“He shot the best piece of ass in Savannah.”

I recently finished reading John Berendt’s travelogue/true crime novel, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I LOVED it! Actually, maybe I should steal from Woody Allen and say that “Love is too weak a word for what I feel.” I luuurved it. I loaved it. I luffed it.

As a native Texan, I found that this novel encapsulates everything I love and hate about the South, and made it simultaneously thrilling and charming. If any of you have doubts about the authenticity of Southern Gothic Literature I’m here to tell you not to get your panties in a bunch over the believability of it all. As far as I’m concerned, this genre tells the truth about every strange aspect of life in the South.

Here’s a few things from my hometown that would make great material for my own piece of Southern Gothic Literature:

1. There’s a family cemetery in the middle of town nestled between a Wal-Mart and a Discount Tire.
2. Driving to work one day I passed a taxidermy shop where the employees were soaping up and washing down a stuffed bear.
3. There’s a middle aged woman who rides her yellow bicycle up and down the main highway, and dances to whatever music she’s playing through her headphones. Oftentimes, she doesn’t stay in a safe place on the side of the road. She’s stopped traffic before, because she was too busy busting a move in the middle of an intersection. I’m not sure what her origins are, but some say she used to be a doctor, and her husband beat her so much that it knocked a screw loose, and she went crazy.
4. In the early 1990s a man who shared the same last name as my family murdered his wife, chopped her up, and then buried her near our dinky little airport. My grandfather started receiving threats over the phone, even though we were no relation to the murderer. It also didn’t seem to matter to people that my grandfather was not only a stand up guy, but a Texas Ranger as well. One person screws up, and then the whole family is to blame.
5. Then there’s the old stock story of the deacon’s son who sexually abused a high school girl. Sometimes it’s the deacon himself, or even a preacher that’s the culprit.

We even have our own versions of that millionaire/murderer Jim Williams. The rich bachelor who hides his homosexuality. Sometimes he’s married to a woman who never shows her face at the parties he throws, because he’s too busy groping men’s (ass)ets. I thought Mr. Williams was a fine character with his antique dealing, fabulous parties, and closeted homosexuality. However, it was with his fondness for Nazi memorabilia that ended up shedding some light on the superiority complex than runs rampant around some men of the South.

(The Real Jim Williams/Not Kevin Spacey from the Film)

John Berendt included this quote from Joseph Killorin, a professor of English at Armstrong State College, in his book, “In the South, among extreme chauvinists, you sometimes find a strange affinity for Nazi regalia. It has to do with a sense of once having been treated for what one was worth and now being treated merely as an equal. There is a terribly social gentleman here in Savannah who sometimes wears Nazi uniforms to costume parties – anyone can tell you who I’m talking about; he’s known for it – and he says he does it for shock value, but the deeper meaning is still there.”

This makes me wonder if the Southern men of today, and their gun grabbing, wife beating, confederate flag flying, Trump voting selves are doing it because of the feeling of dominance that it gives them. Texas has the worst school standards in the nation, the poverty rate is high (Top 20 out of the 50 states), and so is the teen pregnancy rate (Texas being in the top 5). In order to make up for these set backs it’s no wonder men find guns to be overly powerful and exciting  weapons, women  to be the inferior sex, the South to be the superior area of the U.S. (It will rise again!), and Trump to be the best candidate for president. He is a little Hitlery after all.