“When I was in college at Columbus State, I had a paper route, and that’s where I saw these bags of white dirt,” he says. But he discovered dirt eating was more than a folktale when he started working to help finance his undergraduate education at Georgia’s Columbus State University, just across the Chattahoochee from his boyhood home.įorrester explains that he discovered the practice of dirt eating - or, to use the proper scientific term, geophagy - when he was a college student working a paper route, delivering stacks of newspapers to convenience stores. He heard talk about people who ate dirt when he was a child in Phenix City, Ala. Weeks to know that we have surely eaten many things in the past, and we will surely eat many things in the future, but God as my witness, we have never, I repeat, never eaten dirt!”Īdam Forrester, an assistant professor of photography at Alabama’s Troy University, was 8 years old when that episode aired. But speaking for myself and hundreds of thousands of my Southern ancestors who have evolved through the many decades of poverty, strife and turmoil, I would like for Mr. And for all I know, during the darkest, leanest years of the Civil War, some of us may have had a Yankee or two for breakfast. I myself have probably eaten enough fried chicken to feed a third world country, not to mention barbecue, cornbread, watermelon, fried pies, okra and yes, if I were being perfectly candid, I would have to admit we have also eaten our share of crow. We’ve certainly all had our share of grits, and I’m sure there are no self-respecting Southerners anywhere who haven’t consumed at least several tons of their mamas’ homemade biscuits and gravy. “Just tell him that I’ve been a Southerner all my life, and I can vouch for the fact that we do eat a lot of things down here. After inquiring whether the secretary she’s speaking with can take shorthand, she delivers the following message: She calls the writer at the Times but is not allowed to speak to him. In the episode, Julia Sugarbaker happens onto a story in The New York Times about people in the South eating dirt. 5, 1988, I settled into a big chair in my apartment in Brooklyn to watch “Designing Women,” as we did most Thursday nights. I felt compelled to tell her my own little story about the arrival of “Southern Practice of Eating Dirt Shows Signs of Waning.” She told me stories about the slights she’d encountered as a young Ozark woman who had arrived in Los Angeles in 1977 to teach school in the impoverished Watts neighborhood. Channels sent me to Los Angeles to interview Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, the creator of “Designing Women” and arguably the first bitter Southerner who ever aired her grievances on a network sitcom, primarily through the voice of a character named Julia Sugarbaker.ĭuring our interview, I asked Bloodworth-Thomason what motivated her to create a show that purposefully skewered stereotypes of the ignorant Southerner. It still hangs above my desk.Īfter Adweek, I took a job with another New York magazine, now long gone, called Channels of Communication. But I had bought “Elvis Wept” with my own money (and some of Jeffry’s), and by God, it was coming with me. The power of the Southern thing had overcome them, I suppose. Oddly enough, some of my New York co-workers protested. When I left Adweek in early 1988, I took “Elvis Wept” down from where Marty had hung it on the newsroom wall. We packaged it up and mailed it to Marty, and after Adweek moved me to New York late that year, Marty and I overcame our cultural grudges and became friends. We found a beauty - the King in profile, a tear running down his cheek - to which we added a small nameplate that read, “Elvis Wept,” our own snarky little riff on John 11:35. So we drove up Buford Highway to a service station that sold velvet Elvis paintings. Defense of our culture was in order, we thought. My colleague Jeffry Scott and I, young and cocky reporters that we were, would not be outdone. “Southern Practice of Eating Dirt Shows Signs of Waning”īeiser had clipped the piece from the Times on Monday and put it in the mail - with a brief, snarky, handwritten note - to his Southern colleagues in the Atlanta office. 13 edition of The New York Times, a story in the national section under this headline: Beiser worked for Adweek in New York at the time, and he later enjoyed a long reign as executive editor of GQ. I was less than a year out of college, working my first job as a reporter in the Atlanta bureau of Adweek magazine. The first time my Southern origin was used as a tool of mockery happened 30 years ago, on Valentine’s Day of 1984, when a man named Martin Beiser sent me a newspaper clipping.
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