Yankee Doodle Xandy

In the South, conversations like “Come on in! Busy? Me? No! Sit right down here in my favorite chair and keep me up all night and drink all my liquor. Can I run out and kill our last chicken and fry her up for you? No? Wouldn’t take a minute. Are you sure? Oh, don’t let the chicken hear you. She’ll be so disappointed,” are the normal cadence. I am proud to be from the South, where tea is sweet and accents are sweeter; summer starts in April; front porches are wide and words are long; macaroni and cheese is a vegetable; pecan pie is a staple; Y’all is the only proper pronoun; chicken is fried and biscuits come with gravy; everything is darling and someone is always getting their heart blessed.

But what do you do when you find yourself in a mixed relationship? Now "mixed" to a Southerner extends far beyond the cross-cultures of race or religion. For example, you could be considered unsuitable companions if one of you pulls for Clemson (go Tigers!) but your partner roots for USC, one reads Obama’s new autobiography in bed while the other watches Hannity on Fox, or if one grew up in high cotton and the other didn’t have a pot to pee in. But heaven forbid you should ever find yourself romantically linked to someone outside the Southern perimeter. Your character and moral alliance will immediately be questioned. Neighbors may turn their buggies around in Wal-Mart rather than have to speak to you, or worse, relatives may refuse to eat your potato salad at the next get-together accusing you of not using Duke’s mayo.

After my divorce, I found myself in this predicament. During the early months of a new relationship, I went to visit my Aunt Jean in South Carolina. She said that she and my mother had been praying for me daily. You see, they were both worried that this nefarious man was dating me for the wrong reason. They were convinced he needed…wait for it… a green card. I blurted my boyfriend is from Boston, not Bosnia! But to a Southerner, anyone from above the Mason Dixon line is a foreigner. In my youth, being from the North meant you were a Yankee, and in Southern opinion, there was nothing more insulting than to be called the Y-word.

The term Yankee was created by the British to mock the American colonists during the Revolutionary War, and it is term they use today. When I lived in England, being called a Yank (which I was a lot) sent shivers down my spine. To Americans, the term Yankee refers to people who live in the northeastern part of the United States. As if the term wasn’t offensive enough based on its use during the Revolution, it was used again, during another war, to insult largely white Northerners. That’s right: The Confederate States of America used the Y-word as an insult as well. Unfortunately, the Y-word is still used today in the South, to refer — usually in a disparaging manner — to those up North. The irony here is my cousins thought my sisters and I were Yankees because to them Virginia was questionable territory even though Danville was the last capital of the confederacy! We just sounded weird.

Well, needless to say, that Boston Boy didn’t work out. The language barrier was cute at first, but when he argued that the word "no" only had one syllable, I knew the relationship was doomed. Perhaps he was looking for a green card after all. But not soon after, I tapped a real Southern gentleman on the shoulder (a true love story) and married him a year later. My husband and I found we were perfectly compatible – well apart from the whole cowboy, redskin thing. Bless his heart.