Southern writer Lauretta Hannon, author of The Cracker Queen: A Memoir of a Jagged, Joyful Life, has had a laundry list of trying experiences throughout her life growing up in the South.  Her parents met at a moonshine shack where her mother worked, she had a “voodoo root” put on her and has an aunt that shot four of her husbands and was arrested for attacking a police dog. Needless to say Hannon has come out of it with humor, love, pride…and above all, she’s come out of it The Cracker Queen.

South magazine: What was the catalyst that caused you to finally write this book about all your experiences?

Lauretta Hannon: The Cracker Queen was actually born here in Savannah. And Pinkies was really where I was cogitating writing this book. I was sitting on a bar stool at Pinkie Masters writing things down on cocktail napkins.  Listening, having great conversation with people there. People with love, pain and everything in between were telling their stories. 
That’s why there is a chapter in my book called Pinkies is Closed on Sundays because there were days it definitely needed to be open.
 
SM: What do you want your readers to take away from your book?
 
LH: Fearlessness.  Fear is one of the most damaging aspects of life and really holds you back.  The other thing I want readers to take away is that whatever happens to you in your life, with all the pain and suffering you go through, and it hits all of us regardless of class or where your from, that you can make a choice to move forward and not become permanently damaged by it. I call it the The Cracker Queen option, which is being a whoop ass woman who lives with love, forgiveness, gratitude, purpose and a wicked sense of humor at all times
 
SM: In the book you really don’t hide much about you and your family. What was your family’s reaction to the book?

LH: Everyone in my family begged me not to write the book. Everyone. There wasn’t one soul who said write and develop it because so much of it was about shameful, hardcore, negative, gritty parts of our family where people made some really bad choices. They thought that airing all this painful stuff would create more pain and it didn’t. It’s actually had a healing effect.   Above all, my mother gave me complete acceptance, and she’s the one I cared about the most.
 
SM: You’ve had a root put on you before?  How did you know and what did you do?

LH: Well I wrote a column about a senator that wasn’t very nice.  A few days later, the paper got a phone call and saying, “Lauretta should not have said those things about the senator and bad things are about to start to happenin’ to her.” In one week I had a tooth get knocked out, I almost was in a plane crash and had an incident with a black dog, which are all signs of Roots.  That’s why I have the chapter call “You Put Root On Me” I write:
 “In Savannah there is no shortage of playful mischief under the surface of things.  Mischief that defies reason, logic or normal explanation….Other worlds are at work here. Should you visit Savannah, don’t trust what you see in mirrors or shop windows.  It’s a place where true reflections are few and far between.”

SM: Describing Savannah and the South can be a very difficult thing to do.  How did you go about tackling that?

LH: With Savannah, it is the creative debauchery of this town that I just love.  I fed into that.  In fact, one of my chapters is called “Way South of Normal”, which is very true of this town. I also have another chapter called “Gutters and Stars”, which opens up with my favorite quote from Oscar Wilde: “We are all of us lying in the gutters but some of us looking at stars”
Savannah is such a place of gutters and beauty!