$7 • WINTER 2015 • A QUARTERLY PUBLICATION FROM THE SOUTHERN FOODWAYS ALLIANCE

Winter Reading

MAHALIA JACKSON’S GLORI-FRIED CHICKEN PAGE 39 PEACHES AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN MIDDLE GEORGIA PAGE 39 FEATURES 24 32 38 FLAG GLORI-FRIED THE GEORGIA ISSUE #58 PIZZA AND PEACH IN BLACK WINTER 2015 Chris Offutt GLORI-FIED AND WHITE Alice Randall Tom Okie

2 FIRST HELPINGS 48 SOME LIKE IT HOTTER Sandra Beasley 6 SOMBREROS OVER THE SOUTH 50 INDIANOLA SUNRISE Gustavo Arellano Sandra Beasley 10 THE CORNBREAD 52 LOST FAST FOOD QUESTION FRANCHISES Allison Burkette Brooke Hatfield 12 CORNPONE 57 DEEP FRIED FORTUNE Allison Burkette Sandra Beasley 14 ELECTRIC JELL-O 58 FULANI JOURNEY Lora Smith William Boyle 20 LAGOS OR BUST 62 2015 SFA AWARD Courtney Balestier WINNERS

Cover photo by ALLISON V. SMITH Denny Culbert southernfoodways.org 1 Winter 2015 Every Christmas Eve, my mother TRADITIONS ARE serves a congealed salad. She fills in- NOT ACCIDENTS. GRAVY #58 WINTER 2015 dividual dome-shaped tin molds with THEY ARE THOSE cherry Jell-O, chopped nuts, and fruit cocktail. When it’s time to set the table, RITUALS OF she turns each mold out onto a bread- THE PAST THAT and-butter plate lined with a leaf of WE CHOOSE TO Bibb lettuce. Had I stopped to think CARRY FORWARD First Helpings about it when I was younger, I might WITH US. have guessed that this tradition be- longed to my grandmother, and that forging our own food traditions. (It my mother continued the practice out turns out that I’m more like my mom A WIGGLY TRADITION of respect. Now, a dozen years after than I thought, and Kirk takes after my grandmother passed, the dish lives his own mother, a talented and joyful crusty, beloved dive bar on Hillsbor- on. It doesn’t matter whether anyone home cook.) I hope the New Year is a ough Street by the N.C. State campus. actually eats the congealed salad, but time for you to reflect on your tradi- Maybe we were hip all along, and I it wouldn’t be Christmas without it. tions, to revive the ones that you love, just didn’t know it.) We ate at home As we celebrate our first wedding and maybe to implement something six nights a week, and my maternal anniversary, my husband and I are new. —Sara Camp Milam grandmother usually joined us on two or three of those nights. We went through a baked spaghetti phase, a grilled chicken sandwich phase, a n my work for the sfa, turkey burger phase. I’M WITH THE BRAND I often read stories in which the During those years, my parents GENERIC TRADEMARKS I author lovingly recalls the maintained some culinary traditions IN THE KITCHEN Southern foods of his or her child- from their own upbringings—country hood—homemade biscuits, collard ham biscuits for special occasions, When we adopt a brand name as the greens, chicken and dumplings. Brunswick stew on cold winter common name for a product, a generic Usually the author recalls a mother nights, black-eyed peas on New Year’s trademark is born. Many of these from store to store looking for gelatin or grandmother preparing these Day—while others fell to the side. I reside in your kitchen: Crock Pot, that my legs turned to Jell-O.” Jell-O dishes, scooping bacon grease from bet your family did, and does, the Tupperware, and—believe it or not— was an aspirational food in mid-twenti- a tin can by the stove into a genera- same. In graduate school, I read an TV Dinner. Generations of Southeners eth-century Kentucky, writes Lora tions-old cast-iron skillet. academic explanation for this com- recognize Coke as a generic trademark Smith in her article on page 14. I have few such memories from my mon-sense practice: Traditions are for soda. Another generic trademark served childhood, and I turned out just fine. not accidents. They are those rituals Tabasco® has waged several trade- as the icon for our 2015 programming It was the 1980s, and then the ’90s, in of the past that we choose to carry mark battles to defend its status as theme, Pop Goes the South. You’ve Raleigh, North Carolina, at least a forward with us. More recently, I more than a generic term for hot sauce probably noticed the bright pink image decade before the Triangle got hip. (I heard SFA board member Francis in popular use. When we want gelatin, we feature alongside the words. And was away at college and many years Lam tell an assembly of SFA folk the we say “Jell-O,” but Kraft owns the you might want to call it a “Popsicle,” too late before I learned that a young same thing. Which brings me to con- Jell-O brand. It has also entered the but the Popsicle company wishes you Ryan Adams had spent those same gealed salad (a topic you’ll read more vernacular to describe sore, fatigued wouldn’t. It’s a frozen ice treat on a years gigging at Sadlack’s Heroes, a about later in this issue). muscles: “I was so tired after walking stick, thankyouverymuch.

