Southern storyteller writes humorous memoir | DON NOBLE

Randy Cross, now retired from Calhoun Community College, is an institution in north Alabama.

Cross earned a bachelor of arts degree at the University of North Alabama and then a Ph.D. at Ole Miss, specializing in Mark Twain, and made his reputation as a scholar writing introductions for reprints of T. S. Stribling’s novels and coediting Stribling’s unfinished autobiography, “Laughing Stock.”

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During his many years at Calhoun, Cross became well known for telling humorous, folksy anecdotes from his childhood in tiny St. Joseph, Tennessee, in the 1950s. His childhood was not traumatic, and there was little hardship and no stories here of class or racial struggle.

Most of the 24 vignettes in this little book, "Through Old Ground," are from that gentler time and place, though a few are from his time in the service ― he was in the Army Reserves for 31 years and retired as a lieutenant colonel, and several stories are from his experiences as a Fulbright lecturer in Brazil.

Cross learned to get along in big city Rio and had some adventures with snakes and spiders on a trip in the Amazon jungle.

A devotee of picturesque Southern speech, he has chapters on the wonders of Southern idiom and dialect. This is fairly usual stuff. Many Southerners have a soft spot for “I’ll swanee” and “Imo tell y’all a story.” “You’ns listen good ’cause I’m fixin’ to run through this like green apples through the hired girl.”

I was more in tune with his dismay over recent changes in general American speech.

He hates euphemisms like “correctional facility” and asks us to consider what is lost if we retitle the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s missive “Letter from the Birmingham Correctional Facility” and rename Elvis’s tune “Correctional Facility Rock.”

I share his belief that “all right” is two words and mourn the loss of “affect,” “influence” and many other good words to the all-devouring gorgon “impact.”

As you might expect, his Mama figures large. She is comic, but more fierce than comic. A salesman sells her a faulty and dirty used microwave and she makes him sorry he ever thought of it. Mama pitches a fit, makes a scene at the store, until she gets her money back, in cash.

Years later, while Cross is a Fulbright lecturer in Portugal, Mama, visiting, is told about the apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1917 as she is seen at what would be known as the Shrine of Fatima.

Mama, a good Southern Protestant, is having none of it.

“‘Well, I don’t believe that,’ Mother said. “‘You can believe what you want, and you can stand there and talk to me all day ’til you’re blue in the face, but you ain’t gonna get me to believe that Jesus’s mama lit in no tree. She’d a been two thousand years old and looked just like a prune.’”

Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.

“Through Old Ground”

Author: Randy Cross

Publisher: Bluewater Publications

Pages: 139

Price: $16.95 (Paper )

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Southern storyteller writes humorous memoir | DON NOBLE