Confessions of a Carpetbagger

I’d like to get this off my chest right up front: I am NOT Southern. I write about the South, and my mystery novels take place in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. And I live here. But I’m a transplant. A carpetbagger. A—gasp!—Yankee by birth.

Sure, I’ve seen the T-shirts: I WASN’T BORN IN THE SOUTH, BUT I GOT HERE AS QUICK AS I COULD. That’s how we Northern invaders assuage our guilt, but I know it doesn’t mean diddly to the true Southerner. More appropriate to our situation are the bumper stickers that read: WE DON’T GIVE A DAMN HOW YOU DID IT UP NORTH, and my personal favorite: IF IT’S TOURIST SEASON, DOES THAT MEAN WE CAN SHOOT THEM?

So you’ll understand why I feel a little nervous about posting on a blog for Southern writers. But, as my character, Bay Tanner, is fond of saying, “In for a penny.”

I love the South. I wouldn’t have left behind fifty years of family and personal history to move here if I didn’t. Of course, there are those who would argue—and justifiably so—that Hilton Head isn’t the South. I’ve heard it described as Cincinnati with a beach. Gross exaggeration. It’s not just my fellow Ohioans and I who have fled the winter. We have equal numbers of refugees from Michigan, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. Every March we seem to get invaded by the entire province of Ontario.

But my island paradise is sandwiched between Beaufort and Charleston to the north and Savannah to the south. You can’t find bigger bastions of tradition than those places, and it’s from them—their people, their architecture, their history—that I draw inspiration.

The greatest compliment I ever receive from readers and reviewers is that they can’t believe I didn’t grow up here. I treasure those remarks because I have to work harder than my native counterparts at getting the dialects, the expressions, and the idiosyncrasies just right. And I don’t always succeed. I’ve been chastised by a woman from Louisiana about the proper use of y’all and all y’all (apparently it’s different from the SC usage), about soda versus Coke, and about plants that seem to crop up in my books where they don’t belong.

But I think I get a good bit of it right, and my secret is eavesdropping. It’s an art I’ve developed since becoming a writer, and I take pride in my prowess. If you’re standing in line in front of me at Publix or the post office, beware! Interesting names, tidbits of local gossip, uniquely Southern expressions—they’re all fodder for the next book. I overheard two locals in a Bluffton antique store discussing some poor lady, and one of them said, “That woman has flat-out got a head full of snakes.” I loved it! You’ll find it in the latest Bay Tanner mystery, Sanctuary Hill. I’d give you the exact page citation, but I’m too lazy to go downstairs and look it up.

So I’m going to continue to contribute to this blog until someone comes along and drums me out of the corps. I love the South. I love writing about the South. And I honest-to-God got here as quick as I could.


Kathy Wall grew up in a small town in northern Ohio. She and her husband Norman have lived on Hilton Head Island since 1994. Her 8th Bay Tanner mystery, The Mercy Oak, will be released in May, 2008, by St. Martin’s Press.