Tip No. 58 It’s time to update your SFA membership! Join or renew for 2016 at southern foodways.org to keep receiving Gravy. In 2016, we explore the Corn-Fed South, from bread to syrup.

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FEATURED CONTRIBUTOR ALICE RANDALL Tangled Up IN BLUE LAWS

alice randall is the author of four novels, including The Wind Number of SOUTH CAROLINA Done Gone, which retells Gone with states that block the Wind from Mammy’s perspective. Sunday retail She is also the first African American liquor sales woman to write a #1 country music song: the 1994 Trisha Yearwood hit “XXX’s and OOO’s (American Girl).” You might catch a whiff of the chorus of that song—“She’s got a picture of was the last state to lift her momma in heels and pearls/She’s Number that its ban on election day gonna make it in her Daddy’s world”— are in the South liquor sales, in 2014. in her feature story for this issue. maid’s uniform, to choir robe, to busi- Most recently, Randall and her ness suit, and finally not a robe in glory, daughter, Caroline Randall Williams, but a self-respected black body. The wrote Soul Food Love, a cookbook more I learned, the more I understood distilleries that doubles as a love letter to the that the power of Mahalia Jackson was women in their family. To spend any the poetry of her face and form adored: KENTUCKY time with Alice Randall and her work a brown woman’s body that was inde- has the most, with is to take in a big hit of girl power. pendent, international, intelligent, (18.3% of the South’s total) Here’s what Randall has to say elegantly and unabashedly large. It breweries per capita about her subject, the late gospel sing- was a body that had transcended, on WAS THE FIRST er-come-fried chicken entrepreneur Earth, not on high, rebukes and scorn. There is one brewery for every FEDERALLY TAXED GOOD. 58,747 people in the state of Mahalia Jackson: Taking control of her kitchen and The tax led to the Whiskey Rebellion, “I am tempted to stop working on taking pride in her body, Mahalia ex- which historians say played a role in my new novel and write a biography ploded Mammy—for some of us, if not ranking it 1st in the Southeastern U.S. the creation of political parties. of Mahalia Jackson. She moved from for all. She is my kitchen saint.”

Traipse through the In one big, beautiful book, GRAVY BOOK CLUB Naomi Novik serves up dining rooms of history Joe Dabney legitimized an SFA staffers read more than a magical novel packed and explore the practice often-forgotten Southern cookbooks. In this space, we share with modern girl power, and the philosophy of region. He also reminded old-world folklore, and modern hospitality. I this homesick eastern our favorites with you. Assistant just a dash of fairy tale re-read Jesse Browner’s Kentucky girl that she director Melissa Hall offers this (the Grimm kind). book every year, often used to know how to make issue’s recommendations. just before an SFA event. blackberry dumplings.

