CARLTON FLETCHER: Vestiges of being Southern-born survive assimilation

“I heard Mr. Young sing about her. I heard old Neil put her down. I hope Neil Young will remember, a Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”

— Lynyrd Skynyrd

You seldom hear it now when we speak. And there are very few of our “ways” that identify us. Heck, you can’t even tell us by our politics, we’ve become so disjointed.

I’m talking about those of us who consider ourselves sons and daughters of the South, those of us who take great pride in the region that is a vital part of our heritage.

Too many of us bought into the condescension of northerners and westerners who mocked our diction as “cute,” so we assimilated by adapting to their snark, their street jive and their more rapid-fire rhythms. We secretly loathed the idea that the rest of the nation considered us backwards, so we turned our backs on those sweet things that set us apart and instead accepted the coarse and the vulgar.

So now, when you listen to, say, a group of teens chat in the mall, you might well be listening to a similar group in west Hollywood, in the Bronx, or in New England.

Instead of taking pride in the things that set us apart, we simply tried to emulate the “cool kids” from other locales and slowly, gradually lost a lot of what made us unique.

Still, though, there are things about us that are uniquely Southern, things that are encoded on our DNA and cannot be easily disposed of or replicated. These, then, are things that make us Southern:

♦ The ability to blow a gnat out of our face by simply pursing our lips, leaving our hands free to do other things.

♦ The ability to crack open a boiled peanut hull with our teeth and get the precious goobers out without using our fingers. (We get bonus points on this one for knowing that just-right boiled peanuts are a delicacy more palate-pleasing than any high-dollar caviar.)

♦ We can and do bait our own hooks.

♦ The ability to recognize the culinary excellence of a Waffle House or Cracker Barrel.

♦ The innate sense of just how much butter, salt and pepper to put on grits and make them the essential food that they are. (And, “My Cousin Vinny” aside, the jokes by Northerners about what exactly a “grit” is has gotten stale.)

♦ Pulling our vehicles off the road — men remove your caps/hats — when passing a funeral procession out of respect for the deceased.

♦ Learning to shoot a gun the right way as soon as we’re strong enough to lift a weapon and then, as adults, deciding for ourselves if we want to have one in our home. (As opposed, of course, to people who are coerced into gun ownership out of a sense of machismo or pressure from some phony arms group that’s only in it for the money.)

♦ Charm. We can’t help it, it’s part of us. We don’t have to try and buy it or have someone teach it to us. We’re born with it.

♦ Respect for the land. We were raised to understand that the land we live on provides for us: food, protection, pride of ownership, connection to the plants and animals with whom we share it. We, in turn, show our gratitude by taking care of that land.

♦ How to survive in the heat. I’ve talked with several people who were born in other parts of the country who’d invariably asked after moving here, “How do you people stand this heat? I don’t come outside the house until the sun’s gone down and it cools off.” And this is in the wintertime. You’ll have to forgive our seeming unconcern for global warming. We’ve been living with it all our lives.

♦ An appreciation for — and the birthplace of — the best music ever made. Whether it’s rockers like Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers, real country crooners like Jamey Johnson or Eric Church, blues greats like Son House or Robert Johnson, or hundreds of others, great music begins and ends in the American South.

So what if we don’t talk cute anymore? So what if we’re not all ‘backer-chewing, uneducated rednecks as you all thought? We don’t covet or need your approval. Those of us who haven’t sold out will tell you proudly, hell yeah, I’m from the South.