As you can see, this book has been around a while. (The back cover is held on with masking tape.)
I first read Florence King’s Southern Ladies and Gentlemen long before my move from New York City to Dallas in 1982, and have reread it many times since. After my move, it served as an instruction manual for my cultural adjustment (although Texas is as much Western as Southern).
King is a caustic curmudgeon who grew up in Washington, D.C., among Southerners, attended graduate school in Mississippi, and writes hilariously about the South. The first chapter of this book is titled “Build a Fence Around the South and You’d Have One Big Madhouse” and in the fourteen chapters that follow, she builds a credible case.
Here, I learned about Good Ole Boys and Good Ole Boys Who Are Not; Dear Old Things, Rocks, and Dowagers; and self-rejuvenating virgins. King writes about gay men in the South (“Every obscure hamlet has a homosexual that nobody could miss…”), old and young maids, and what you get when you mix Southern belles and bourbon (“Someone at the party is certain to complain about being either horny or sore…”). I was tickled to hear echoes of King’s life when I started in the features department of a newspaper. It was called the Women’s Department in King’s newspaper days (it was just “the fourth floor” at my job) but was no less scorned by the people who wrote the “real” news when I was there.
The book, originally published in 1975, is dated, but still contains essential truths. To some extent, I used it as a model for my own book The Yankee Chick’s Survival Guide to Texas, although I can only aspire to King’s rapier insight. King’s book was out of print for years, but was wisely re-released in 1993.
I don’t want a new copy, though, until this one disintegrates in my hands. It’s an old friend.
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