Magnolias Grow in Dirt: The Bawdy Lore of Southern Women

Rayna wrote us the following note: “My grandmother, Clara Frederick Derden, was the bearer of many Southern, German, and Texas traditions, including bawdy lore. Born in 1900, she died on October 19, 1976, two weeks after I finished this article. I brought a draft of the article to her hospital room and said that I had ‘told all,’ and that her reputation would be ruined. She laughed and said she hoped I’d told the truth. I’ve tried to do just that. This is for her. ”

 

I heard my first bawdy stories from Southern women; they told them in the appreciative company of other women and children, male and female. Usually, this storytelling occurred when we city folk went “down home” for holidays to visit relatives in East Texas (a Southern enclave in the Southwest). All the women would assemble after dinner to talk about family matters and tell stories. The men were engaged in the same enterprise out in the yard, except that they didn’t talk family; they talked politics. And they didn’t “set” to talk; they stood or hunkered. 

We girls and all the boys who were too young to go out with the men had been put to rest near the women, but we were always very much awake. No one really expected us to go to sleep, and we were allowed to listen as long as we didn’t intrude. It was called being “seen and not heard.” Ordinarily, we had been called upon to perform earlier, but when our songs and recitations and the men’s mealtime politics talk were done, the women had their turn. When things got a bit too racy, someone would put a finger to her lips and say “little pitchers have big ears.” The content would be adjusted for cleanliness for awhile, but not for long. 

Of course, some of what they said was meant for children, and it was calculated to send us into shrieks of shocked delight. The very advice traditionally given to children was comic, bawdy and just the reverse of proper. “Now that you’re going off to college,” an aunt advised my best friend, “don’t drink out of any strange toilets.” And my granny warned the girls many times, “Before you marry any ol’ hairy-legged boy, be sure to look carefully into his genes (jeans).” 

For such wonderful advice, we did indeed have big ears, and we carried away material for our future repertoires as grown women. Such performances gave my sisters and cousins something to share, expand and treasure as much as we treasured the more conventional and publicly acceptable Southern woman’s store of knowledge about cooking, quilting and making do. 

One of the first bawdy stories I remember was about a newly-married couple who spent their first week with the girl’s parents. Late one morning, her mother went upstairs to see why the couple hadn’t come down for breakfast, and she returned to the kitchen with orders for Paw to call the doctor. When he inquired why they needed one, she replied, “Oh, they come down in the middle of the night for the lard and got your hide glue instead.” 

The woman who told that story and many others was my grandmother. She continued to fill my big ears with a large and delightfully bawdy store of tales, songs, jokes, and sayings for the next thirty years. Grandmother was an unusually good storyteller, but her bawdiness was not remarkable in our family. Her sisters, my mother, my sisters, cousins, and aunts all engaged in the perpetuation of the bawdy tradition. I have noted this family pattern elsewhere and have heard similar material from Southern friends and colleagues in folklore and from those marvelous teachers professional folklorists call “informants.” Although folklorists are just beginning to report its existence all over the world, I have heard bawdry from all sorts of women. I continue to hear such material from family members; since I don’t travel home very often, Ma Bell has to serve as the communicative vehicle. I’m certain her corporate Yankee ears would turn pink if she knew what my sisters told me long distance. The phone now serves as an instrument for the maintenance of tradition and for my own recall of those stories I heard so long ago. In fact, a new tradition in the family is the reputation of Grandmother’s stories, and it is partly due to that tradition that I can record them here. 

Many folks in the South would vigorously deny that any women would engage in such naughtiness. Certainly there are some, perhaps many, who would no more traffic in bawdry than in flesh. And there are others who would not even participate by listening. As my best friend’s aunt would say, “She wouldn’t say ‘shit’ if she had a mouth full!” The South believes in and reinforces its own mythology, and the bawdy material simply would not aid women in maintaining the Mammy- Miss Melly image. Between the accepted image and the rigid sanctions of Protestant church life, I doubt many women would revel in a public reputation which included being a good trashy storyteller. 

