Deep Fried Southern Tales

By A. Everette James Jr.

Deep Fried Southern Tales: Short Stories
A Summary

A. Everette James, Jr., ScM, JD, MD


There are certain truths that are universal, and then there are regional truths of great validity. Deep Fried Southern Tales are among those with impeccable veracity and are so compelling one can even share them with their best canine friend. In this instance it is a large Labrador retriever whose moniker is Mr. Grady. (A.K.A. Mr. Gravy)
These tales are largely related in the Southern vernacular, a universal form of communication understood and appreciated by most of the realm. The subjects and stories are neither profound nor profanejust interesting flashes of everyday life in a rural construct. Sometime the protagonist talks directly to Mr. Gravy while others he speaks to hear the sound of his own voice.
Each tale stands on its own. Thus the reader has a broad-spectrum selection opportunity to choose any sequence they wish. We hope you read them all but read what you like.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 7, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479775507

A. Everette James Jr.

Author’s Profile for Deep Fried Southern Tales Everette James grew up in rural Eastern North Carolina. His family was tobacco farmers, warehousemen, and owned a small tobacco “redrying” plant. Dr. James is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke Medical School. He did his residency at Harvard, attended Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and taught in medical schools for thirty years. Moving back to rural North Carolina he changed from writing medical texts to nonmedical fiction and nonfiction. Dr. James has produced three novels, two texts of nonfiction and a book of short stories. This short story compilation is a result of observation and experiencing the culture of the rural South.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Lessons from the Oracle of St. James

Seems to me most folks always claim they got somebody telling them what to do or asking them to do something, and they feel put on. Every day, I think I am hearing more and more about that kind of talk. This caused me to spend considerable time thinking on this subject and talking it over with Grady, getting his perspective.

Now you may not appreciate the significance of that last fact, but that’s because you’ve never been to obedience school either. The fact is you most likely never had an invisible fence to stop you from jumping into your neighbor’s swimming pool either, as if it were the moat around Windsor Castle.

Now that pool next to the Duchy of the Dismal Swamp is certainly no Olympic thing, just a large plastic bowl they bought from Mr. Walton so they could call their kin up in New Jersey and tell them they were going to be momentarily unavailable because they were taking a short dip (ever seen a long one?) in the pool. Trying to make it sound like they have a six-meter board and Johnny Weissmuller was their lifeguard.

I have digressed again; but the fact is—if as a canine, you want to get wet bad enough, you can, but you are going to have to get an electric shock before you can get out of your yard into theirs. So if the goal is more important than the control, go for it. Take that to the bank.

Mr. Grady’s also being taught at obedience school what he is supposed to do when you tell him to sit, heel, shake, fetch, and stay. He really does not like stay, but he’s worked it out. So Grady might be very authoritative on this subject, and if you know how to get a conversation out of him of to-dos and maybe even thou shall nots thrown in, you will get a mighty fine fix on the whole thing.

Well, to tell the truth, most of us spend too much time looking at the control side of life and too little seeing if there are some benefits even to that control. For example, Grady told me he doesn’t like any of those commands; but if he does them right, he gets free room and board. Room isn’t all that big a deal, but board is something else in his order of things.

Grady is so interested in and focused on food, he learned to be a world-class beggar. He pulls back his ears and cocks his head and looks away like he is powerful, ashamed to be so hungry. He used to jump up and down and pant but learned right quick that that scared the hell out of everybody, and the alpha wolf didn’t like it either. Now if somebody tells you to run to the end of the rainbow, then you first want to know what you will get for that. If you are digging hard, you aren’t likely to smell the flowers or see the pretty sights along the way. Grady doesn’t stop to mark anything in his path for food.

Why, when I had one of those highfalutin jobs at one of those very proper universities, I used to hear a bunch of my colleagues (that’s what you call them; sounds kind of lofty to me, but you don’t want be the company fool) complaining about all the travel they were forced to do. I found out they were being asked to expound before thousands of folks that came to hear what my erudite brethren had to say. This hardship speech that they were forced into—because they are so smart—was slated to take place in Paris or Rome or in some way-out spot like Portofino, Victoria, Bali, or Kauai. What a hardship.

