Southerners a decent lot -- except for iced tea

Growing up in Flint, Mich., I came to believe that people from the South were just about the lowest form of life there was – right down there with those gross-looking, bottom-feeding catfish they liked to catch and eat.

We called them hillbillies, rubes, hicks and s___kickers. The term “redneck” wasn’t in vogue yet, or we would have called them that, too.

Not only did they talk really slow like they weren’t very bright, making it worse by adding extra syllables to their words, but they ate other strange stuff besides catfish – like greens and grits and cornbread. And what was that thing they had about fried chicken anyway?

But the one thing that really set Southerners well beneath the rest of us was the fact that they sweetened their iced tea. If the good Lord intended sugar to be put in iced tea, wouldn’t he have just included it in the tea leaves in the first place?

I started to learn a little about Southern culture when I fell in love with Mary Gist in high school, a southern gal whose father brought the family up with him when he got an assembly line job. But my parents were not proud of the fact that I was seeing her. They considered car factory workers of any race or creed a cut below us.

In fact, my image of Southerners was based on the fact that Flint was a blue collar car manufacturing town, and back in those days working on the assembly line was about as good as you could do without an education. So a lot of people from the South moved to Flint to work in the car factories.

But they weren’t the Southern people with great educations and jobs. Heck no, they wouldn’t have been caught dead in Michigan (remember “by day I make the cars, by night I make the bars…”). No, it was the poor and downtrodden southerners who came north looking for work. Many hadn’t finished high school. A fair share were running from bad family situations and a variety of other problems.

So an image formed that I carried for a long time, even after I realized that black people were just like us (that’s a story about growing up in Flint for another time). (And don’t let me forget to tell you about the only Mexican family in our Flint neighborhood, back in an era when there wasn’t even a Taco Bell to make their presence tolerable.)

It wasn’t until much later in life, when I had reason to interact closely with people from the South again that I realized the ones who formed my early opinion were not representative of the people who lived in the South.

Working as a writer for a Phoenix video production company, I happened to spend a lot of time over the course of several years in Atlanta – to many, the very heart of the South. Delta Air Lines was a major client of our company, and they regularly flew us back and forth for meetings at their Atlanta headquarters.

In spending time with Delta employees, both on and off the job, I came to realize that my impression of Southerners growing up was totally false. I came to love their fast-disappearing dialect and their gentle manners. Why, they could talk as intelligently and fluently about what was wrong with their beloved Braves as I could about the Detroit Tigers (the Diamondbacks hadn’t come along yet).

Back then, Delta Air Lines was considered the world’s premier carrier, and the people I came to know were very proud of that fact. They exuded loyalty to their employer and it was reflected in how hard they worked and how much they cared about their passengers.

I came to see that my longtime impression of Southerners was bigoted. Bigotry is normally grounded in ignorance and mine was a classic case based on stereotypes molded from limited information and exposure. Even Mary Gist couldn’t save me from my own ignorance.

I have to wonder how often we form opinions based on incomplete information, how often we judge people based on the fact that they are different from us – in skin color, language, lifestyle, religious belief … it goes on and on.

I’m grateful I know better, and I hope the experience will keep me from ever misjudging people again. In fact, Southerners with their gentility and civility can teach our country a lot about tolerance and respect for one another these days.

I thoroughly enjoy spending a few minutes every Friday evening with fellow columnist Noble Collins, a true Southern gentleman from the old school and a great example of all that is wonderful about people from the South.

But I don’t think I’m ready yet to share a pitcher of iced tea with him. Noble has made it clear how he feels about sugar in his iced tea.

Best we just stick to wine.

(Tomorrow: Southern gentleman Noble Collins responds in "Rimshots.")