Growing Up Southern: March 8, 2018

When Sainted Mother wanted to chide me gently about my appearance, she had a unique way of softening the act, one honed by a lifetime of rural restraint.

“You look,” she would say, “like somebody who was called for and couldn’t come, and when they got there they wasn’t needed.”

I’ve never heard anyone else use it. I don’t know if she had it copyrighted or not, maybe so. I tried it once early in my marriage. Only once.

As I say, I don’t use it myself. I’d love to know if anyone else (other than immediate family, Sis) has ever heard it used.

I do know, from hanging out mostly with English majors at Fayetteville, that folk music adapts, over time, to location. Thus, an English Ballad about a dying soldier (syphilis supposedly) became the ballad of a dying cowboy on The Streets of Laredo. Of course, he was kilt by a gunshot wound. Here in America, we die manly deaths from firearms—"womanly deaths,” I suppose they call them when young girls are the victims—or it’s just not proper.

Anyway, I know folk sayings also adapt to new locations. In L.A. (lower Arkansas) where Sainted Mother grew up, when someone really annoyed you, say a presidential candidate mocking a disabled person (although that would have never happened in her lifetime) the correct response was, “That man makes my ass crave applesauce.”

Move a generation forward and fifty miles north, the saying changes but the intent stays the same. Say a couple of rich idiots loved to kill elephants for fun and cut off their tails, folks in the Arkansas Delta might observe, “That makes my ass crave a dip of snuff.”

I kinda like that last one because of its inherent earthiness and the fact that there are so many opportunities to use it these days. I counted its use eight times in 30 minutes last evening by someone close to me watching the nightly news on television.

One other of Sainted Mother’s favorites, and one I’ve never heard used elsewhere, concerned what she must have viewed as unwarranted pride. When someone who should have been expressing a high degree of shame or repentance, say someone who constantly lied, not for humor or emphasis—both accepted purposes in the commons—but for spite, greed, or self-aggrandizement, she would observe and comment. Many times, this involved undue haughtiness in church. Or, a non-chastened soul might drive by our little grocery store without the customary, no, obligatory, wave, thus warranting censure.

“They was just a’sittin’ up there like Garrett on snuff,” she would say, “never even looked this way.” Pride knoweth no shame.

Maybe she just made that up. Southerners do. My late father-in-law, showed such class once, when a political candidate for office had been caught performing despicable acts prior to the election (I can’t give away too many details, but it involved female prisoners and unused jail cells). Not surprisingly (family trees are not bushy in these commons, but they are quite tall), he still received maybe a hundred votes.

Father-in-law called it an "educational election."

An educational election?

“Yes, it tells us just how many assholes there are in this county,” he said.

Some things never change. We’ve had a few of those elections lately, haven’t we?

The family store and home.
Neglect to wave at your own peril.