Although I grew up in the Arizona desert, in many ways mine was a Southern childhood. After my parents’ divorce, a few plot twists worthy of a Carson McCullers novel delivered me at the age of 4 into my grandparents’ care. My Grandmother Maye, originally from Arkansas, still spoke with the thick drawl of her youth, and cooked as if she still lived in the Gulf Coastal Plain.
Despite working full-time as a jewelry saleswoman, she fixed me a hot “plowboy’s breakfast” every morning, and fried up chicken, pork chops, or chicken fried steak almost every night. Every Sunday she served roast beef and gravy for 12 or more guests gathered around two dining tables: friends, relatives, and occasionally a stranger who’d told her a sob story at the gas station.
Nobody else in Scottsdale talked like my grandmother, nobody cooked like her, nobody else wore mink to the grocery store, and nobody, not even my grandfather, seemed to understand the place she’d come from. Perhaps that’s why Grandmother always took an annual birthday trip to the South, in sweltering August, usually to New Orleans, to meet up with her sisters, cousins, and old friends. My grandfather wasn’t one for traveling, so I got dragged along.
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