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the buffoonery to come. book, Sombreros and Motorcycles SOMBREROS OVER Here’s the funny thing, though: in a Newer South: The Politics of Stateside, I rarely see a Mexican Aesthetics in South Carolina’s THE SOUTH wear one. Outside of folkloric Tourism Industry, P. Nicole King dance performances, soccer stadi- examined the notorious sombre- WHAT LIES BENEATH THE HAPPY HAT ums, or mariachi shows, we favor ro haven South of the Border, a by Gustavo Arellano tejanas (Stetsons) for everyday square mile of fiesta off I-95 in wear. We give the sombrero the Dillon, just across the line from respect it deserves. It’s headgear North Carolina. Towering over for a certain place and time—like the roadside kitsch is Pedro, a 77- revolutions, for instance, or to ser- ton, 100-foot-tall Mexican wear- enade a señorita in the moonlight. ing—yep—a sombrero. Here, I’ve noticed the prevalence of curious visitors can eat at a som- sombreros in the South ever since brero-shaped restaurant, book my first visit. In 2007, the kind their wedding at the Top Hat Club, students who hosted me at the or climb up the 200-foot Sombre- University of Memphis decorated ro Observation Tower to take in a lectern with a sombrero featur- views of the Carolina countryside. ing more colors than a bag of It’s lit up in neon at night, hanging Skittles. I’ve seen them on high- over the horizon like a UFO ready way signs advertising Mexican to descend. restaurants on I-40, I-75, and U.S. Sombreros over the South: Route 72, the highway that cross- What a perfect metaphor for the es northernmost Alabama and Mexicans who live here, aliens in Mississippi. Spartanburg, Rus- their new home. sellville, Danville, Charlotte: My travels through deltas, hollers, summer, 2014. My wife and I swamps, and mountains have visit a Mexican restaurant on a ven though i haven’t held it in nearly fifteen years, i been a Johnny Cash song come Friday night in Kentucky cave can easily picture the sombrero my father wore as an adolescent. It hangs to life—if the Man in Black had country. There’s a twenty-minute E in the bedroom of his childhood home in the Mexican village of Jomulquil- accessorized with a sombrero. wait, so we stare in awe at the lo, Zacatecas, redolent of tilled earth and ganado (livestock), its straw brim slight- Southerners just can’t seem to crowd: all white, their tables lad- ly frayed but sturdy. The sombrero is a reminder of my family’s agrarian roots, the get enough! In October, a photo en with fajitas, nachos, and can- life my ’apa left behind. That’s what sombreros historically represented for Mexicans: of University of Louisville Presi- teen-sized margaritas. And we markers of proud campesinos or charros (our archetypal men on horseback) who dent James Ramsey and his staff stare at a booth where friends and reveled in the rewards of a hard day’s work. wearing sombreros and shaking family sing “Happy Birthday” to maracas at a Halloween party a college-age woman as the South of In los Estados Unidos, Ameri- team flaunt them during interna- went viral, prompting an apology. restaurant staff crowns her the Border, cans have warped them into tional matches. Costume stores That followed Clemson Univer- with…a sombrero. Dillon, South Carolina. something quite different. Here, can barely keep them in stock sity offering its own mea culpa There are no debates about sombreros are exclusively happy during Halloween or Cinco de after cafeteria workers served cultural respect or appropria- hats: permission for the wearer Mayo. Late-night hosts wear Mexican food while wearing som- tion; tonight, everyone is a Mex- to transform into a one-person sombreros for comedy sketches, breros. South Carolina is obsessed ican. That’s the magic of the

party. Fans of Mexico’s soccer tipping their you-know-what to Medley Kate with the damn hat. In her 2012 sombrero—and its harm. As