One way my family acknowledged the hypocrisy was to tell bawdy stories about it. A favorite from my mother concerns a group of ladies discussing sex. One said she’d heard that you could tell how much a woman liked sex just by examining the size of her mouth. “Waal, (and here the teller opens her mouth wide and bellows) ah just don’t believe that,” said Mrs. Priss, the minister’s wife. And “Oooh, (here the teller purses her lips) is that sooo!” said Mrs. Belle, the red-headed beauty operator. 

The reason few know about Southern women’s bawdy lore is that most scholars of pornography, obscenity and bawdry are male. Unlike folklorist Vance Randolph who had the good fortune, good sense and credibility to collect such materials from women, most collectors received bawdy lore from men. Women sang them child ballads and lullabies and men told them bawdy tales and songs which could not, until recently, be printed at all. Men not only collected bawdry from men, but they often sought it only from certain kinds of men - usually urban black males on the street or in prison. They knew Southern white males tell racy racist material, and, being rightfully offended by the existence of an endless Rastus and Liza joke cycle, never thought to ask what else there was. Had they gone collecting the stuff from women, they’d have either got it, been shot trying, or ruined their reputation with the men out by the pick-up. 

I recall the stunned surprise of two male colleagues in folklore when, during a visit to my home, my female relatives treated them to a display of sisterly trust and verbal indiscretion the like of which they’d never been otherwise privileged to hear. Few husbands, brothers or fathers would have sent male collectors to a female relative if the agenda was dirt. So, the dirt stays in the kitchen where men and women prefer to keep it. 

The number of women who tell bawdy lore is something of a question, but what kinds of women tell it is an even more curious issue. Due to my own origins and upbringing, my exposure to Protestant lower- and lower-middle- class women, both black and white, has been more extensive than to any other group. However, because of the peculiar advantages which education has afforded me, I have mingled with wealthy and upper-class women enough to hear the stories they have to tell. All sisters under the skin, one might say, and sharing trashy talk certainly moved us to a common denominator. Genteel rich ladies fulfill one’s wildest expectations, and the stories of the Southern female horse set (the Manassas manure crowd, as one Washington journalist tabbed them) would give any Derby hooker a run for the money on this particular track. One of the loveliest of their stories comes from my aunt, an elegant horsy lady who loves train stories — the bawdier the better. She tells of the flashily dressed belle who boards a train in Memphis heading West. Two dark ladies seated across from her draw her attention, and she inquires after their exotic origins. 

“Well,” says the first one, “I’m a Navajo and my friend here, she’s an Arapajo.” 

“Oh, that’s just wonderful,” says the berouged lady. “I’m a Dallas ’ho. We have so much in common.” 

Not to be outdone by elegant women, other women who operate outside the boundaries of social systems also take license in their storytelling. The various Southern “whore ladies,” barmaids, snuff queens (Country/Western groupies), and other wicked ladies I have known and loved deliver the goods when it concerns bawdy tales. The trash-mouthed “good old girl” has even surfaced in recent literary and cinematic treatments. The Cracker truck-stop waitress in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More is one such character. And two Southern madams and their repertoires have been immortalized in print. Pauline of Louisville’s notorious bawdy house wrote her own delightful memoirs, and “Miss Hilda,” the last of the Texas Madams, appears with her tales in a 1973 Journal of American Folklore article (see bibliography). Miss Hilda illustrates part of the Southern paradox by telling outrageous stories at the same time she forbids her female employees and male clients to swear in the House. She might be a “Dallas ’ho,” but some standards had to be maintained in order to keep up the proper image. 

One final group which participates in bawdry, however, is less bound on keeping up the image. I have to confess that many of the women who tell vile tales are gloriously and affirmatively old! They transcend the boundaries — not by their station and employment — but by aging beyond the strictures that censure would lay on the young. The South, like many traditional cultures, offers an increase in license to those who advance in age, and old ladies I have known take the full advantage offered them in their tale-telling. They seem to delight in particular in presenting themselves as wicked old ladies. Once, when my grandmother stepped out of the bathtub, and my sister commented that the hair on her “privates” was getting rather sparse, Granny retorted that “grass don’t grow on a race track.” 

