I met author Rick Bragg briefly this morning at a book signing. He's a big man, about 6'2" and 270 pounds, with the deepest Alabama accent I've ever heard. The first thing he asked me was "Where you from?" I told him I was from here, done lived here all my life. "Well, I couldn't place your accent," he said. "You don't sound like you're from Arkansas."

I guess it's true, since so many other people have said the same thing. I've lived in the South since the day I was born, but I also went to speech therapy three times a week between the ages of three and eight. (I was relearning to talk after an early-childhood bout with spinal meningitis.) I sound more like someone who grew up talking TV-anchor accentless speech and then moved down South and picked up a tiny wee bit of accent and a lot of colloquialisms. I've got the native rhythm but not the native twang.

So it is what it is. But I'm frustrated by it, because I grew up in this culture. I love it. I study it. I write about it. And now I've been informed by a Big Daddy of Southerness that I don't sound like I'm from these parts.

Bragg certainly meant it in the nicest way when he said it. We were just chatting while he was signing our books. I liked him on first sight, because his type of guy is home for me. I'm related to about 20 men just like him. Big and rough, smart, hard-working. Ornery and a little dangerous, but also sweet as can be with the people they love.

My friend who went with me is from a very ethnic enclave of Chicago, and she couldn't find one comfortable thing about Bragg that she could relate to. She thought he might as well have been from the moon. We went to lunch afterwards, and I spent most of the time trying to explain this particular breed of man to her. I don't think I ever did manage to do that; perhaps the only thing I managed to make clear is that there are no distinct polarities in them, only a muddle of contradictions. There's the street-fighting, fried-chicken-eating, dead-loyal, straight-talking and tall-tale-telling aspects of it all, but there's more than that to them, and it's largely undefinable. It's a toughness and a sweetness and Lord knows what-all complications mixed up and poured into a big, sturdy container. I guess all I really know about it is that there are few things I like better than literary blue-collar men and smart good ole boys.