SOUTHERN WRITER, I AM

Souhern writer. I have been told I have a southern voice when I write fiction. I hope that is true. As a daughter of the South, I grew up with the creations of writers of that region. Although I have found some great new authors from that area in recent years and read their work with enthusiasm, I am amazed to admit I remember those dead writer's work better than the new.

An article in "The Oxford American," a great southern magazine, gives us a glimpse into the resting places of some famous Southern writers. It also offered some of the epitaphs on their tombstones.

Do you remember Edgar Allan Poe's tales? He was considered a Souhern writer and is buried in Baltimore, Maryland--a state some still consider more southern than northern. When first assigned to read him, I was taken back by the darkness of his stories. But the more I read, the more I was hooked. Some say Poe was the author of the first mystery. Maybe that was how I became an avid mystery reader/writer. His tombstone had no epitaph at first; then when family managed to come up with money to engrave "Here at last, he is happy," the stonemason broke the stone while carvng. And when friends collected money for a new stone, Poe's birthday was the wrong day in January. Mystery? Or just the spirits getting even for all those chilling stories?

"Look Homeward, Angel," the most famous book by Thomas Wolfe, was written in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina where he is buried. On his tombstone are words from that book--"The last voyage, the longest, the best."

I remember reading Marjorie Kinnan Rowlings, "Cross Creek" when a youngster. I loved the description of Florida, never knowing I would live in that very area as an adult, and the relationships warmed me, a child often alone except when in the world created by books. On her stone is written, "Through her writing she endeared herself to the people of the world." Especially this young girl.

In the era I grew up in the South, reading authors of color was not promoted. I never knew much about Zora Neale Hurston until Alice Walker went to the Garden of Heavenly Rest Cemetary in Fort Pierce, Florida, to place a momument on the unmarked grave of this famous author who died in poverty. Carved on her tombstone are the words: A genius of the South. Novelist Folklorist Anthropologist.

I find epitaphs in old cemetaries interesting. Once I traveled through several Western states, visiting old graveyards and making rubbings of creative epitaphs. I wish I still lived in the South to go on a search for some of my favorite Southern writers. Good excuse for a trip home?