In the Changing South:

     A True North Carolinian Speaks Her Mind

     In the last several years, I have noticed a lot of changes in our beautiful Western area of North Carolina—and throughout the South as we have known it.

     Now there's a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina who reports that Southerners can’t exactly agree on where the South is. He says that places like Northern Virginia, Florida and Texas are no longer in the South.

     I will have to agree. Florida is not even in the true USA, not to mention the South. But that’s mainly the fault of our lack of immigration laws. You just cannot have all these people coming down from New York and New Jersey untrained and expect to tell them anything different. They don’t speak English. And Upper Virginia is so contaminated by Washington, D. C. that it will never recover. Texas has always been more of a Western state than Southern. As I see it, you can’t be Southern and wear a ten-gallon hat and boots on the Outer Banks. That would be about as bad as wading in the swamp wearing black socks and loafers.

     What’s going on? Are we losing our Southern identity? I don’t think so. I’ll tell you exactly where the South starts and stops—and it does not take a college degree to figure it out. If you can’t see the sugar in the bottom of your glass of iced tea, you are from the edge of the South. If you drink the unsweetened stuff altogether, you’ve crossed the border; and if you have to order hot tea, you have passed the point of no return. And don’t even ask for grits or country ham; they’ll stare at you like you ordered ‘possum. Don’t mention collard greens, either. When you ask for pop and the waitress has no idea what you’re talking about, you are way passed the Mason Dixon Line. And barbecue! If they bring you spiced-up beef, you have really gone too far. The same goes when you order a hot dawg and get a bun topped with sour kraut.

     But this is nothing new. Our good ole South has always generated a lot of interest and controversy.
                                --Mary Gale Price