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color-coded mind reading. My response to (b) was thatit sounded to me like the sort of assumption that enabled noncombat-ants to feel cozy about blaming Vietnam on American draftees.
    I wouldn't hear a word against the O.J. jury until I heard several thousand words against the L.A. cops and the prosecutors. I would point to all manner of bungling on the part of these professionals, and observe that the DNA doesn't prove anything if the specimens were planted.
    “Oh,” people of the Northeast would say, as if they had me now. “Was the investigation-prosecution a conspiracy, or was it incompetent? You can't have it both ways.”
    “The hell I can't,” I would counter. “Y'all never heard of an incompetent conspiracy?”
    “But O.J. did it!” they would protest.
    “Most likely. Chances are, so did some of the people who—as has not been forgotten down where
I
come from—used to get lynched.”
    And whatever else you think about Johnnie Cochran, whether his client was the devil or not, the son of a bitch could
preach
,! Alive in his words—without
needing
impeccable high ground. I will presume to put myself in the mind of a given black juror to this extent: I believe if I were such a juror listening to Johnnie Cochran represent a black defendant, I'd be thinking, “Let's remake
To Kill a Mockingbird
with this brother here as Atticus Finch!”
    I don't throw lynching at people of the Northeast lightly, but I do freely
say y'all.
The language needs a second-person plural, and
y'all
is manifestly more precise, more mannerly and friendlier than
y'uns
or
you people.
When Northerners tell me they have heard Southerners use
y'all
in the singular, I tell them they lack structural linguistic understanding. And when they ask me to explain grits, I look at them like an Irishman who's been asked to explain potatoes.
    All too often in the Northeast,
writers themselves
seem to regard being a writer as normal. When people ask a Northeastern writer what kind he or she is, instead of expostulating, “What do you mean what
kind?
Getting by the best I
can
kind! Trying to make some kind of semi-intelligible sense out of the goddamn
cosmos
kind! If you're interested, see if you can't find a way to read something I wrote! If I knew it by heart I would recite the scene in
Marry and Burn
where the fire ants drive the one-legged boy insane (which I'll admit I think almost comes up to what it might have been, but it's not
simple
enough, there are too many
of s
in it; I couldn't get enough
of s
out of it to save my life!); but I don't carry it around in my head—I was trying to get it
out
of my head; and even if I did, reciting it wouldn't do it justice! You have to
read
it”—a Northeasternwriter will natter away about being poststructuralist or something. And everybody's happy Writers fitting into the social scheme of things—it don't seem right to me.
    Grits
is normal.

Out-of-Pants Experience
    S omebody called me a “niche writer” once, to my face. I was so taken aback I didn't tell him I wished to hell he'd tell me which niche he had in mind, so I could get a good foothold in it. It's true that back in the midsixties, when I was working for
The Atlanta Journal,
I would sometimes devote my op-ed column to a verse form I made up: the Georgia limerick, whose first line had to end in the name of a Georgia town. For instance:
    A fellow from near Villa Rica

Got sica and sica and sica.

The doctor: “His heart.”

His wife, for her part:

“It isn't his tica, it's lica.”
    That was a very popular feature, the Georgia limerick. Originally, it had a redeeming social purpose: to establish the right—the local—way to pronounce the Georgia town in question, as in this:
    A wife asked her husband, in Winder,

“Are you happy?” The husband said, “Kinder.”

The wife exclaimed, “Oh!

Decide yes or no!” Said the husband, “I'm trinder, I'm trinder”
    But the Georgia limerick didn't need that rationale. Many readers sent in