahead of time.


You don’t want to be discussed.

And then there’s the jello salad. I think it defines the holiday and southerners in general. You only see a jello salad at covered-dish church socials, after funerals, and at Thanksgiving. No one looks forward to eating these things, yet everyone does. Every Woman of a Certain Age should have at least one good recipe for a festive jello salad, and if she’s a maiden aunt, two.

Dessert is a topic for another day. Besides, you’ve got cooking to do. So do I.

Overheard Conversation #1

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4:00 at Hobby Lobby
“I don’t usually never do this kind of sewing. Usually do the high dollar stuff. Custom sewing. I don’t never do that three-dollar stuff or alterations. Don’t have no patience at all for them kind of people. They worry you to death. Only the high dollar stuff.” Pam wore a plaid scrunchie in her hair that perfectly matched the Christmas-plaid cats on her sweatshirt. The cats had little plastic pearl-eyes.

She shifted her enormous mass from right foot to left, positioning her right fist into a hip for counter weight. She had the practiced coolness of a woman who wears a lot of gold rings but seldom looks down at them.

“ This here’s just for some Christmas presents an’ stuff. I generally only do custom sewing for rodeo and pageants. I’m very familiar with sequins. Do ‘em all by hand. Only the high dollar jobs, though.”

Pam’s nonchalance became one of the finest things she had attempted this week. She breathed deeply the moment, hoping not to alter it by saying even one syllable too much. She let here eyes become disinterested and vague.

“ I also train rodeo queens,” she exhaled while picking up and discarding packages of uncovered, coverable buttons.

The small, bent woman with the scissors looked up from the table and nodded appropriately while systematically measuring and cutting a variety of polyester fringes for Pam. She meticulously remeasured each and taped the fringe just at the cutting point to prevent fraying.

She had to. That satin fringe was almost two dollars a yard.