Excerpt

Common Is as Common Does

there was a time in the South when being common meant something, and it wasn’t good. For generations of Southerners — my parents’ and grandparents’ generations in particular — to be common, to exhibit the behaviors that were part and parcel of commonness, was to find oneself seated on the lowest rung of the social ladder, toes planted in the muddy gumbo underneath. God may have been no respecter of persons, but where commonness was involved, we Southerners certainly were.

In those simpler times, mommas of any refinement at all strived to rear up their sons and daughters to “know better” than to do common things, understanding that commonness was not only the behavior itself but the accompanying cluelessness about the error of that behavior. Commonness, it was thought, was so deeply ingrained in common folk that they hardly knew they were behaving commonly.

(There were exceptions to that perception, of course. I mean the kind of brazen commonness that clung to immodest, slatternly women: those demimondaines who dared peroxide their hair or wear ankle bracelets, who wore ... read full excerpt from Carryin' on ebook