Talking Southern – The Marvelous, Versatile Croaker Sack

     A fine Southern term, this: denoting a common burlap sack or bag.  Its derivation seems to come from the cheap, noisy saltwater fish of the same name, for croakers very easily could have been hauled home from the docks in sacks such as these for subsistence dining near the coast, or inland where the fish are often shipped.

      Your compiler worked in a fish market on Memorial Drive in Decatur from 1979 to 1981, his last three years of high school, and used to be amazed at the folks who would come in and want, “Five dollars’-worth of croaker.”  They didn’t like it if the pricing scale showed $5.20 or $4.94 – they wanted exactly “five dollars’-worth,” as if weighing and pricing fresh seafood was like pumping gas.  

     The fish market’s owner fried some croaker one day for the staff’s lunch, and your compiler is glad to say that roughly forty-five years have elapsed since he had to eat something so fishy-tasting. Let’s just say that croaker is not a comestible sought by many discerning palates.   But your compiler digresses – he can’t help it; he’s Southern.

     One seldom hears a Southerner say, “burlap sack” or “burlap bag,” but almost always hears, “croaker sack,” instead.     Your compiler has never in his sixty-two years heard anybody call it a “croaker bag,” so “croaker sack” seems to be the only way the term is used.  And as mentioned in an earlier column, Southerners will hardly ever say, “bag” when they can say, “sack.”

     As for phraseology, the term appears in one of the most interesting sartorial observations your compiler has ever heard. His late cousin Vernon Woods (1919-2004) was a prosperous poultry farmer and leading citizen in Brooks during the middle-to-latter years of the Twentieth Century – a fine and wonderful man in every way. Cudn Vernon was always on the cutting edge of fashion – one might have termed him the Beau Brummell of Brooks – particularly during his late middle years when the flamboyant styles of the 1970s came into vogue.

    One day your compiler was riding with his grandfather in his black 1964 Ford pickup truck, when they saw Cudn Vernon dressed in a large-patterned red and black plaid blazer that looked as if it had been made from fabric left over from a Barco-lounger factory. Your compiler’s grandfather, who had been born in 1901 and who declared himself too old to bow to the new styles coming into vogue, mumbled under his breath, “Look over yonder at Vernon in that god-awful sport coat!  He’s dressed up like a sore thumb, but I declare, I’d rather be buried in a croaker sack than to appear in public in a get-up like that!”  For the record, so would your compiler!

    The photo below, incidentally, shows Cudn Vernon styling in that very same sport coat in April 1976, when the Bicentennial Wagon Train stopped in Brooks for lunch.   And y’all thought your compiler made this stuff up – for shame!