Blunt Wit

There probably exist other folks more qualified than me to write about traditions of the great American South. Local yokels. Jim dandy’s. You see me, I’ve been a carpet-bagger all my life.

Alas, I was born in Saratoga Springs, NY. Hell that’s almost northerner than Toronto, the capital of the biggest northern state, Canada. However, my entire family all hails from the South: Georgia mostly, but also Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and Tennessee. In fact, as I was growing up my extended family chided me for being a Yankee due to my birthplace.

I believe this was the primary reason I developed a deep seated sense of displacement, a sense of never really belonging, the genesis, if you will, of my wanderlust. I left the South like a shot from a cannon. I traveled to and settled down in far flung reaches of the planet. I learned Chinese and Japanese and fully embraced these cultures: reading their newspapers, watching their TV, eating their food and surviving numerous encounters with their law enforcement which we won’t go into here.

But the traditions of my upbringing still exerted a mighty pull over me and I thought to expound on them here for those of you not lucky enough to have been born and raised in the South. There are literally thousands of idiotsyncrasies that set us apart but for the purposes of briefing down I will limit myself to the following: caning, black eyed peas, sweet iced tea and wet T-shirt contests.

So I remember oh so well pulling out the mason jars and boiling them with those funky holy vacuum seal lids. We then fixed up huge boiling pots of veggies and overly sugared fruit. Wait, that’s canning. Caning, on the other hand, occurred on the numerous occasions we were bad. Parents would pull out that rattan cane and beat us to within an inch of our lives. Dammit, memories as fine as these are nearly forgotten or possibly blocked out by deep psychological trauma. Makes one feel Singaporean, or possibly Catholic, although every southerner has a bit of Baptist blood running in their veins.

Next, every New Year’s we would all gather round the boombox and sing the Pea’s “My humps, my humps, my lovely lady lumps” together. Kidding. Not those peas silly, the other black eyed peas, the ones you eat.

This tradition dates back to the U.S. Civil War when Union troops, especially those in areas targeted by “Scorched Earth” General Sherman would typically strip the countryside of all food, crops, and livestock and destroy whatever they could not carry away. At that time, Northerners considered black eyed peas suitable only as animal fodder, and as a result they didn’t steal or destroy this infernal food. Many Southerners – my ancestors in fact – survived as a result of this mistake. And thus, to celebrate this fact, we’re forced to eat peas that have the consistency and general taste of dirt at least once each and every year.

But at least we can wash it down with sweet iced tea. We never had air conditioning growing up – or at least that’s the myth my parents had us believing to conserve electricity – so the only way to keep cool in the hot, humid summers was to drink iced tea. And since sweet desserts are a decidedly southern trait, any self respecting tea comes laced with cup upon cup of heaping sugar. I think you can actually hear the sound of teeth rotting in their gums on those warm southern breezes of summer.

And of course there is that hoary tradition of the wet T-shirt contests. Every spring the entire school population of the South spills into Dayton Beach, Florida for their Spring break. And all up and down those shapely beaches, young women enter wet T-shirts contests by the million pairs. Lithe, nubile bodies made wet by testosterone induced spillage. The vibe makes one nostalgic for coliseums and lions. I’d have to say that of all the southern traditions THIS is the one that captures my attention and interest the most, even to this day.

Have you ever participated in a wet t-shirt contest?

Can you share any funky traditions (sordid or not) from your part of the world?