A number of stories I’ve heard concern old women’s fancy for young men, and Randolph reports several of these in Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales. As the Southern Black comedienne, Moms Mabley, used to say: “Ain’t nothin’ no old man can do for me ’cept bring me a message from a young man.” I confess I look forward to old age if I can be as bad as Granny and Moms. 

Southern or not, women everywhere talk about sex — sex with young boys, old men and handsome strangers — and sexual errors, both good and bad. Newly married couples are some of their favorite characters along with prostitutes, preachers, rabbis, nuns, Easterners, country boys and girls, foreigners, and traveling salesmen. In general, men are more often the victims of women’s jokes than not. Tit for tat, we say. Usually the subject for laughter is men’s boasts, failures or inadequacies (“comeuppance for lack of uppcomance,” as one of my aunts would say). One story my granny tells is about the two women who were arguing as to whether old men could satisfy women. They argued back and forth until one quieted the other by asking if she’d “ever tried to stuff spaghetti up a pig’s butt?” 

Preachers take the brunt of many jokes, and one can understand — given the Southern church’s rigorous control over women’s lives — why parson stories are true favorites of women. Preachers either get away with what they can never brag about, or worse, get caught with their clerical piety down. In a joke my aunt tells, a young nun sits across from a prostitute on a train. When the sweet little nun inquires solicitously of the painted lady what she does to get such beautiful clothes, the lady replies that she is a prostitute. 

“Oh, my,” said the nun. “I’ve never met a prostitute. What do you do?” 

“Well,” the lady said, “I sleep with men for money.” 

“Oh, my goodness,” gasped the nun, “how much do you charge?” 

“Twenty-five dollars,” said the lady. 

“Twenty-five dollars,” the nun said in surprise, “why, pooh on Father O’Brien and his cookies!” 

My grandmother does a long monologue composed of mock announcements from the pulpit by the typical Baptist preacher. “Will all the ladies in the congregation who wish to engage in family planning, please see the minister in his study,” the monologue begins, and the phrases following do the preacher’s image no good. 

Besides preachers and old men, women love to tell stories about country boys and strangers. Country boys are noted for their affections for sheep and their mothers and sisters. Strangers are noted for their tricks on local folk, most particularly for their efforts to secure sex with the farmer’s daughters. In a story repeated in Pissing in the Snow, one of my Southern Indian/Kentucky migrant friends told of the on-shore sailor who had the joke played on him. He visited a smalltown prostitute, but was too drunk to know what he was doing. As he huffed and puffed in his efforts to get his money’s worth, he asked how he was doing. 

“Oh, about three knots,” replied the lady. 

“Three knots?” he asked. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s not hard. It’s not in. And you’re not gonna get your money back.” 

Next to country boys and strangers, foolish people of all kinds are the subjects of tales. What constitutes foolishness could be some matter for debate, but I expect that the women all recognized it when they saw it. When someone behaved in a silly or disgraceful way, my Granny would remind us of Charlie Fershit who had his name changed so that it was All-Turd. And she would tell us about the country boy who came to work with two black eyes. When his friend asked how he got them, he said, “Well, when we stood up in church yesterday morning, a fat lady in front of me had her dress tucked up between her buttocks. I thought to help her out, so I pulled the dress straight and she turned around and hit me in the eye.” 

“But you have two black eyes.” And the country boy said, “Well, when she turned back around, I figured she must have wanted her dress like it was, so I put it back.” 

I have rarely heard from women material that I would consider to be deeply derogatory to women or men; I have as rarely heard racist sex tales from women, black or white. Thus, the women’s repertoires, like those of other groups, are as distinctive for their omissions as for their inclusions. Southern men tell stories about many of the same characters as women, but their emphases and inferences are, I believe, quite different. 

