I belatedly found a whole little essay on "ornery people" in Lee Harris's THE NEXT AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

I HAD TO ORDER A USED HARDBACK RIGHT AWAY.

I am charmed by what I have read on-line. This man, if he is still alive, is probably still in Stone Mountain, Georgia, so he may just have met one or two of my ornery people.

It has been decades since I tried to write a "character"--now that I think about it, a great literary genre. Charmed, now.