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Mexicans have migrated to the a division but a conduit over a beautiful way of life and oppor- South over the past twenty years, which to exchange traditions. I’ve tunities ripe for the taking. too many folks reduce us to a written much about how So far, Mexicans have done most seemingly silly hat. non-Latinos in the South endorse of the work of forging a Sur-Mex The first time I had an inkling Mexicans through our food, al- culture. Now it’s time for native that raza lived in el Sur was in ways asking for more of the au- Southerners to go beyond the 2008, when a young man with a thentic stuff (breakfast burritos sombreros. Teaching Mexicans twang rang up my purchase at a from a roadside stand in Grimsley, the lay of the tierra is essential— video-game store in Orange Tennessee? Sure!). But far more the music, the cuisine, the cults County, California. I bought the accepting are the Mexican chil- of Ale-8-One and bluegrass, of Xbox 360 version of NCAA Foot- dren who grow up Southern. Dusty Rhodes and mirliton (which ball 08, the one with former Ar- From Louisiana to the Florida we call chayote). In turn, South- kansas Razorbacks legend Darren Panhandle, the Ozarks to Appala- erners can learn from Mexicans; McFadden on the cover. The clerk chia, these kids absorb regional loving the food is a good start. said his favorite team was the identities, from accents to pickup Learn, too, the importance of Auburn Tigers. When I told him trucks, and create new ones firm- immigration reform, the glories that Mexicans were only allowed ly rooted in the land. I’ve even of our musical rhythms, the com- to root for UCLA, USC, and may- heard Chicano college students munity festival that is a quinceañera, be the Texas Longhorns, he said in Kentucky proudly call them- or the genius of trucker movies (on that wasn’t the case for Mexicans selves “Appalachicanos.” that note, organize a Smokey and in Alabama. This is happening despite pol- the Bandit marathon and pair iticians who do everything pos- it with the Mexican cult classic sible to make the lives of these Lola la Trailera—Lola, the Truck- “Lubo.” Makes as much sense as I’VE HEARD CHICANO young people and their parents Driving Woman). “Loo-vuhl,” no? COLLEGE STUDENTS IN miserable. A great many of them It won’t hurt y’all to learn a bit And if Southerners don’t em- KENTUCKY PROUDLY are undocumented, or come from of español, either. I do my bilin- brace Mexicans? We’ll do fine— CALL THEMSELVES families with at least one family gual part in this columna, but start we’re a surviving lot. But then “APPALACHICANOS.” member without papers. And still listening to any local Spanish-lan- Mexicans won’t bother to fully they become Southern. guage radio stations, or watch bond with Southern culture. The your Univisión channel. And, like youngsters who are the future “There are Mexicans in Ala- outside of the South, Latinos Gullah and Cajun and the Native will migrate away, turned off just bama?” I asked, incredulous. also think of the Sur-Mexican as American languages that gave like hundreds of thousands of “Yep,” he said proudly, adding novelty. Place any good ol’ chico names to rivers, cities, counties, folks, black and white, in previous a “War Eagle!” for good measure, or chica anywhere else in the and mountains, let Spanish seep generations. Mexicans want to be along with some harsh words United States or Mexico, and into the Southern vernacular. It part of the South, they really do. about Nick Saban. they’ll have two strikes against already has in Louisville, where Now, it’s up to Southerners to The time of treating Mexicans them, as Mexicans and Southern- Latino students have added a new listen and let them join. in the South as a novelty—a som- ers. Ni de aquí, ni de allá, as the entry—“Lubo”—in the lexicon of Heavy lies the sombrero, oh brero!—is over. A twenty-first-cen- saying goes—neither from here ways to pronounce the Derby wonderful South. Are ustedes tury Great Migration of Latinos nor there. It just doesn’t compute City’s name. Say it out loud: ready to wear it? to the region is forging a new for the rest of us that Mexicans identity. Call it Sur-Mex: simulta- would ever find paradise in the Gustavo Arellano is the editor of OC Weekly and the author of neously of the South and Mexican, South, far from the comfort of the Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America. He presented

with the hyphen representing not Southwest. Yet they go, drawn by Fotolia a version of this piece at the 2015 Southern Foodways Symposium.

