In “The Folklore Project,” Bitter Southerner readers write their own stories. Here are all the other readers’ favorites from 2019.

 
 
 

The Bitter Southerner’s “Folklore Project” section wasn’t part of our original plan. But during our first year of publication, it seemed our readers took our mere existence as an invitation to share their personal stories — simple memories of family and friends, wise words about how Southerners do (or should) live, anything that inspired them to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. They sent their stories to us, and on our first anniversary, we began to publish them.

After five years, the Folklore Project still stands as a home for the writing of people who might not, in the everyday order of life, consider themselves “writers” in the strictest sense ( although nowadays, the occasional essay from a “pro” turns up in the Folklore Project, as you’ll see here). And our readers have come to see this section of The Bitter Southerner as a place not only to share their memories, but as an outlet for their own stories of struggle with what it means to be “Southern.” 

To read this roundup of our readers’ favorite Folklore Project stories from 2019 is to see an uncommonly broad range of Southern experiences, how we manage to live our lives in this chaotic present. We present this year’s top 12 in chronological order, by publication date.

— Chuck Reece

 
 
 
 

Gretchen Peters | Nashville, Tennessee

Gretchen Peters is hardly the garden-variety Nashville songwriter, having penned multiple No. 1 hits. Still, she’s learned that no matter how much money a woman writer produces, the Music City machine still insists not just on talent from its women, but also that they “look pretty.” Thus the “tubes, tubs, (and) wands” of concealer in her makeup kit. But age looks very different to Peters now that she’s 60. “The ethereal beauty of age is there for all of us to see, if we stop insisting it be concealed,” she writes. “It’s the transcendent, transparent look of someone whose body is slowly ceding way to their soul.”

 
 
 
 
 

Worth Parker | Arlington, Virginia

Worth Parker is nearing retirement from the U.S. Marine Corps, and these days, his workplace, the Pentagon, keeps him far from harm’s way. This was not the case on the battlefields of Iraq, where a young man from Georgia needed to keep the South with him as he fought. This is a story about how the words and melodies of Southern men got one Southern man in particular through a war.

 
 
 
 
 

Christopher Richardson | Atlanta, Georgia

In 2018, daily newspaper Montgomery Advertiser formally apologized for the fact it once promoted white supremacy and admitted it had “failed victims of racial terror.” A year later, we were still waiting for other Southern newspapers to act accordingly. Christopher Richardson, a former U.S. diplomat now living in Atlanta, Georgia, writes, “Southern newspapers literally built their reputations, history, and current presence based on lynching and white supremacy.”

 
 
 
 
 

Kim Conrey | Marietta, Georgia

Kim Conrey can’t count the times people have told her she needs to smile more — because that’s the way Southern girls of her generation were raised. “An unfriendly woman in the South I grew up in was either a bitch or uppity,” she writes. “Many a Southern woman is raised for the service and amusement of others. She does not belong to herself.” This is a story about the right way to get above one’s raising.

 
 
 
 
 

Caleb Johnson | Boone, North Carolina

In many a small town down here, a single person can come to possess an entire community’s collective memory. In little Arley, Alabama, where novelist Caleb Johnson (Treeborne) grew up, that person was William Jesse “Billy” Wadsworth. When Billy died, the whole town’s stories about him began to surface. Why? “Billy Wadsworth had a gift,” Johnson writes. “He made people feel seen and heard. Coming home was a comfort because I knew in my bones Billy would be there, which meant a part of me would be there, too.”

 
 
 

Daniel Browne | Birmingham, Alabama

After two decades in New York City, Daniel Browne moved with his family to Birmingham, Alabama. And after three years there, he’s begun to understand exactly how many misplaced assumptions get thrown your way when you live in a place like Alabama. “I’ve fielded a lot of questions from friends, relatives, and co-workers since we made the move, and most of those questions are dumb,” he writes.

 
 
 
 
 
 

B. Daniel Simmons & Joshua Reed | Atlanta, Georgia

When Vista Equity Partners founder Robert F. Smith gave the 2019 commencement speech at Morehouse College, the historically black institution in Atlanta, Georgia, he made big news by promising to pay off all the student debt of every member of that graduating class. Two recipients of that gift, Daniel Simmons and Joshua Reed, teamed up to submit this piece to our Folklore Project. One phrase is common to both their accounts: “Did he really just say that?”

 
 
 
 
 

Catherine Gray | Jackson, Mississippi

A letter from a Mississippi mother to her two young sons, one only 3 years old and the other just 3 months. Catherine Gray tells her boys that the Mississippi they grow up need not be the Mississippi of history books. “My Mississippi is full of truth seekers, justice fighters, and norm challengers,” she writes. “It’s full of loud activists and soft-spoken female priests who point us to Biblical examples of what happens when a ruler leads his people by fear.” This is Gray’s second consecutive appearance on our annual “Best of the Folklore Project” list.

 
 
 
 
 

Mark Wilson | Canton, North Carolina

In the region we call home, certain foods are sometimes tied to highly specific places. In the area around Shelby, Tennessee, the food of specific regional pride is called livermush. It consists, Wilson writes, of “cornmeal, water, flour, salt, pepper, sage, pork liver, and maybe cayenne pepper.” And, he argues, “If it’s fed to you in childhood, you will never rid yourself of your love for it.”

 
 
 

Tom Lee | Nashville, Tennessee

Coming home from a high-school reunion, Tom Lee hit the drive-thru at Dunkin Donuts in Crossville, Tennessee. As the server handed him his coffee, he saw on her arm a small tattoo of a punctuation mark: a semicolon. Those who choose to bear that mark are people who have considered and/or attempted suicide. It is, Lee writes, “the affirmation of this claim: your life isn’t over yet. … There is joy yet unknown and discovery yet unmade. Recognition of struggle need not lead to the end, but merely to the next; a semicolon, if you will, not a period.”

 
 
 
 
 
 

Dartinia Hull | Charlotte, North Carolina

Great-grandma Lavinia’s house, where Dartinia Hull lived with her mother when she was a child, always had gleaming hardwoods and the scent of Lemon Pledge. And it was cooled by a clunky old window fan that great-grandma somehow managed to keep running year after year. Hull’s kids, with their lifetime of air conditioning, don’t really understand why she reveres such old houses, but she explains it here. “I want to walk around in these old homes, knowing their hardwoods will sound solid to the step, and they will smell of Lemon Pledge and time, and their insides will be hot as the devil’s armpit,” she writes. “I want to sit with the people who live there.”

 
 
 
 
 

Whitney Magendie | Durham, North Carolina

Whitney Magendie built a life and a family in New Orleans, Louisiana, before they all transplanted themselves to North Carolina. That’s when she learned homesickness for Nola is an unusual and highly specific thing. “Most people live where they live on purpose, but in New Orleans they live there because it’s home in their bones,” she writes. “They live there with a chip on their shoulder, burdened by the constant worry that they might have to leave again sometime soon.”