If the talk goes well, they then adjourn to eat at some watering hole where the menu is written in a strange tongue and doesn’t tell you what anything costs. They also got the dudes dressed like they came from a funeral, pretending they don’t see you till you ask them what year they recommend for the wine. Hell, they make Thunderbird and Mogen David every year, so I don’t know what the fuss is all about. You got to remember to ask if it is dry when you both know it is liquid that comes out of stomped grapes.

Now as the alpha wolf, which is the cryptonym code for lead dog, you got to lay down some truths for those little wolf pups to sniff.

Folks are always talking about control as if it was some fatal illness and they must shy away from it. I tell those other dogs, everybody has got some form of control laid on them, so you learn to either slip it or slide it. You will take some powerful chance if you go after that control yourself because the folks that got it want to keep it, and they got it because they went after it and didn’t care how they got it. If you got this big tiger sleeping next to the fire, you better not pull his whiskers. Think about the control folks as tigers or barracudas, which are more dangerous than sharks.

When you were just a little fellow, I bet they were always saying to you, Don’t fight. There weren’t any qualifiers either with the ladies of the household. That advice has spanned many, many generations, and that’s because it’s good and sound most of the time. So don’t pick any fights, but if you can’t slip or slide an alternating altercation, then you pick the spot where this control associated with a fight will be put on you. If you are a shy dog, let them rest this control on you where not many folks are liable to be looking. Most folks don’t want to be showed up or humiliated in front of their audience, so don’t ever fight a fellow when his troops are observing. Arrange it also so your shame from this control is in private.

Those control freaks get off on showing how powerful that they are before the whole universe. That’s why they wanted that control in the first place. I once worked for a fellow for ten long years who couldn’t think about nothing else. The board brought him in to control the budget, but he took it to mean he could control everything that went to your bowels. He changed the locks on all the WCs, and you had to go to him for the key and put your request in writing so you could be up for bowel review if you were going too much. He got him a staff that was easy to control because they hadn’t done anything by their own in their whole lives and have never uttered a negative. You got to have a stratagem (kind of like a game plan) to deal with this species.

Remember, the control freak can’t score if you got the ball, so fix it so whoever wants to control is with you only in private, and let them think they provoke that control, then give them the reaction they want and hit the exit. When you can decide when to take off, then you sort of slip the control. They think they are in control, but if you decide when you are to hit the exit, you still have exit control. This is not perfect, but if you spend your whole life like those control freaks, then the world will not have been a better place because you were here.

Slipping control is a bit more difficult than just regular slipping. First, you may have to be quick. Second, you have to be devious and sneaky. Some folks are just naturally sneaky, and most can learn to be devious. Now if we were talking about fast like Bullet Bob Hayes or Michael Johnson (not Jordan or the late Jackson), then you got to choose your parents, and that is very hard. This quick is more like facile and kind of like James Worthy’s first step or Ben Quick in The Long, Hot Summer.

My physics friends tell me quick is the initial thrust to overcome Mr. Sir Isaac Newton, who wasn’t related to either Wayne or his cousin Fig. Soon after you get rid of Mr. Newton, you got to bob and weave, zig and zag, and, if you are in the right situation, juke and jive.

You can see how this control business gets to be mighty complicated. Mr. Grady has indicated to me that unless it is somehow related to eating your next mess of vittles, it is simply not worth all this energy folks seem to invest in it. He probably is right, but the Lord gave man judgment and reasoning, and a whole bunch of folks has wasted it on control. The lawyers put you in the slammer, the doctors send you a bill you can’t pay, the smokies take away your fuzz buster, your spouse impounds your credit, and the parson hollers about you in front of the congregated multitude.

After talking it over with my main man (dog), I decided that we weren’t going to spend so much time on this control. First, those control freaks are going to spend more time on it than you are because it’s more important to them, and most of them have nothing else they can or will do. Why, they are so deprived that they probably think points are something you get with a driving citation or for checking the posterior of some rear admiral. They believe hoops are related to ladies’ dresses, honkers are rude drivers, Red Man is a Lakota Indian male with a large teepee, a lounge lizard is some sleeping reptile from the Galapagos, and shine is a reflection of the sun. They will not know the difference in a hawg from Boss Hog, think a still means you aren’t moving, don’t even know about the existence of the Confederate Air Force, what I got my mojo working’ means—I could go on, but you get the drift. Besides, if you spend a bunch of time messing with these folks, you might have forgotten all this important stuff, and by taking up your time, they have control of you. So either pay them no mind or go somewhere, like a turkey shoot or a folk fest, where they would feel uncomfortable. If they are really bothering you, invite them to go goose hunting, where your mates will eliminate them.

