Southern women are the last unhomogenized social order. Their heritage and chutzpah are passed along in a unique genetic code; you can't pretend it and you can't learn it; you have to be born to it. I suspect they are less easily flustered because they know their place in the continuum. Today is only today, but the past sustains them and fortifies them for the future.

Significant identifiers were included in introductions, not to exalt or condemn, but merely to give "a sense of place" about the individual being introduced.

"I'd like you to meet Jessica Marie Baptiste Coutant," it begins. "Her momma was Head Cheerleader with the Dixie Darlings, and President of the statewide Daughters of the American Revolution, and her grandfather on her daddy's side was a rum runner who was killed by his lover's husband."

Just so you know where we all rank in the hierarchy.

I was awestruck with their grace, style and brazen audacity.

Sarah Melissa Bondereaux Jamison was college educated and was old-line Natchez society, a big deal in Pascagoula, which had no old-line society of its own. She felt her lineage entitled her to certain privileges, and she made sure she got them.

As president of the Women's Civic Guild, she was the leader of such community activities as a raid on the movie theater when they tried to show Rosemary's Baby, and the closing down of the local bookstore because they kept a few "adult books" in the back because so few people bought the books in the front

When I was languishing in the hospital after an accident, she paid a visit and brought me two XXX paperbacks. She must have gotten them when she closed down the book store.

"I see you've had a visit from Sarah Melissa," said my doctor when he saw them smoldering on the nightstand. Later, I asked her how she reconciled this.

"We're adults," she sniffed. "It's the children we have to protect."

Not everyone loved Sarah Melissa. People who were offended by the sight of detritus from last night's dinner congealing on the table well into the next day were well advised to visit her late on the days when the maid hadn't come.

On one occasion she must have become overwhelmed with a desire for cleanliness and order, which prompted her to go to the school and demand that two of her boys be released.

The principal offered condolences, assuming that a family tragedy had occurred.

"Why thank you," she said, "but that is not the case. I told those boys that they would clean up their room before another six months went by, and that is what they are going to do, on this very day. (If that sounds brazen, well, it is, but you must imagine all this being delivered in a soft and guileless southern accent).

Properly delivered by a pedigreed Southern Belle, it manages to be both intimidating and non-threatening. The true measure of the boldness and clarity of her logic came when her widowed father remarried.

Of course, she would attend the wedding, but not the reception.

With no fanfare or even fair warning, she drove a U-haul to Natchez, and took with her a sturdy young man. During the reception at the local country club, she and the young man loaded up a "few things I know my Momma would have wanted me to have," and were home before the cake was cut.