southern

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

You said you left Mississippi in 1854," Ron says. He turns to Mamuwalde and asks "Were you a runaway slave?" "Not at all," Cindy Lou answers. "Daddy freed him." Ron's jaw almost hits the floor. His wine glass does.

You'd think that a redheaded boy with glasses who was named Howard and had an up-down walk would have a lot more to wish for than being friends with me. But I admit I felt a smile on my face and hope in my heart, 'cause maybe wishes really do come true. Maybe some wishes just take longer than others.

He shook his head. "No, we do. I may be a little buzzed and really fucking horny, but I also need you to know that I love you. I should have said it the first time months ago, and I will keep saying it every damn day. I love you more than every single star in the Louisiana sky above us.

Whenever a group of people who are designed to primarily unite around one thing try to unite around something else, the result is devastating for all.

Kay yawned and rested her forehead against the windowpane, her fingers idly strumming the guitar: the strings sang a hollow, lulling tune, as monotonously soothing as the Southern landscape, smudged in darkness, flowing past the window. An icy winter moon rolled above the train across the night sky like a thin white wheel.

As a child, I ate up the image Carl strived to portray: An inspirational rags-to-riches tale of a go-getter emerging the hell of his sulfur-scented, Podunk Texas upbringing. With a community college dropout education, Carl managed to reach six figures as a mobile home lot manager when the trailer park industry boomed in the early nineties. He decorated his accomplishments with a large house, yachts, and weekly morale shindigs for his salesmen bursting with open bars and filet mignon. However, my mother was by far his prettiest accessory.

Every town has __HAT house_: the one that once held dark secrets. You know the house_ the one no one will purchase? The one whose walls have seen blood? The one that even birds avoid, and the darkened windows resemble empty eye sockets? There are furtive, yet insistent, whispers about __hat_ house, murmurs that perhaps the house is best left alone, lest the dark stain left upon that abode__ history seep into our own present-day.

Many people, after spending a long weekend being stealthily seduced by this grand dame of the South, mistakenly think that they have gotten to know her: they believe (in error) that after a long stroll amongst the rustling palmettoes and gas lamps, a couple of sumptuous meals, and a tour or two, that they have discovered everything there is to know about this seemingly genteel, elegant city. But like any great seductress, Charleston presents a careful veneer of half-truths and outright fabrications, and it lets you, the intended conquest, fill in many of the blanks. Seduction, after all, is not true love, nor is it a gentle act. She whispers stories spun from sugar about pirates and patriots and rebels, about plantations and traditions and manners and yes, even ghosts; but the entire time she is guarded about the real story. Few tourists ever hear the truth, because at the dark heart of Charleston is a winding tale of violence, tragedy and, most of all, sin.

I began to doubt that I would ever know the truth of what transpired, or who those people really were. But all that changed one rainy August afternoon, when I was surprised by a dead man who had answers.

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel__he whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.

She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.

{Summertime she speaks of winter, she eats ham, but speaks of beef, got a good man but, flirts with another. She might as well go to hell, cause she ain't gonna be happy in heaven either!}

I'm always sketchy of people who don't like grits.

I know what it feels like to miss everything about him--the way he smells, the way his mouth curls up when he laughs, his voice.

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia__ut at least I__ learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.

It's summer and time for wandering...

It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?