Our "Week of Southern Humor" kicked off Tuesday evening with a reading by Lauretta Hannon, author of The Cracker Queen. After driving through some of the town's more squalid corridors, Lauretta felt right at home in Greenwood and was especially relieved to see we served cold bottles of PBR, the official drink of Cracker Queens.
After careful scrutiny of her book, the Cracker Queens, it seemed to us, wasn't so much a club Ms. Hannon was hustling us to join, but a set of personal aesthetics through which she lives and views the world. She celebrates the anti-Southern belle, someone who refuses to live her life through facades and mannered behavior, but embraces her pain and suffering and uses her sense of humor to glide over life's rough patches.
Lauretta fit this definition to a T. She was unflappable, punctuating her hard-luck tales — "The last time Mama saw her sister, she got a gun pulled on her" — with wild laughter. She plucked tales from her book, telling us all about her outlandish, hard-drinking mother; her ham-radio-operating, WWII-vet jazz man father; and their backwater hometown of River Wall, "a place that called itself 'the Friendliest Town in Georgia,' but was, in reality, so mean it was featured in an encyclopedia entry on the Ku Klux Klan." For every abandoned child, discharged firearm, rotgut-swilling husband, knife-wielding wife, and police intervention, Lauretta had a hearty laugh and a hilarious digression. There seemed to be no way possible to get this woman down.
"Tell us something really dark," one audience member requested, and Lauretta was glad to oblige, though somehow, even her darkest stories seemed comically poignant.
Mary Carol, one of our good readers, had read The Cracker Queen on a trip to Tupelo and back and pronounced it a success. She likened it to Jeanette Walls' potent memoir, The Glass Castle. "Just when you think it can't get worse for these people, it does."
Hard-luck memoirs are a dime a dozen, but what sets Lauretta's work apart is surely this defiant good humor in the face of adversity. This book should provide comfort to anyone who has come through hard circumstances and has a hard time loving themselves, or anyone who loves to read about deeply flawed and eccentric, but still essentially decent, characters.
Incidentally, we're happy to perpetuate our goat motif by mentioning one of Lauretta's stories, which involved the famous Goat Man of middle Georgia — whom, she seemed surprised to learn, we'd never heard of — a wandering goat herder and folk preacher who often delivered his profanity-laced sermons in crazed roadside tirades and was purportedly a great influence on Flannery O'Connor. Read The Cracker Queen to learn more.