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THE LAMSAS SURVEY RETURNED OVER 390 DISTINCT ANSWERS TO THE CORNBREAD QUESTION. THAT’S A LOT THE CORNBREAD OF WORDS FOR CORNBREAD. QUESTION for these, this one in particular): Even given the breadth of Mc- WHAT DO YOU CALL IT? Now, you mention cornbread. David’s follow-up questions by Allison Burkette What do you mean by cornbread? about cornbread, it still may sur- Do you have more than one kind? prise you to know that the Suppose you have the kind that LAMSAS survey returned over doesn’t have anything in it except 390 distinct answers to the corn- cornmeal, salt, and water. What bread question. do you call that? Some of the terms are regional, Do you ever remember any kind some are local, and some are in- of cornbread that people talked about dividual. Some terms reflect a ften i am asked how over 1,100 people over the course making before the fire on a board or particular method of cornbread linguists research the ways of the 1930s and 1940s, spending something like that, only larger? preparation, like “hoe cakes,” O in which different people six to eight hours with each infor- Are there kinds that they cook which are made out in the field use language. The long answer has mant. They wrote down answers in ashes? when dough is baked over a fire to do with collecting data and doing to the interview questions in In- What kind is about an inch thick, atop a wiped-down hoe. Some theoretically grounded analysis, ternational Phonetic Alphabet, a very large and round? terms carry with them their cul- perhaps even some correlational set of symbols that can be used to And sort of like a sphere and tural origins, such as “pone” statistics. The short answer is precisely document speech sounds. maybe it has a little bit of onion (Native American), “ponhaus” simple, and perhaps more elegant: McDavid and Lowman asked each or green pepper mixed up in it and (Pennsylvania Deutsch), and We ask them. interviewee about 800 questions— you cook them in deep fat and eat “bannock” (Scottish), just to name In the late 1920s, a group of Amer- yes, eight hundred—most having to them with fish or other fried a few. Some terms reflect the ad- ican linguists undertook what is to do with words for things common- seafood? dition of other ingredients, like date the largest survey of American ly found around the house and There is something else that you meat scraps (“crackling bread”) English ever conducted. They called farm. They asked questions using sometimes have that you boil in or eggs (“eggbread”). it the Linguistic Atlas Project and a shotgun-style technique: long cheesecloth with either beans or I can come up with reasons for, began by interviewing speakers in questions aimed at eliciting a short greens or something with chicken, histories of, or background stories New England. After they completed answer, followed by a set of lengthy made out of cornmeal. What would for a lot of the terms, but that many the New England survey, they follow-up questions gauged to hit you call that? cornbread variations are hard to moved down the East Coast, creat- an even wider target. And then there’s the kind of explain. I’ve not run across ing the Linguistic Atlas of the Here’s an example of a basic cornmeal that you cook in a deep another Linguistic Atlas question Middle and South Atlantic States question: What is baked in a large pan and it comes out soft and you that elicited as many terms as the (LAMSAS, for short). cake made of cornmeal? dish it out like you would dish out cornbread question did. It’s a tes- LAMSAS fieldworkers Raven And here’s a not-so-basic set of mashed potatoes onto your plate tament to the cultural import of

McDavid and Guy Lowman talked to follow-ups (McDavid was famous Denny Culbert beside your meat. this foundational food.

