Entry · catalog no. 1431
I'm cracking but I'm facking
/ /aɪm ˈkrækɪn bət aɪm ˈfækɪn/ /ime KRAK-in but ime FAK-in
phrase · Harlem, New York · 1940s
✓ Verified
1.
A tag a speaker adds to his own wisecrack to say that the joke is also a fact. It lets a man land a laugh and stand behind the claim at the same time — the humor is in the delivery, not a retreat from what was said. Crack is to make a sharp remark; fack is a verb built straight off fact, meaning to state the plain truth.
“That man ain't paid his half of the rent since the war — I'm cracking but I'm facking.”
Origin & Attribution
Harlem, 1930s and 1940s, recorded by Zora Neale Hurston in 1942. The phrase runs on rhyme, the sound-play driving much of her glossary, and it does a specific piece of social work: in a culture where boasting, signifying, and the dozens were all in play, it marks the line between a man performing and a man testifying. Unlike most of the glossary it did not die with the decade. The shortened form, crackin' but fackin', stayed in Black American speech and was still current enough in 2008 to title a scholarly article on racial humor in Christopher Paul Curtis's The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963.
1942
Hurston records "I'm cracking but I'm facking: I'm wisecracking, but I'm telling the truth"
1995
Library of America reprints the story and glossary in Novels and Stories
2008
Jonda C. McNair takes the phrase as the title of a peer-reviewed article, showing the formula still current
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, New York · 1940s
Spoken by
Harlem street men and working people; later Black speakers well beyond Harlem
$IMCRACThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Dormant84 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
40/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1942
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Zora Neale Hurston, "Glossary of Harlem Slang," The American Mercury, July 1942
magazine
■
Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, Library of America, 1995, pp. 1001–10
book
■
+ Cite a sourceJonda C. McNair, "'I May Be Crackin', But Um Fackin'': Racial Humor in The Watsons Go To Birmingham—1963," Children's Literature in Education 39(3), September 2008, pp. 201–212
peer-reviewed article
See also