A sweet potato is the root of a certain kind of morning glory. The root has a sweet taste and is a popular food item, both as a stand-alone item and as an ingredient in numerous recipes.

And then there’s the sweettater.

Here, a sweettater is an idiomatic metaphor for just about anything you can imagine that might come from, or be obtained in, or delivered to Calhoun County.

The little town of Vardaman, in Calhoun County, is the self-proclaimed “Sweet Potato Capitol of the World.” Sweet potato farming is big business in and around Vardaman. The town has (or at one time had) an annual “Sweet Potato Festival,” complete with a “Sweet Potato Queen,” or “Miss Sweet Potato.”

Calhoun County and sweettaters are interchangeable mental images for North Mississippians and those images are often used in our daily speech, generally as comic, figurative terms.

To illustrate: When, as a child, I asked my Daddy where he was going as he headed to work, his response as likely as not would be: “I’m going to Vardaman to see a man about a sweettater.” Or perhaps, “I’m going to Calhoun County to get a load of sweettaters.” He wasn’t actually going to either Vardaman or Calhoun County and he wasn’t going to return with one or more sweet potatos. He was merely giving joking responses to my questions.

When I’d do some knuckleheaded stunt, as I frequently did, my Mom or Dad might say, “That’s about as smart has hauling sweettaters to Vardaman.”

A lady with a particularly noticeable figure might be described as, “She’s got some fine sweettaters in that sweater.”

If my wife were to ask me where I’m going on my motorcycle today, it wouldn’t be unusual for me to grin and say, “I’m going to Vardaman to check on the sweettater crop.”

It’s just a figure of speech and it’s used all the time in all kinds of settings, and I’m confident other localities in the nation have similar metaphors arising from activity common in the locality.

Tim Balducci wasn’t really dealing with sweet potatos in his conversations that have become associated with US v. SCRUGGS … he was referring to sweettaters, a metaphor that encompasses anything and everything or maybe nothing at all: a bag full of money (perhaps, perhaps not), a draft court order, a proposal to join the Balducci firm in an “Of Counsel” capacity, a bottle of whisky (Calhoun County being dry), or maybe that he was just driving south from Oxford (in the direction of Calhoun County). The list is endless. It’s just metaphor arising from the context of the conversation people may be having at the time the term is used.

Don’t read anything significant into “sweettaters” in this prosecution. It’s not like the participants were using secret code that could broken only by others wearing a secret decoder ring.

It sure appears to me that the overwhelming problems with Zach pleading are:
(1.) that he can’t get a sentence he can live with without a 5k sentence reduction. And,
(2.) he can’t get a 5k sentence reduction without testifying against his father (unless his father were to plead guilty, too). And,
(3.) Dickie’s age precludes any kind of plea from being a good deal for him.
(4.) The above situaton has Zach stuck in an OODA loop, unable, or refusing to make a decision and to act.

This is just my guess, but that’s my take on the Zach situation.