What in the World?!: A Southern Woman's Guide to Laughing at Life's Unexpected Curveballs and Beautiful Blessings

Morgan grew up in Adams, Tennessee, a town of 500 people on the Tennessee-Kentucky line. Most people in Adams were “the same,” and although Morgan’s family fit right in, in some ways, they were very different. Morgan’s family, the Fletchers, owned Adams’s only grocery store. Her father, Jimmy, was known for his butchering skills, and her mother, Lucille, worked the cash register.

Before Morgan started kindergarten, Lucille would prop her up on the counter to tell customers stories. She told her daughter every day that she was special and funny. Morgan’s older sister, Beth, on the other hand, was “painfully shy,” and Morgan wonders if she exaggerated her extroversion to spare Beth the pain of the spotlight. All through childhood, Morgan was “a ham,” and people were attracted to her like a magnet. This built her confidence and reinforced the feeling that she was truly special.

From an early age, Morgan had the sense that she was different from her peers. Other girls her age dreamed of growing up, getting married, and having families. This appealed to Morgan, too, but she was sure that her ability to make people laugh meant that she was headed for big things. Her family members reinforced her aspirations. Her mother was sure she would end up in Hollywood, and her uncle insisted she should take Vanna White’s job on Wheel of Fortune. To prepare for that future, Morgan spent her time in front of the mirror, practicing selling various products as if she were in a commercial. She longed for dance lessons, but there were no options in rural Adams. Unperturbed, Morgan “tapped” on the hardwood floor in her patent leather Sunday shoes, performing for anyone she could.

When Morgan was 12 years old, her father sold their store to open a meat processing facility behind the family home. The custom butchering business took off, and soon the family was helping out. Morgan’s parents ran the business as equals: Jimmy took care of the butchering, and Lucille ran the phones, wrapped meat, and took care of the books. During Thanksgiving, the Fletcher family was always busy with deer processing season, and people from all over Adams would gather to watch Morgan’s “super feminine” mother skin a deer with a golf ball tied to a string.

The downside of living next door to a meat-processing plant was the smell. Lucille washed all the butchering aprons in the family’s home, and soon, everything smelled like “death.” Smelling like meat all the time made it hard for Morgan to achieve her high-school goals of standing out. She compensated by being “cute and fun” (15) to work past the stench.

Morgan closes Chapter 1 with an anecdote called “My Big Break That Never Happened.” When she was nine, she decided to sign up for Adams’s Fourth of July picnic talent show. She planned to perform a tap number to Cher’s “Half-Breed” and was sure she’d steal the show. She didn’t tell her family about her plans, and when they found out she’d signed up to perform, Beth was hysterical, sure that her sister would embarrass her. In the face of Beth’s sobs, Morgan’s parents refused to let her go on. Morgan was angry at the time but realizes now that Beth might have saved her from the dangers of “child stardom.”

In rural Adams, Southern girls were expected to focus on finding a husband. Education and intelligence were valued as long as they didn’t interfere with these goals. Even though Lucille was intelligent and hard-working, she modeled the importance of beauty to her daughters. 

Morgan entered her high school years interested in standing out because of her personality. She chatted with everyone and joined every sports team she could, where she kept her teammates’ spirits high and the crowd energized. At 15, however, she discovered makeup, and she and Beth began spending hours fixing their hair and priming for school. Both girls were pretty and blond, and truck drivers would honk at them when they were sunbathing in their backyard.

Morgan soon came to realize how being cute and fun opened doors. The school’s music director insisted that she join the choir even though she couldn’t sing a note; she just stood in the front and pretended to sing along. Later, the drama teacher recruited Morgan to play Stupefyin’ Jones in Li’l Abner. Her father complained that she had no lines and spent the whole show dancing, but her mother complimented her figure.

Morgan thought that being fun and cute would lead to good things, so she was surprised when high school ended, and people began asking her about her college plans. She had spent much of high school focusing on her hair instead of her studies, and her rural school didn’t offer a rigorous academic program. According to her advisor, her ACT score wouldn’t get her into any school, but she was accepted to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville anyway.

As an adult, Morgan learned that “prioritizing pretty” with young women can develop “skewed values and self-hate” (27). She couldn’t help telling her own daughters how beautiful they were, but she also tried to teach them that their self-worth comes from their faith. She wishes she had focused more on faith herself as a young woman and less on boys. 

The chapter ends with a vignette titled “My Brief Life in Pageantry,” which further describes the Southern preoccupation with beauty. When Beth was 18, Morgan accompanied her to a Miss Tennessee pageant in Nashville. Armed with a makeup bag and a blow dryer, the girls quickly realized that they were out of their depth in the company of contestants who had spent the weekend in the Bahamas to get a tan for the event. 

At 17, Morgan participated in a pageant at the country fair. She made it to the top 10 but was cut for turning the wrong direction on stage. Later, another pageant mom told her that she needed to cut her hair. At first, Morgan was determined to do better, but on second thought, she decided that pageants were “silly.”

In college, Morgan imagined she was Erica Kane from All My Children, and her “dating life was defined by high drama with pitiful boys” (31).

When she was in high school, the teenagers in Adams hung out in the Kroger parking lot, where they smoked cigarettes and sometimes snuck beer. Morgan, however, was “very straight-laced” and didn’t like it when her friends drank. One night at the Kroger, Morgan met William, a senior at the nearby Springfield High School. 

The next day, William called to ask Morgan on a date. They went to the mall and the pizza buffet, and on the way home, she was already figuring they would get married. They dated for all of William’s senior year and were “on-and-off” when he left for college in Knoxville. Morgan decided to attend the same university to recommit to their relationship. She was sure they would be married as soon as William graduated.

After growing up in Adams, Knoxville, with 200,000 people, seemed huge, and Morgan was overwhelmed by the difference from her small town. She attached herself to William, even going with him to the fraternity parties that she hated. She nagged him not to drink and party so much, and after three weeks, he broke up with her, complaining that she wasn’t fun. Since this is what she prided herself on, Morgan was “crushed.” She was miserable and began failing her classes.

In the aftermath of the breakup, Morgan decided that she wanted to date someone she could “fix.” Many of the girls in her dorm had also come from small towns, and together, they went through dating and breakups. Morgan started dating Mark, from central Tennessee, but broke up with him when she learned that he had no aspirations to make more than $30,000 a year. Next, she dated Brendan, an aeronautical engineering major who was kind and “gentlemanly,” but Morgan found him incredibly boring.

As she entered her sophomore year, she was still directionless and struggling academically. One night at a gas station, she met Evan, a handsome, older man. They talked at the gas pump for hours, and Morgan was flattered that someone so sophisticated wanted to date a small-town girl like her. Morgan and Evan started dating, and she soon learned that he was often moody, insecure, or jealous. She was sure she could “fix him.”

Morgan moved in with Evan, even though they had only been dating a month, and dropped out of college to work at a Clinique counter in the mall. Their relationship vacillated wildly—Evan was prone to jealous tantrums, but they also had lots of fun together. Morgan was relieved when Evan proposed, even though she knew, deep down, that it was a mistake. Neither of their families approved of the relationship, but they went through with the wedding anyway.

Being married didn’t improve Morgan and Evan’s relationship. Shortly after the wedding, Evan suggested his new wife needed diction lessons to do away with her southern accent, and he began isolating her from friends and family. He couldn’t hold down a job, so Morgan worked three jobs to support them. After two years, Evan stormed out of a restaurant at Christmastime, leaving Morgan with no ride and no way to pay the bill. The “compassion” in the waitress’s eyes was a wake-up call for Morgan, and she divorced Evan.