The Pride of Southern Youth

The Pride of Southern Youth

Southern Pride

Chapter 1

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I am a southern son. I am prideful and I can be hateful, but, I can also be giving and loving. I am the south and the south is me. We are bonded, we are one, we are inseparable under the southern sun.

Like most southern men, my earliest childhood memories are of my father. No son admired their dad more than I did. He was larger than life and able to accomplish anything. There wasn’t anyone who compared to him when I was a boy.

I looked up to my dad, even idolized him at times, and I hoped to one day be just like him. He was the kind of father that would let me ride on his back if we were walking somewhere together and sometimes he would spend hours of quality time with me, when he was able to. We would sometimes even wrestle in the living room for as long as I wanted. We were both children when we would play together. 

He taught me at a young age how to play sports as well as how to hunt and fish. He taught me sportsmanship, competitiveness, and what it took to survive. He gave me the building blocks I needed for success, which were what would later be the cornerstones of everything that I have ever accomplished in life. 

No matter what anyone said about my father, I always knew he loved me. He taught me even at my youngest of ages that there was nothing wrong with a man telling his son that he loved him, which I have always been thankful for. He filled me with encouragement, daily, and he taught me that I could accomplish anything that I put my mind to.

I had an inward peace in my early childhood because my Father constantly filled me with love and encouragement. The only complaint I could ever have had about my Father was that while expressing his inner child when we were together, he had a tendency to lean towards meanness. When I was turning seven years old my Father decided to throw me a large birthday party. He was kind enough to invite friend and foe alike from our family and community. This blessed man went to great lengths to make sure everyone was having a good time and he did everything in his power to make sure that the atmosphere stayed light and festive at this party.

This great man of the south made a great personal sacrifice by risking our relationship when he realized that the party was getting dull and that I had not yet taken a swim in the family pool like he had asked me to do, earlier in the day. To rectify both of these dilemmas, he ever so lovingly pulled my pants off in front of everyone at the party as I kicked and screamed and he then threw my young exposed body into the pool. This of course brought laughter from all the little girls and boys that I had shared time and friendships with throughout the course of my young life. I would take jokes like this light heartedly during my childhood in order to keep a close relationship with the man I loved. 

My dad and his family were like that when I was a child. They were like rebellious and mischievous children themselves on most occasions. They would pull light hearted pranks on each other that would sometimes lead to fist fights that would temporarily cause rifts in our otherwise close knit family.

My dad and his brothers had a need to have adventures and had a need to constantly break the boredom with wild high jinks, even at the cost of their loved one’s safety. I remember one hunting trip in particular that illustrates the immature nature of my deeply southern family. The hours of heavy monotony which suffocates many hunters in the early morning hours, was broken this day by my dad shooting his shotgun in the direction of one of his younger brothers.

Of course, his sibling returned fire and instead of hunting quail that day, they turned their attentions to each other. They would have to take cover from a barrage of pellets as they ducked for cover behind large oak trees, before returning fire themselves. This spectacle baffled me as a child and their only response to my concerns was the pellets from a shotgun shell are harmless and they don’t really hurt that bad.

In all seriousness, I have always believed that my father’s side of the family has a genetic flaw that allows for mental illness to creep into our minds. There were tempers constantly flaring up in my youth it seemed and suicide was a common cause of death in our households. Before my birth, my father’s sister took her life and in my youth a cousin of mine also took his own life.

I also had an uncle that I was very close to when I was a child that for years refused to leave his room. He would tell me about angels visiting him when he was younger, which I of course believed. As well as mental illness, the life expectancy for my kin folks is uncommonly less than average and just in my childhood, my grandmother lost two sons and a grandson due to either genetic defect, southern cuisine, suicide, or our smoking habit which was enjoyed by almost every member of my family or of course a mixture of all of the above.

In my family, love is the positive that outweighs all the negatives. There is not a better feeling in the world than living in a home where you know you are loved unconditionally and my father sacrificed daily in order for me to have that feeling. As much as my father was a provider for me at this stage of my life he was also my mentor and he was my friend as well. In my early childhood experiences a bond was formed with him that has never been fully broken.

My parents, like many that grew up during the fifties and sixties in the Deep South, came from what would be considered today as poverty. As children they both shared small houses with many siblings and they were both taught virtue and respect by their parents. Being from the deep south in those days meant that above all else, there was a constant demand for all children to be respectful at all times. Being from the Deep South also meant that they could trust others in their community. This was a period in the South when a family could leave their doors unlocked at all times without fear. 

I was sure teenagers partied and had a good time in those days that came many years before my birth, but, it was a time before drugs (at least in the deep south) had made an appearance in the lives of teenagers and the AIDS virus hadn’t yet emerged as a threat in America or abroad. They were able to live life without worrying about lethal violence in the schools they attended as well. The usual harshness and cruelties of youth weren’t as extreme as they are today. The negative behavior of pupils in the south during this time seems to pale in comparison to the degree of negativity that can be found within the actions of the students within schools of the rural south today. 

My father was the son of a butcher, who later became a police deputy, which led him to later become the elected sheriff of a small county in South Georgia. My mother was born into a working class family in Jacksonville, Florida that had many long standing friendships in the area. They were both in their twenty’s when they met; my mother was a good bit older by almost a decade and she was a good bit higher up the corporate food chain as well, spending her days working as an accountant at a major factory in Albany Georgia.

My father at that time was nothing more than a janitor who cleaned my mother’s office, but from what I hear it was love at first sight. My dad was a charming man and still had the confidence and charisma of the star athlete he was in high school. My mother was beautiful. She was also well educated, which for a woman was unusual in the small town my father was from. The relationship they started, transcended class and the social divide between the educated and uneducated, which existed at that time in the south.

My father had already been married. His professional baseball career was brought to a halt before it even began when parental responsibilities were thrust upon him at a young age. His high school girlfriend, whom he later married, became pregnant with my oldest half brother before my Father was able to take advantage of his baseball scholarship to a southern college. By the time my parents met, my father already had two sons by his ex wife, who had been his high school girlfriend. My mother had just escaped an abusive marriage. Her ex-husband (whom my mother rarely spoke of) had become delusional and psychotic during the Vietnam War and returned a different man than the one she had fallen in love with.

My parents were married shortly after they began dating and were together over a decade before I was born. By this time my dad had worked his way up from being a janitor, to being his company’s leading sales rep and my mother had become a high school teacher at a local private school. They were the perfect couple to everyone in the small community in which we lived, which wasn’t far from where my father grew up.

My father was always noticed when we went to town together and women would stop us to ask dad how things were and about his family. After these conversations they would always be sure to remind me that my dad was the greatest sports star the county