The genres of women’s bawdry are, I think, few. I have rarely seen bawdy gestures. Tales and jokes predominate, though I have heard some vulgar songs. Most of the songs, like those of males, are parodies of traditional, popular or religious songs. The “dirty” version of “Little Red Wing,” for example, is sung by males and females alike, and I have heard relatives and friends sing it. But, in general, I cannot recall hearing many bawdy songs from women, though Randolph reports some incidents in his unpublished manuscript, “Bawdy Songs from the Ozarks.” A kind of bawdy word play or word invention, however, appears to be quite common among Southern women; here the content is often scatological rather than sexual. My mother’s favorite curse is “shit fire and save matches.” The comic naming of genital areas (“Possible” for: wash up as far as possible, down as far as possible, and then wash possible) offered women an enormous opportunity for bawdy language play. Here the many names were not in themselves bawdy though their immediate referent was. In my family, a woman’s pubic area was known as a “Chore Girl” or a “wooly booger.” Here, I leave the reader to ponder the cultural significance of the terrifying “booger” in Southern life as well as the visual, metaphoric impact of the well-known (well-used and worn out) scrub pad on women’s imaginations. I never heard a woman use but one (twat) of the numerous derogatory terms for women’s genitalia that Southern men use (gash, slash, pussy, cunt, cock, etc.). 

Our Chore Girls and wooly boogers were affectionately referred to, as were the male “tallywhackers.” Again, I marvel at the richness of cultural interpretation possible as well as at the cynicism with which Chore Girls and tallywhackers were invented. So much for moonlight and magnolias. What is interesting in all the naming is that Southern ladies’ reputed public preference for euphemism (e.g.: “he Critter” for “bull”) travels to the private sector as well. 

The same preference for word play and euphemism shows up in another form of bawdy lore that women engage in. Southern women love to discuss death, disease, dying and pain. But they also love to invent comic diseases accompanied by the comic definition of the disease. Just the shorthand name of the ailment said by one of my female relatives while we were in public or polite company could be guaranteed to send all the children into fits of laughter. Whenever one of us would complain of some unspecified ailment, Granny would say that we had the “hiergarchy” — that’s when you usually fly high but have to light low to shit. Or when someone really behaved badly, she would inform us that he had the “spanque” (pronounced span- Q). “That’s when there’s not enough skin of the ass to cover the hole,” Granny would say. There were, of course, non-bawdy diseases like the “epizooty,” applied to unspecified craziness or illness, but Granny seemed to know more people who had the spanque and the hiergarchy than the epizooty. 

Southern women — like traditional women in all cultural areas — use the bawdy material in many ways for many reasons. Obviously, the material is entertaining to those who use it and presumably to their audiences who continue to demand it. But why it entertains is something else again. I can scarcely develop a theory of humor here, but I can speculate on the uses of the material beyond the simple evocation of laughter. That function of evoking laughter, however, is an important one in the analysis of women’s materials since women, stereotypically, do not have reputations as humorists. Women themselves often say they cannot and do not tell jokes. The media comediennes stand alone in their presentation of women as inventors and perpetuators of humor, but even there, few — beyond Moms Mabley and Lily Tomlin, both from Southern cultures — have gone outside the boundaries of portraying women as humorous objects rather than as humorists. Thus one of the functions of bawdy lore lies in women seeing themselves as comic storytellers and comic artists. In the women’s world, as in the men’s, the premier storyteller and singer, the inventive user of language commands respect and admiration. And the ability to bring laughter to people is as much admired as the preacher’s power to bring tears. Here, the ability to evoke laughter with bawdy material is important to these women’s positive images of themselves as teller and audience. 

There are other functions of this material, however, which should be obvious. Clearly, the material is educational, but in an unexpected way. Unlike the enormous repertoire of horror stories used to convince children (particularly young women) of the importance of maintaining the culture’s public agenda (“why, I know one girl who sat on a park toilet seat and got a disease and she could never marry”), the bawdy tales debunk and defy those rules. The very telling defies the rules (“nice women shouldn’t even know what a prostitute is much less what she does”). Women are not supposed to know or repeat such stuff. But they do and when they do, they speak ill of all that is sacred — men, the church, marriage, home, family, parents. 

It is almost a cliche to say that humor is a form of social criticism, but the shoe certainly fits here. Southern women ought to get married and have children and like it, according to overt cultural prescription, but marriage and sex in bawdy lore are not always attractive states. In a story told by a woman to Vance Randolph, a young Cracker wife complains about her beekeeper husband’s stinginess. He makes her lick old sour molasses off his pecker every night though he keeps three hundred pounds of strained honey in the house. Not a lovely portrait. 

