Raising Cane
By Shane Mitchell
The Bitter Southerner
“Gimme some sugar,” said my great-aunt Adele Anderson, who always grabbed me to her bosom and plastered red lipstick kisses on my head when I landed on her doorstep. She was kind to a shy, disheveled adolescent who belonged neither here nor there, and lacked sweetness of other kinds in life. Like her sister, my Nana, she was the sort of Southern woman whose hair was never out of place, carried purses clutched with military precision on her arm, and marched staccato in matching heels, even on cobbled streets in Charleston’s historic district.