Free God Save the Sweet Potato Queens by Jill Conner Browne Page A

over and half the chickens made good their own escape, freeing their comrades still clawing impotently at the walls of their brown paper prisons. Soon all forty of them were hopping and peeping and pooping all over the Volvo. Tammy was thrilled to have her car’s interior instantly redone in Early Chicken Coop at no extra charge, so she wheeled into the neighbor lady’s yard, honking the horn. She hopped out, yanked open the rear door, shooed all the puffballs out of the backseat, and yelled, “Here’s your chickens!” And Tammy roared off in a cloud of dust, cackling. That has a vengeful smack to it in my opinion.
    A delightful and most resourceful reader in North Carolina wrote to describe how her erstwhile husband had made a complete drunken ass of himself at a party one night and then, when finally forced to head for home, proceeded to throw up all over himself in the backseat of our delightful and most resourceful reader’s automobile. Here is where the “delightful and resourceful” parts start: She pulled over to the side of the road even though they were in the worst possible part of town and to do so was risking their very lives. He makes quite a picture: well-dressed man-about-town, on his hands and knees heaving his beets onto the already-filthy sidewalk. He finishes and is allowed back in the vehicle. They travel all of about two blocks, and he cranks up again. With somewhat less patience this time, our heroine pulls into a bank parking lot and makes him get out and take off his puke-soaked clothes, which she hurls into the bushes. He is now riding home in his underwear, and just before they get home, he barfs again—this time all over the backseat of the car itself—and being the fastidious bastard that he is, he climbs over into the very back of the station wagon and passes out. Having had just about enough of him by this time, she pulls the car into the garage, locks it, and goes on in to bed, leaving him snoring in the cargo compartment of her wagon. He wakes up at some point during the night, still so drunk he can’t figure out how to get out of the locked car, but in his travails, he manages to roll around in the vomitus he’s left on the backseat. He is conscious enough to know that he has done so, delicate darling that he is, and this completely discombobulates his sorry ass. By the time he sobers up enough to work the door locks, he has smeared barf from one end of the car to the other. Smelling almost as bad as he looks, he stumbles into the house to berate her for locking him in the car. To which she calmly replies that since he has ruined her perfectly good Camry, he can expect to be out buying her a new Land Cruiser by that afternoon. Don’t you just love that new-car smell?

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    No, It’s a Hole in the Head We Don’t Need
      A pparently a few readers—all men, if memory serves—somehow deduced from
SPQBOL
that we do not need them. One of them, in fact, recently asked me to compile a list of the top five or ten reasons Sweet Potato Queens don’t need men. I thought and I thought about that. I must confess, I failed utterly in this task. After all, I asked myself, if there were no men, Aretha would have had no cause to sing “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” without which the world would be severely deprived. Bonnie Raitt would never have sung, “I wanna man to love me like my backbone was his own,” and then where would we be? I could go on and on, but also consider this: If not men, then who would ever sing to us such memorable words as “I wanna drink your bathwater, baby”? Only a man would ever even think of such a thing. If there were no men, there would be no Johnnie Taylor to sing about the “Big Head Hundreds” and what all he wants to buy us with them. Oh, yes, sisters, we need men all right. We need them and we love them for these and many other reasons. The one and only reason I could think of that would justify our saying that we don’t need men is this: We cannot borrow their