A standard comment on sex usually offered by married women is “I give it to him once a week whether he needs it or not.” But some of the stories make sex — with whoever happens to be attractive — sound downright appealing, and that version differs from the duty-bound version ladies often purvey to prospective brides. So, in the bawdy lore, the women speak with disgust, relish or cynicism about what they ought not to admit to in their socialized state. The bawdy lore gives a Bronx cheer to sacred cows and bulls. 

But the bawdy lore itself is a form of socialization to the hidden agenda in Southern women’s lives and thoughts. The tales and sayings tell young women what they can expect in private out of the men and the institutions they are taught to praise in public, and they inform them as they could never be informed in “serious” conversation. Poking fun at a man’s sexual ego, for example, might never be possible in real social situations with the men who have power over their lives, but it is possible in a joke. The hilarity over the many tiny or non-performing tallywhackers, or the foolish sexual escapades of drunken, impotent men form a body of material over which women vent their anger at males and offer alternative modes of feeling to the female hearers. And when the audience is small boys, what then do the women want them to “hear”? Perhaps their mothers and aunts expect them to remember and “do right” when the time comes. Perhaps, though, the repetition of such stories before little boys is just a tiny act of revenge on the big boys out by the pick-up. Just remember Old Pompey humming a few choruses of “All God’s Chillun’ Got Shoes” while he swept under Old Marse’s feet, and see if that particular shoe doesn’t fit. There are many forms of education, and sometimes the lessons are hard. 

A kind of function that the stories and sayings serve, however, is not necessarily connected to the covert psychological agenda that concerns women’s needs to react against the system that defines their roles as wives, mothers and Ladies. The need is for sex education, pure and simple, and the bawdy lore serves that purpose as well as others. My Granny’s sayings about looking into a boy’s genes/jeans served two purposes. It made me ask about genes which led to a discussion of why I couldn’t marry my age-mate cousin and beget pop-eyed, slackjawed kids. And those first bawdy stories about young married couples, lard and hide glue led to inquiries about the SEX ACT in general. Why, please, would anyone want to use lard or Vaseline in sex anyway? One may still ask that question, but posing it to my cousin got me a lot of information in return. The kind of sex education I got from the bawdy stories and from inquiries about them was no more erroneous or harmful than the “where babies come from” lecture, and it was a good deal more artistic and fun. 

So, participation in fun, rebellion, and knowledge-giving were all a part of what those naughty ladies gave me and what Southern women can continue to give new generations of women. For those who engage in bawdry, the reward comes from having been bad and good at it. The respect that her audiences give the bawdy female narrator backs up the delight she gets from the forbidden nature of it all. What she purveys is a closet humor, taken out and enjoyed whenever and wherever ladies meet — while they work together and while they relax together. Their humor requires no pick-up, no men’s club, no coffee can for spitting, no coon hunt, no Mason jars full of whiskey, and no chaw of Red Dog Tobacco — just a kitchen, a porch, a parlor, and a private, willing audience of ladies. Next time you see a group of women in that particular set, don’t assume they’re sharing the latest recipe for peach cobbler. The subject may be other delights.  There are many issues concerning women’s bawdry that I have not attempted to address here. For example, I do not know to what extent men and women share tales, songs, sayings and so forth. How often and in what circumstances do women perform bawdy material in front of adult men (or vice versa) and how are their repertoires, expectations and uses of the lore affected by that performance? How do performance styles or attitudes toward bawdy material differ among individual performers, between various regions of the South, and between racial and ethnic groups? In most instances here, I have given examples of women’s bawdy folklore totally out of context and have alluded to types of situations where women might perform this material. Studies and reports of all these aspects of female bawdy performance would tell us a great deal about the covert culture and acculturation of women in the South. But the world of women’s bawdry is a private, not a public world, and access to it would require more than scholarly interests and credentials. In part, I am reluctant to suggest that anyone approach that world for the purposes of study alone, and rather insist that a natural participation in it offers more than any research report could.