Identity Crisis

-- Originally published in the Winter 2000 issue of Art Journal by College Art Association.

When my fingers passed along the plastic grooves of the red and white Winn Dixie name tag, I could hardly have predicted my future fixation.  On the surface that would typically display a name like Jennifer, Stacy, or Carrie, my friend had scrawled in a black Sharpie marker -- SALT CHUNK MARY.   I could not think of a better name to put on a tag that represented a Southern grocery store with the ad campaign, "we're the beef people. "  Amused, I put the tag on a shelf.

"She could say 'no' quicker than any woman I ever knew, and none of them ever meant 'yes'. " (77)

Years later, I found the SALT CHUNK MARY tag hiding among some old letters and college dust. She appeared to me at a point when I questioned how identity is formed, and what makes an individual unique. With those issues on my mind, it occurred to me how odd it was that someone could just randomly hand you a ready-made identity written on a name tag, a role to take on and off at will.

So, of course, I pinned the tag to my shirt.  

At first, it was just for a fashionable flourish, just as the character Sabina in Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being wears that famous bowler hat (among other reasons) "as a sign of her originality, which she consciously cultivated." But it became more than just an external manifestation of my desire to truly be different from the warmth of the swarm. Bearing the tag did not provide instantaneous transformation, but I did fantasize, hypothesize, where did SALT CHUNK MARY come from?

A free bonus to artists, courtesy of the Metropolitan Transit Authority of New York, is lots of time to think. I knew that SALT CHUNK MARY existed first as a bubble gum snapping-waitress with an eye for the left, the underworld, and the devious. She short-changed the suits staying at the Motel 6 across the street to favor the road-battered misfortunate with a wink and a complimentary WonderMelt, hence the "salt chunk." She was older than me and knew how to articulate what she wanted. Don't mess with Salt, she does what she likes without forethought.   SALT CHUNK MARY worked her way along various rural blue-collar outlets in the southern United States including the Winn Dixie, the Waffle House, and the Piggly Wiggly, where she violated her own rule to not participate in hierarchies by becoming a supervisor. Yes, I am guilty of concocting SALT CHUNK MARY out of leftover script analyses from Tennessee Williams's plays and my love of diner culture. But she's my character, and every one needs her own rebel, fictitious or otherwise.

The fantasy of SALT CHUNK MARY is only one part of the experience of assuming another role, of bearing the tag. Another part, which I did not consider, is that the name tag provided an invitation for strangers to approach me. Often at the end of the work day, as I took the elevator down to the first floor, a well-intentioned soul would say, "Miss, you forgot to take off your tag." Misplaced Southerners wanted to know the location of the New York Winn Dixie. Others pondered the meaning of "salt chunk,"  and I received responses for things as random as taffy to quartz rock.

I am sure it is confusing for me to introduce myself as Rachel when my name tag insists otherwise. A name tag stands for something concrete, a known value. It gives the bearer a label. Yet, a frustration would build inside of me when people expected to get a meaning, a quick answer. "SALT CHUNK MARY? What does that mean?" they would plead, "Why are you wearing that tag?" While I appreciate the desire to know, I could not reveal my reason or my fantasy. Just as in theatre and film, actors use stage or hand properties (props) in a myriad of logical and emotional contexts. When an actor endows an object with emotional meaning for her character, it is entirely a private process. The audience never gets to know how that object became significant for the actor. It remains a mystery. Indeed, my favorite response to the tag is no response at all.

"She was about 40 years of age, hard-faced and heavy-handed. Her hair was the color of sunburned brick, and her small blue eyes glinted like ice under a March sun."

Perhaps you have seen the B-movie cliché shot in which a female character looks into a three-way funhouse mirror.  In each mirror, are reflections of that female character played by other actors in wigs. Just as the music swells to crescendo, the character discovers all her reflections are not the same. I thought of that moment when I found out that SALT CHUNK MARY existed as someone else's fiction and published as such in the best-selling novel of 1926, You Can't Win, by Jack Black (reprinted by Nabat/AK Press, 2000). Furthermore, in both The Soft Machine and The Adding Machine, author William S. Burroughs featured excerpts describing SALT CHUNK MARY as he remembered her from his favorite novel You Can't Win by Jack Black.

I feared the novel, a heightened autobiographical account of Jack Black's time in the criminal or "yegg" brotherhood of the hobo underworld, would reify SALT CHUNK MARY into the antithesis of my construction.  However, as I turned the pages I entered into a colorful world where righteous criminals adopt epithets like Foot-and-a-half George (SALT CHUNK MARY's brother), Smiler, and Sanctimonious Kid. Black documents a different kind of America, when the West was a newly broken frontier, a time when people could still refer to living relatives who had served in the Civil War. Against this backdrop, he places SALT CHUNK MARY from Pocatello Junction, Idaho, whose "principal business was selling wine, women, and song to the railroad men and gamblers."  The yeggs call her SALT CHUNK MARY because of her trademark pot of beans forever simmering with a "fine chunk of salt pork."  Before she gets down to the business at hand, she offers her associates a hearty spoonful from the pot. Hardly the mothering type, Mary will be the first to draw a pistol when she is wronged.

I should marvel at the similarities between what I conjured up in my head and what Jack Black wrote. Instead, I focus on the loss of my rebel's mystery. I can now easily provide the label, the quick answer people desire. "Who is SALT CHUNK MARY?" they will say. And like a Star Trek groupie at a Trekkie convention who proudly adopts a Klingon moniker instead of her own name on the "Hello, my name is... tag," I will say with a tempered enthusiasm "a character in a book by Jack Black."