Book excerpt: "GROWING UP SOUTHERN" ... The words evoke a tide of images, both bitter and sweet: overalls and organdy, hot green fields, cool brown creeks, Grandma's front porch, lengthy and complicated family connections, Mama's fried chicken and biscuits and Granddaddy's cane syrup, "colored" water fountains and "white" ones, church, chores, Dixie, and hot dark dangerous summer nights. Today's Southern children get their biscuits as often from Hardee's as from Mama. On Saturday afternoons they're as likely to cool off in the local shopping mall as in a shady spring-fed swimming hole. But Grandma and Grandpa and Uncle Joe and Aunt Elaine loom large in the lives of today's Southern kids, just as they did in those of earlier generations. The hard work many children still do isn't likely to be acknowledged by their elders; "colored" and "white" labels are less blatant, but they still constrict the futures of this generation's Southern children. Crowing Up Southern explores the continuities and the chasms between the lives of Southern children today and in the past.