Southern cussing, tamale makers, and Ott's
by Jack Neely
I got lots of response to my North-South essay. I alleged that all the pop-culture aspects that seem Southern today—from college football to temperance to stock cars to fundamentalism—were originally Northern characteristics; and not only that, they were so Northern that they were distrusted and resented in the South when they were first imported.
It's an unsettling and, if you don't mind my saying so, revolutionary idea. I was expecting some outrage on the part of fellow Southerners about the implication that maybe we were just old-fashioned Yankees. I didn't get any of that. What I did get was reaction to one of my premises: that Southern women are learning to cuss, and perhaps cussing more than Northern women, who, at least, used to cuss more. (Some readers even questioned that.)
I'm not attesting to that comparison on personal experience. I first saw it alleged on one of those silly e-mail chain-jokes that circulated during football season in 2002. It alleged that Southern female football fans cussed much more than their presumably more polite Northern counterparts. I was struck by the fact that so many e-mailers who'd seen the allegation concurred. However, a wide variety of Southern ladies disagree in the strongest terms. Well, maybe not the very strongest.
One reader reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where George befriended some Texas wheeler-dealers, jolly, recognizable characters who routinely called everyone "bastard" and "son of a bitch" as terms of endearment. When George picked up the habit, it caused no end of trouble in New York, where the custom is less well understood.
Which implies that Southerners—Southern men, at least—cuss more, at least within certain boundaries.
The original e-mail's premise, that Southern women cuss more than Northern women, may be based in part on that perception, or on Southerner's habitually slippery blanket assessments of Northerners. During the World's Fair I worked with a Southern girl who was fond of doing impressions, and when she did an impression of a Yankee tourist she affected a proper British accent. To her, Southerners were the earthy opposites of Northerners.
Consider the territory Southerners take in when they dismiss someone as a Yankee. The upper-crust Philadelphian and the Ivy-League Bostonian may well have some British propriety about her. The Upper Midwesterner may be polite to a T. But the tough, loud broads of the Bronx, and Queens, and New Jersey (Broads is their term, I believe) do cuss. And, in Indiana and Illinois, you may meet folks who are anthropologically indistinguishable, in accent and affect, from East Tennessee rednecks. Is the archetypal Yankee woman Princess Grace or Rosanne Barr? Beats me.
Maybe, when you talk about Northerners, you need to be more specific. There's not much that they all have in common. As, I suppose, is also true with Southerners.
Still, I have rarely heard any Southerner use the euphemistic term frigging.
 Concerning my column about the early 20th-century tamale industry in East Knoxville, I received lots of interesting tamale memories, advice on some under-the-table suppliers, and further evidence that it's not over yet. Boone's Hot Tamales is located in East Knox County, having moved there not long ago from Niota. You can buy their wares in groceries.
Ott's, in Dixie-Lee Junction, was a unique Knoxville-area barbecue, and one of the oldest restaurants on Kingston Pike. A few months ago, Ott's closed.
Some people went there to pick up a hickory-smoked ham, but what drew me to Ott's was the good pork barbecue with spicy vinegar sauce, very much unlike the barbecue sauce at every other worthy joint in town, served on white bread with a Coke and some chips if you wanted them. They didn't serve much else.
There are several good barbecue places in town, but Ott's was one of a kind; its barbecue sauce wasn't sweet, and was arrogantly unassociated with any tomato product. The owners called it Paducah style—the original owners had lived in that Kentucky town at the opposite end of the Tennessee River—but many learned customers called it "Carolina style," and to me it was the closest thing hereabouts to the hot, bitter barbecue I've enjoyed in the low country. Whatever it was, Ott's was Knox County's chief practitioner.
For me, Ott's had a tragic handicap. Most of the time I've found myself near Dixie Lee Junction, Ott's was closed. On those rare occasions when my schedule coincided with Ott's, I counted myself lucky. I always made the most of my good fortune. I always sat at the sunny counter and had two or three of them.
Ott's was opened by Otto Melott and his wife Thelma in 1963. I never knew them personally. I think they passed the place on to their kids, who ran for the last couple of decades. Ott's had its own reasons to close, I'm sure. But it's a loss to Knoxville's culinary heritage and diversity—and a loss to Kingston Pike's sense of place. Contrary to some urbanist prejudices, there's still a there out there, somewhere: but a little bit less of a there there than there was when Ott's was there.
January 29, 2003 * Vol. 14, No. 5
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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