Down in this part of the world, we got it all: fifty-foot Confederate flags planted along the interstate, statues put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy, plantations where you can have wedding pictures taken of the way things used to be; we got lynchings, riots, bombings, shrimp and grits, and even muscadine grapes. Yeah, the South is America’s longest-running crime scene. Don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. But the thing is, if you’re born into a meat grinder, you grow up around the gears, so eventually you don’t even see them anymore. You just see the beauty of the sausage.
