This may be one of the longest oening sentences ever written, but it is still a favorite. From A Place to Come To by Robert Penn Warren.

I was the only boy, or girl either, in the public school of the town of Dugton, Claxford County, Alabama, whose father had ever got killed in the middle of the night standing up in the front of his wagon to piss on the hindquarters of one of a span of mules and, being drunk, pitching forward on his head, still hanging onto his dong, and hitting the pike in such a position and condition that both the left front and the left rear wheels of the wagon rolled, with perfect precision, over his unconscious neck, his having passed out being, no doubt, the reason he took the fatal punge in the first place. (Can't help it, I gotta finish the paragraph.)Throughout, he was still holding onto his dong.

It is just the way uncle Bubba might start his story-telling after all the family has settled out on the rockers and glider on Grandma's front porch after Sunday dinner. There is no mistaking that you are about to enter the rich tapestry of a well written southern novel.