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Wilmington, Delaware, to to make flatter cakes, resulting in compile his Vocabulary of the something more like a cornmeal Unami Jargon, a list that contains pancake. They treated a thicker several variously spelled entries batter as bread dough, shaping it for “bread”: poon, pone, and pane. by hand into loaves for baking. Farther north, we have James To the English colonists, corn- Madison’s Vocabulary of New meal batters were reminiscent of Jersey Delaware, collected in the what they called a “pudding” back 1850s and containing an entry for in England. The colonists baked “bread” as apoon. their cornmeal puddings in crusts As Powhatan, Unami, and Del- like pies or boiled them in bags. CORNPONE aware are all from the Algonquin These “hasty puddings” required A BORROWED TERM FOR A BORROWED STAPLE language family, we can make an no stirring and were quick to by Allison Burkette educated guess that pone is Al- prepare. A single batter could gonquin. The geographical terri- yield two dishes: porridge (or tory covered by these languages “mush”) and bread. accounts for what would have Writings from the Colonial era, been the colonial American corn including early American receipt belt. The whole East Coast was books, show that the terms rife with corn-based contact “bread” and “pudding” appear between Native Americans and together, probably because the early colonists. The persistence looser culinary construction of a of the term “pone” as part of our pudding could be baked into a American cornbread vocabulary dense bread. These early cook- suggests that different groups of books contain recipes for Baked ometimes, during the their contact with various Native colonists adopted this term at Indian Pudding, Indian Hasty course of researching the American tribes. One of the ear- many points of contact through- Pudding, and Boiled Indian Pud- S relationship between lan- liest is Captain John Smith’s A out the Atlantic states. ding, along with directions for guage and culture, a single word Map Of Virginia from 1612, which Colonists didn’t just borrow the making Indian Bread and Indian or concept emerges that seems to describes his encounters with the word for cornbread; they also bor- Cakes. There’s even a recipe for carry with it the whole of history. Powhatan, who are depicted as rowed Native American ways of Indian Bannocks, “bannock” be- Take “cornpone.” supping on “broth with the bread preparing cornmeal, adapting the ing a word of Scottish origin to I’ve seen several discussions of they called Ponap.” recipes to suit English palates. describe a dense, dark bread. “cornpone”—or “ponebread,” or William Strachey, also in the Native Americans made cornbread From poneap to pudding to simply “pone”—that slip in a Virginia colony, wrote down a list in one of two ways: with a paste of pone, names and techniques statement or two about the dish, of Powhatan words in his 1612 crushed green corn kernels, or blend and evolve across historical and its name, being of Native vocabulary. It contains entries for from a batter made by adding periods and cultural contact. American ancestry. Clues as to asapa (which he defines as “hasty water, salt, and animal fat to corn- They become part of the materi- the more specific origins of pudding”), and two words, apones meal. They would use a thin paste al world around us. “pone” can be found within the and appoans, which are likely Indian Vocabularies. Reprinted as singular and plural for “bread.” Allison Burkette is an associate professor of Linguistics at the a series, these thin volumes In the 1640s, Lutheran priest University of Mississippi. Her research interests include language contain vocabulary lists made by Johannes Campanius collected variation and its connection to cultural factors, which is the subject

European colonists who recorded examples from the area around Company Living Seed of her recent book, Language and Material Culture.