Mr. Grady and I talked about the stratagem we ought to use to circumvent the perception of control. First, don’t make it look like you are hiding or that you give a damn. You can go someplace where everyone accepts the fact that you are simply not available. If you can get yourself to a duck blind, you are safe. Don’t carry one of those flip phones the yuppies like to insert in their external auditory meatus. If you got one of those cellular phones in your pickup right under the gun rack or between the front seats in your van, don’t never pick it up when it rings. Those control freaks get the message from the AT&T, Sprint, MCI lady, or Ms. Bergen, which says you aren’t available, which makes this whole scenario seem most official to the control freaks.

Now they think you are playing by their rules, letting them call you when you are doing something else you want to do but have still made yourself electronically, potentially available so they could theoretically lay some control on to you. It is most unfortunate they couldn’t get to wrest some control on you but acceptable to their way of thinking because you just aren’t available but you tried to be.

This whole scenario is like laying down some turpentine to fool the bloodhounds. A friend of mine did that to protect his family business of converting solid corn into liquid corn. Those ole revenuer boys looking for him were going to lay on the control by locking him up and feeding him three squares with no menu. They might even have been planning to tell him when he could eliminate and relieve himself, so he worked mighty hard to slip it. They stumbled up the gully through the turpentine, so when they were about to unwittingly blunder into his stash, he hurled two bowl weazles his oldest boy had trapped. And they slipped the whole thing.

That reminds me to share with you the fact that you should always have a fallback plan so if plan A isn’t cutting it, then you may not have time to figure on it long, so get yourself a plan B to put right in there quick. My buddy had a plan for those bloodhound owners if the turpentine laced with some kerosene and boll weevils didn’t work. We called this the Smith and Wesson Plan. You can put it in for all types of situations. I must warn you, never have this as your primary game plan because it is just too dramatic and makes those control freaks and their couture so mad that they will fight to the death and never forget.

You would be best advised to develop a method to slip the control so the freaks will think they won, but you know they didn’t. After all, you should look at it like the Oracle and Mr. Grady—if you know where the grub and the liquid refreshments are, the rest of this stuff is not anything but fluff and probably will take care of itself. So control the food and water and the elimination thereof and take care of the rest with mirrors and cruise control. That’s the read from the Oracle of Delphi and the alpha wolf.

Chapter 2

How to Act: Move Over, Emily Post

At any gathering of humankind, there is a proper conduct. Now if you boil this thing down to its essence, it simply means how to act. Mr. Gravy, I call him that because of his gustatory manners, and I have visited and revisited this subject because between the two of us, I thought we could develop some parameters and guidelines that would just help many folks who don’t seem to know how to act. I had a mother who was principally responsible, some say culpable, for what I know about how to act, but I had me one of those special circumstances that was so important, I’m going to let you in on the intimate particulars.

I was raised in an extended household, sort of like Thomas Wolfe, who wrote a story about it and got himself into a potful of trouble. I had my grandmother, and she was one of those delicate ladies who, if things weren’t going her way, would faint. She could faint at the drop of a phrase, and my mother called them episodes. They would bring the house down, and when Grandmother woke up, she was definitely in charge, and everybody else was running around like they had just heard Chicken Little say that the sky was falling, or told that the band had stopped playing on the Titanic. My daddy told me that was an acceptable way to act only if you were an old lady and looked real frail, which described Grandmother.

You have to understand that fainting was the deal for her alone, but she had another one, and it was all in the Book. I am not talking about the blue book, the telephone book, or the black book, but the Good Book. She read it all the time, and if she could get her hands on you, then you were the audience in this one-sided exchange. This would go on for a spell until she reckoned you had enough so you would know how to act till you needed some more of the Old Testament. By the time she decided that my cup had not only run over but that it had actually spoiled on my whole lower extremities and I was standing in a whole puddle of goodness.

Grandmother was a foot-washing Primitive Baptist—the folks that don’t have any playing organ music, the preachers come in tandem, the sermons have more volume than content, and one of their gatherings lasts all day. They are also known as the hard shell Baptists, and they do not interpret the Good Book—they take it literally. They truly believe ole Jonah stood right there in that gastroesophogeal junction of the whale and sloshed right on through that hydrochloric acid and came out unscathed.

