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The following – about we Southerners – is too good not to share with you, folks.

It’s purloined from the book “South of Broad” by the late Pat Conroy. If ever a writer was consummately creatively gifted at his craft, it was Pat Conroy. To fully understand what I mean by that you simply have to read “South of Broad”. Which you probably won’t, but that’s okay. (Note I didn’t write O.K.)

Here is what he thinks the rest of the country thinks about us; or vice versa:

Some people hate Southern accents.

Some people think all Southerners are stupid because of those accents.

Many black people I have met outside the South blame us personally for Jim Crow laws, segregation, the death of Martin Luther King Jr., the existence of the Ku Klux Klan, all lynchings and the scourge of slavery.

Movie buffs hate the South because they have seen “Birth of a Nation”, “Gone With the Wind”, “In the Heat of the Night”, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, and “Easy Rider”.

A man from Ohio hates the South because he once ate grits at the Atlanta airport. He admitted that he put milk and sugar on them and thought it the worst cream of wheat he’d ever tasted.

Many women who married Southern men then divorced them, hate the South, as do many men who married Southern women and divorced them. All men and women who married Southerners, then divorced them, hate their Southern mother-in-laws – ergo the entire South.

All liberals based in other geographies hate the South because it is so conservative. They refuse to believe that any true liberals could also be Southern.

All women not from the South hate Southern women because Southern women consider themselves far more beautiful than women of the lesser states.

All Americans who are not Southern hate the South because they know Southerners don’t give a rat’s fanny (I would have said “rump” for alliteration.) what is thought of them.

There ends what Pat Conroy had to say.

Allow me to add that I think many of my fellow Americans up North think we are slow, or dull, because we talk slowly.

To them I say maybe so, but we don’t send our children to college up there, and y’all sure love to send yours down here for a higher education.

Enough of this. It’s mostly just tongue-in-cheek, not to be taken too

 

 

seriously. (Or maybe foot-in-mouth.)

See you back here next week.

Oh. Other books by Pat Conroy are “The Boo”, “The Water is Wide”, “The Great Santini”, “The Lords of Discipline”, “The Prince of Tides”, “Beach Music”, “My Losing Season”, and “The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life”.