title: Ham Bones (Southern Belle Mysteries)
author:  Carolyn Haines 
description: A native of Mississippi, <b>Carolyn Haines</b> lives in southern Alabama on a farm with her husband, horses, dogs, and cats. She has been honored with an Alabama State Council on the Arts literary fellowship for her writing, a family with enough idiosyncrasies to give her material for the rest of her life, and a bevy of terrific friends. She is a former photojournalist.
zlib_text: **ELMORE**
  
  LEONARD
  
  ****
  
  ****
  
  **Tishomingo**
  
   **Blues**
  
  For Christine
  
  _____________________
  
  I'm going to Tishomingo to have my
  
  ham bone boiled,
  
  I'm going to Tishomingo to have my
  
  ham bone boiled,
  
  These Atlanta women done let my
  
  ham bone spoil.
  
  Performed by Peg Leg Howell
  
  Atlanta, Georgia, November 8, 1926
  
  ______________________
  
  **1**
  
  ______________________________________________________________________________
  
  **DENNIS LENAHAN THE HIGH DIVER** would tell people that if you put a fifty-
  cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked
  like from the top of that eightyfoot steel ladder. The tank itself was twenty-
  two feet across and the water in it never more than nine feet deep. Dennis
  said from that high up you want to come out of your dive to enter the water
  feet first, your hands at the last moment protecting your privates and your
  butt squeezed tight, or it was like getting a 40,000-gallon enema.
  
  When he told this to girls who hung out a