Janis Owens

Though I make light of it in the cookbook, there is in our cultural mélange the unsettling reality of the Mean Cracker. You know: the slack-jawed miscreant you hate to see appear in the movie; the one with the hillbilly accent and missing front tooth, whose introduction to the storyline guarantees the most dewy innocent member of the cast is about to go through an unpleasant life-changing moment.

I shudder as much as anyone when they appear, as I’ve met a few such bullies in my day and make it my business to take a wide berth around them. The few documented murderers in our tribe were less feared than the bullies, because bullies are just a pestilence, while murderers, if they had just cause, were respected. My great-grandfather killed a man in North Georgia but was absolved of the murder, in family, because he killed a land-owner who was being mean to the widow of one of his sharecroppers. He’d beaten her and (so the story went) poured syrup in her hair (which is mean.) Well, great-granddaddy Rice took matters into his own hands and sent the old boy to glory and then had to hide out in Tennessee with one of his older sons till the political winds changed and he could return to hearth and home in Floyd County. Granddaddy remembered taking him food up in the mountains when he was hiding out.  

On daddy’s side, his mother’s brothers “did away” with an abusive step-father. When my own grandfather proved a little lenient in the area of marital fidelity, these same brothers (two of whom would later become Pentecostal preachers) met him at the well one afternoon and told him to “drink from your own well the rest of your life,” or get gone. From what I can make of him, granddaddy was a pure pragmatist. He said “thank ye, boys” and lit out for Texas that same night. He eventually remarried, and had a whole other batch of children in East Texas, and seldom again troubled the wells of South Alabama.

I think the reason all this Cracker meanness is on my mind is that I was diagnosed with a minor female complaint last month and put on hormones, which have inadvertently made me mean as a snake. My murderous antecedents have nothing on me, except that I’ve not yet done the deed. But I have it in me, I fear. Yesterday in Target, that bastion of suburban civility, I was ready to check out and found myself in an express lane nine customers long. I didn’t so much as mutter a cuss word, or make any gesture of impatience (I’m too old to be ass-y in public) though I wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of waiting twenty minutes to buy bobby pins and high fiber cookies. I was looking down the cashier line, reflecting on the fact that there are always forty employees up front at our local Target, goofing and having fun, and only two cashiers at work, when one of them - a fresh-faced, upbeat young man with spiked hair - flipped the light on the register in front of me and offered to check me out.

I didn’t hesitate to take him up on offer – lord knows it’s the first time it’s ever happened. I figure I must have been standing there, giving the whole store the old Cracker Stink Eye. I did it perfectly unconsciously, and can only conclude that my current load of estrogen must be sending out little dagger waves of pheromone warning: this is one customer you don’t want to cross.  Sell her her bobby pins or head for Texas. The choice is yours.  

Tags: Mean Cracker, Target