CRACKERS!

“ In my opinion this humble uneducated colored woman has more brains in her head than a thousand of these sign-waving, folksong-singing Harvard dropouts who keep showing up on our doorsteps to tell us how to lead our lives.” (99)

I believe this moment is a perfect example of how many white southerners were completely brainwashed at this time, while others disapproved of the environment the lived in, but couldn’t get around it. Orley continually attempts to show how a newspaper article they are reading is accurate, by saying that the majority of blacks in the south really do disapprove of being told to protest the way they are treated by whites. He represents the uneducated southern community that has been taught to accept that there is nothing wrong with the southern way of life that has been around forever. However, we are also given Riley’s point of view, one that sees that the newspaper is doing nothing more than presenting the people with the South’s form of yellow journalism. When they have a white man interview his black maid to express how she feels about the protest marches, it is clear that she wasn’t going to say how she truly felt. Riley says that the woman is trapped. Trapped by crackers on the left and right of her. Crackers write the news and crackers read the news. But nobody can get away from this news, because as he eloquently puts it, “All of us are stuck in a goddam cracker box!” They were all raised to think and be like “crackers” and there was no possible way to escape it.

Discussion Question: Does identifying as a southerner at this time force you to embrace the “emblem of the Confederacy” that Orley seems to love so much? Was there any way to avoid this “cracker” way of thinking?