Tag: Southern

Chef Ryan Smith cures meat in the basement beneath Empire State South. Three flights below the reclaimed wood and dim lights that dominate the Midtown restaurant’s farmhouse-chic interior is a climate-controlled menagerie of sorghum sausages, fat mortadellas, and other charcuterie hanging from delicate lengths of string. Most striking are the country hams, whose aged skins have developed the rich patina of antique wood furniture. Some hams have just begun curing this month, stuffed in a cooler and encrusted with salt. A few others will continue to age for as long as two years. It isn’t often that a chef focuses so much care and attention on an item that won’t appear on the menu until 2014.

Just before 10 a.m. on September 7, 2009, residents of Mill Creek heard gunshots. Some heard one shot; others as many as three. At the time it did not seem important.

To most of the world, I’m your standard-issue Cracker, a good ole boy who loves his mama and bourbon and Jesus (order subject to change).

Our “How Southern Is Atlanta?” survey ran on atlantamagazine.com in July 2012 and was completed by 645 Atlanta magazine subscribers and registered users of our website. Most respondents (64 percent) were in the 25–50 age range, most (77 percent) were female, and most (86 percent) identified themselves as white, which pretty much parallels the magazine’s general readership. The majority (64 percent) of respondents were born in the South; 35 percent in Georgia (and of those almost two-thirds were that rarest of breeds: Atlanta natives).

Technically I’m Southern because I was born on the corner of State and Carlisle in Jackson, Mississippi. But I suppose that’s not what we’re talking about here.

The south holds memories of my people. Beneath blistering suns and torrential rains, we toiled that someone else might prosper.

The first thing i did was plant marigolds in 
the red earth. I didn’t know what I was doing or why I was doing it. I didn’t especially like marigolds. Nor would they last long in the shade garden I had acquired upon moving to Atlanta.

When I got to New York, it was an entirely different story. As a Columbia student in the early 1990s, I found the self-professed NYC melting pot very anti-South.

Asking someone who has made a career out of studying Southern identity to share his feelings about being a Southerner himself is a bit like asking a dermatologist to describe his own skin.

The South is supposed to be haunted—crumbling houses and graveyards crowded with specters, spirits dripping like Spanish moss from ancient gnarled trees.