Lauretta Hannon - The Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life

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Table of Contents

For Jazz Daddy & Princess Brown Eyes

Introduction

Everything You Need to Know I Learned Inside a Singlewide

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing....

MARCUS AURELIUS

Give me your broken and broke-down. Your worn-thin and your whacked-out. The undesirables, the uneducated, and the hopelessly out-of-date. For in them the human spirit reveals its strength and beauty.

I have been among them my whole life. I am them.

Our stories show that hardship and hard living are great enhancers. Im sure that the pretty people have things to say too, but I prefer my pathos to come from somebody dressed in Kmart duds and missing a few front teeth. It just makes for a better story.

You, however, do not have to be toothless to enjoy this book. Just human. Thats because we all have something in common: We know what its like to be hurt deeply and emerge with a decision to make:What will I do with my pain? It is a question, one of the Questions, that each of us must ask.

Everyone wrestles with it, especially my colorful tribe of hellions, heroines, bad seeds, and renegades. But whatever happens, we never lose our sense of humor. And in so doing, we prove that the greatest humanity, and the loudest cackles, come from where you might least expect them: the wrong side of the tracks.

Well, even the bad part of town needs a good leader, right? That leader is inevitably a Cracker Queen, and you simply have to meet her. With one smack of her wand (which looks suspiciously like a baseball bat), shell teach you how to live out loud, laugh hard, and love life to death. If youre smart, youll want to be her.

This book takes you through my life and evolution as a Cracker Queen. My aim is simple: to make you laugh at my clumsy dances, to connect to you through my sorrowful songs, and to meet you on the path to Queenly Glory. Whether we get there or not will be determined by how we answer that Question:What will I do with my pain?

I dont know about you, but I intend to get there. Even if I have to scratch and claw and break a few rules along the way.

Lets start with a quick primer on Cracker Queens.

What Is a Cracker Queen?

The Cracker Queen is a strong, authentic Southern woman. She is the anti-Southern belle. She has a raucous sense of humor and can open up a can of whup-ass as needed. She holds her head, and her cigarette, up high. She cusses, laughs inappropriately, and raises t-total hell when the line is crossed. You might find her waiting tables or working the third shift at the factory. The Cracker Queen knows loss and hurt; these things have made her beautiful, resourceful and, above all, real.

Can I Still Be a Cracker Queen If I Dont Meet All the Qualifications?

Absolutely. Being a Cracker Queen is about having the spirit and attitude outlined above. Nonsmokers,Yankees, professors, and even men can be Cracker Queens. Your age, race, and country of origin are irrelevant. But your willingness to whup some ass is nonnegotiable.

The True Heroine of Dixie (And Everywhere Else)

Traditionally, Cracker Queens have been judged as uninteresting and unworthy of closer examination. The manipulative belle, on the other hand, has been the celebrated ideal of Southern womanhood. What a crock!

What really makes Cracker Queens notable is the perspective weve earned through generations of hard times. More than anyone else, we know how to find meaning in pain without ever sacrificing our trademark sense of humor. Adversity and a unique set of values have made us brim full of joy and able to laugh like a Pez dispenser: with head reared back and mouth wide open.

In contrast, the belles bat their eyelashes and get what they want through false flattery and fake friendliness. Then theyre miserable because they wanted the wrong things. We should have run Scarlett out of town on a rail a long time ago.

Anyhow, the Cracker Queen outlook on life is guaranteed to enrich yours. Of course it can get you in trouble, too. Thats half the fun, because Cracker Queens can be both the life of the party and the reason the police have to be called.

When we make mistakes, we make big, messy, bodacious ones. The kind of conflagration that produces smoke visible from ten miles away. The sort that makes you cover your mouth and then secretly delight in recounting it to everyone you know.

As I lay forth the themes and tenets of the Way of the Cracker Queen, I hope youll give em a whirl. When you do, youll feel emboldened to be who you really are. And when that happens, the stars will finally come into alignment in bedazzling fashion. On that Ill bet my next five paychecks.

Read on. It is time to claim your crown.

Part One

Comin Up the Hard Way

The Indian Princess

Mama was such a beautiful, dark-eyed child that she was known as the Indian Princess. Her young life was rough, and she remembers it allbeing packed in a straw bed with two sisters and a brother in the dead winter all ill and bone-cold, the sudden sound of vomit hitting the slop jar. She recalls her brother Scooter ramming chicken shit down her throat and her Grannys surefire cure for pinkeye: Squat and pee into your hands, now; then rub your eyes real good.

But what she remembers most is how she felt when her mama left.

It was getting dark that day, and the eight-year-old Indian Princess was scared. She had not seen Mama all afternoon, and her daddy, known to everyone as Bennie T, was a rare visitor to the tarpaper shack. She got her looks from him; he was half Creek Indian. But he looked strangelike a brown-skinned Welshmanall of five feet two.

When Bennie T did come round, he would stumble trying to pick up his little girlleaving his smell of corn likker and Buttercup snuff all in her face. Youre my S-I-PSpecial Indian Princess, he would slur, making the words with stained, exaggerated lips.

Night fell on the porch, and there was still no sign of Mama. The kids started to panic, but the Indian Princess remained calm. As her sisters and brother wailed and huddled in the bed, she sat on the top porch step like a stoic. Somehow she already knew that her mama wasnt coming back and that the sadness would never leave.

Mama had escaped to Florida with a man who had an automobile and was nearly handsome. Nobody in the town of River Wall, Georgia, would see her again for eight years.

When it was barely light the next morning, the children walked the dirt roads to town. Their toes sank in the red Georgia claythe kind that death masks are made of. The Indian Princess at last made her appearance in town, exhausted after carrying and half-dragging her younger sister the whole way.

On the courthouse square, the pear-shaped, busy-body women fell silent at the sight of the ragged girl. It was so quiet that you could hear a rat piss on cotton. But the men in town that day, mostly rangy farmers and chaw-chompin sharecroppers, accurately predicted that they were looking at the girl who would become the most beautiful woman in Jarrellson County.

Jazz Daddy

The wind whistled through the cracks in the tarpaper shack on the day my mama was born. It fluttered the newspapers covering the walls and sounded like a symphony of kids blowing over the tops of Coca-Cola bottles. My aunts said it was a sure-enough sign of some kind, but every damn thing is a sign to country folks.

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