My grandmother told me that how to act was all right there in the Word. All I had to do was sit still while she read it to me, from the Thou shalt nots… through those fairy tales of the New Testament. Those Primitive Baptists were very suspicious that the liberals had watered down the New Testament to where it was fuzzy, as in unclear on how to act. The fact is the hard shell rules were so clear, nobody wanted to follow them, and they are now on the endangered species list. If you plan to tell folks how to act, they got to act afterward like you imply, or they will punch their ticket. The words in the Good Book sound real good and their message is usually direct, but if somebody doesn’t interpret for you, you still don’t know how to act. I loved my grandmother, but her techniques didn’t get it—she was better with Kaopectate. Mr. Gravy didn’t have a grandmother at all, and in fact, he couldn’t remember his mother all that well. So I know he was depending on me to tell him how to act.

My home setup was more like a menagerie, where I was the only one getting obedience training. Mr. Gravy says his upbringing was more like the real world out there because all he had to do was get ahead of his brothers and sisters, then he could act just like he wanted because he was the lead dog, until he ran into me.

But more about this adult guidance. I lived in this house with my widowed aunt Nene and bachelor uncle Jesse, who tried real hard to show me how to act. My aunt was a very refined lady and didn’t allow any profanity. All you have to do is have a mouthful of Bab-bo once, and you learn how to act on that subject real quick. That talking was easy, but in teaching me how to act couth and mannerly, my aunt needed some serious help from my mother. My daddy and my uncle didn’t know any more about that than they did petit point. Teaching me how to act with couth was kind of like group therapy. The two guys were observing, so those women weren’t going to do anything to mess up my jump shot or my slider.

Working on that DNA legacy, Mother and Nene just knew I was going to be some virtuoso baritone. That DNA idea didn’t work any better than it seemed to in court, except maybe it was my daddy’s DNA, because he couldn’t carry a tune in his valise. I got a nice voice, but just for calling geese, and sometimes I can put one of those Tom Turkeys in heat. That, however, doesn’t come under couth, even though it makes Mr. Gravy do his uh-uh-uh thing when he gets excited or he is about to stain his molars.

The ladies decided I could learn about this music thing or pretend that because I knew so much, I could do it. All you have to do is act like you know how to act. Besides that, this music was composed (right before you act, you get composed) by a group of folks named Wolfgang and Giuseppe, and I should not have had to act around anybody with names like that.

My mother and my aunt ganged up on me, so Mother sang and my aunt read. I was supposed to absorb it this way so I could act with couth. This was like feeding turnips to a wharf rat. It ran right through, and almost none of it stuck. You don’t have to be very smart to figure out that the wharf rat is working on the garbage in, garbage out plan.

Since I couldn’t show my couth by performing or even presenting some soliloquy, they said I could demonstrate by being a collector. Daddy liked that one and suggested I start collecting those Indian pennies and work my way up to portraits of the presidents on paper. We are not talking about three-dollar bills (my family is full of those), wampum, or wooden nickels but genuine coin of the realm.

The ladies kiboshed that whole game plan—Grandmother said it was against her religion to pile up money. Daddy lifted up his eyes, but he did not utter one word. My uncle was named Jesse James, so he was suspect even though it was Grandmother who laid that weight around his neck.

Besides that, he and Daddy needed some couth themselves, but they were glad Mother and my aunt were laying it all on me. I looked up the word connoisseur and said it three hundred times in the mirror so as not to blush or turn green, then set forth to acquire a collection.

Because I could toss a little piece of rawhide about ninety miles an hour and make it seem like it just fell off a table, I started collecting baseball cards. I thought that this was the how to act that they were talking about. The ladies put the nix on that and made me sell my whole collection so as to destroy the evidence of my uncouthness.

Do you know I had one of those cards with Honus Wagner’s picture on the front and Piedmont Tobacco behind? I may have been short on couth, but when a fellow later sold it for $640,000, I figured I could buy all the couth I would ever need with that. Besides, if I had that much bread, I could act like I wanted to. You look at that Ross Perot fellow. He put a cussing on General Motors, talked real ugly about some of the money the prez and Mr. Dole took, and implied that most of Congress had dubious lineage and the Supreme Court was a bunch of pink liberals. That behavior is what would get regular folks fitted with a