God Save the Sweet Potato Queens by Jill Conner Browne Page B

Whitney Houston and Bruce Springsteen. Poetry paid off for you, aye, Mike? He was forced to confess that he didn’t actually write that poem; it came from an old episode of
The Dick Van Dyke Show
. He thought it just sounded better when followed by his own name. I had to agree.)
    But I digress. My sister, Judy, and I passed a lively afternoon once at Guido’s, our very favorite restaurant and bar in Cozumel, Mexico, by listing aloud the names of all the people who needed killing. It started out on an intensely personal level, with those individuals who had wronged us grievously. As the drinks came and went, the list grew and grew to include quite a number of our fellow patrons at the bar, and then took on a universal scope to embrace low-level state employees, the occasional rude checkout woman at the grocery store, a few TV evangelists (some of the women of this ilk piss me off more than the men; you know the ones—they talk about Jesus like He was their high-school boyfriend), and assorted movie stars. One of us would throw out a name and the other would chime in with her own agreement. Then we would just laugh and laugh, as only two sisters, full of margaritas, can laugh.
    Years later I found myself recounting this scenario to my boyfriend, Richard Pharr, who was entirely on board with the fun until I mentioned the name of Dale Evans. Richard is a big ole cowboy, and he was frankly stupefied at Miss Dale’s inclusion in such a list. “Dale?” he queried, not a little desperately. “You want to kill Dale Evans? Whatever for? Dale?” I hastened to explain that while Dale had never done a thing to me, personally, she had somehow managed to cross the line with Judy, and I just felt it was my sisterly duty to go along with it. He was off in his own world, haunted with questions like how could he be going out with a woman who wanted to kill Dale Evans? and so he really wasn’t hearing me or my explanations to the contrary—or that Judy didn’t really mean it, for crying out loud: It was just a joke, Richard. In his mind all joking stopped at the mention of Dale Evans’s name, she being holy and all that, to cowboys and the like. Again, as if in a trance, he repeated, “You would want to kill Dale Evans?”
    My bucket of patience having run completely dry, I said, “Yeah, Richard, that’s what I’m really looking for in a man: I want a man who will bring me the head of Dale Evans.” Yessir, buddy, I’ll believe you love me only then. And so it came to be that we have a new standard by which to judge the seriousness of a relationship. Replacing the old—Has he taken you to meet his mama yet?—is the updated scale of devotion: Will he bring you the head of Dale Evans? Isn’t that what we’re all really looking for? A man so utterly devoted to our happiness that,
figuratively speaking only,
he would fetch us this grisly prize, if for some totally warped reason we actually wanted it? (Okay, for the record: It’s a
joke
. If you don’t get it, don’t laugh, but we don’t want any heads sent down here. We will not love you back.)
    We’re still faced with this dilemma of how to emphasize to any and everyone precisely to what enormous extent some person—usually male—has transgressed against us. We hit on the idea of maiming. Instead of saying the loathsome, repulsive, insufferable dope needs killing, we could maybe just say he is a Man Who Should Be Maimed. Perhaps that would sound more palatable to the fainthearted. We’ve done some test-marketing on the idea, and it has been met with great approval. A vast majority of you out there are willing to embrace the maiming theory. (For you literal ones, this is a joke, too.) Still, a few holdouts couldn’t even bear to hear about maiming. We suggested that they get from here and leave us be with our laughter, but then we took it (somewhat) to heart—we like a challenge anyway—and determined to explore further ways of expressing our extreme displeasure that