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button more than the one that and I wanted to know why. delivered pain medication, struck The voices in the archives by wonder each time a nurse ap- speak of hardscrabble farm living. peared with an aluminum foil– Families grew, put up, and cooked sealed cup of orange or red Jell-O. almost all of what they ate. Every Jell-O drove me into the ar- member of the family worked chives at Berea College to explore subsistence gardens that provid- a collection of oral histories with ed fresh vegetables. Meat was mountain women that document- primarily chicken, pork, or wild ed shifting Appalachian foodways. game that they processed to store The majority of the women were for winter. The women recall born in the 1930s and hailed from harvesting and foraging fruit from eastern Kentucky and West Vir- plentiful orchards and brambles. ginia. The interviews highlight They talk about apples, blackber- traditional preservation tech- ries, quinces, peaches, mulberries, niques, the effects of rationing plums, cherries, wild grapes, per- during World War II, and changes simmons, pawpaws, and raspber- to Appalachian tables over time. ries. Desserts were for special That all sounded fascinating, but occasions. Holiday treats includ- Jell-O ephemera I was there for the Jell-O. I had ed sorghum-covered popcorn from the heard that many of the women balls, buttermilk candy, fudge, and collection mentioned it in their interviews, vinegar taffy. In the summer of Margaret Dotson at the months, they baked fresh Berea College fruits into pies and cobblers. archives One, I could get anything I wanted. ELECTRIC Two, the dessert case never disap- pointed. After winding around the JELL-O metal counter pushing a marbled REFRIGERATION BROUGHT THE plastic tray, I was electrified by the mountains of translucent green, JIGGLE TO RURAL APPALACHIA perfectly cubed Jell-O neatly por- by Lora Smith tioned in parfait cups. Along with 7Up, a cure-all tonic in my mother’s house, Electric ’ve long believed in Jell-O was a healing food. It was Orange, the alchemical properties of my sustenance on sick days home oil on panel by Lina I Jell-O, a powder made from from school. Tharsing ligament and bone. Add water, and After my second child was born, all of a sudden you have a brightly I discovered that, along with the colored, gelatinous solid. miracle of birth and the awe of a My fascination started as a child precious new life, there was a call with trips to the D&W cafeteria in button I could push on my hospi- Corbin, Kentucky. These outings tal bed that would prompt a Jell-O were amazing for two reasons. delivery. I think I pushed that

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following year. The program offered low-interest and long-term loans to governments, farmer co- operatives, and nonprofits to run power lines to isolated areas. Kentucky was among the least electrified states at the start of the REA’s work: Only three percent of the state’s farms had electric- ity. Fewer than ten percent of West Virginia farms were electri- fied. In the Berea oral history collection, most of the interview- ees reported that their electricity came in the early 1950s. Prior to electricity, families used traditional preserving methods to store food for slim winters. They cured hams, canned blackberries, strung beans to dry, and fermented cabbage for sauerkraut. After World War II, something gland of a cow), celery, and “a good Betty Bailey was born in 1937 each side and cover it over,” she The Rural happened in the kitchen. In many mayonnaise,” held together inside in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Her told an interviewer, “and then light Electrifica- tion Admin- of the stories, Jell-O marked and a tomato gelatin mold. family got electricity 1953. She that sulfur wood and cover it and istration divided a shift in home cooking. I Reading the interviews, it recalled eating canned beef, pre- let the apples get that smoke. Let at work in came to think of time in Before became obvious that Jell-O stood served fruits, and sauerkraut in it stay so long until they get sul- Kentucky Jell-O and After Jell-O eras. It out in the minds of rural mountain the days before refrigeration. fured, then she’d take them out seemed strange that Jell-O women because it signaled the “When I was a little girl, I remem- and put them in fruit jars. I can emerged suddenly as the first com- time when power lines finally ber mother had the big stone jar about still almost taste them sul- mercially processed food em- snaked their way up rural moun- that she’d put her sauerkraut fured apples, they were good.” braced by the women of rural tainsides. The appearance of down in,” she said. “She’d cut that Families stored foods that had to Appalachia, especially since gelatin Jell-O in remote Appalachian cabbage and I thought that was be kept cold, like milk, in caves, dishes had been popular in the kitchens was a direct result of rural the best stuff when you’d just put springhouses, and root cellars. The United States—even in Appala- families connecting to mainstream the salt on it, you know, after oral histories chronicle dreadful chian cities—since the early 1900s. American culture through the very you’d fresh-cut it. Oh my gosh, I journeys into dark caves and tales The Club House Cook Book real connectivity of going on the almost made myself sick just by of unlucky girls falling into cold (1929), complied by members of grid. In 1935, President Franklin eating that.” springs while fetching milk jugs. the Charleston, West Virginia D. Roosevelt created the Rural Addie Bicknell was born in 1920 Francis Davis, born in 1924 in Woman’s Club, contains an exten- Electrification Administration in Red Lick, Kentucky, and re- Middle Island Creek, West Vir- sive “Frozen Salads and Desserts” (REA) as part of his New Deal membered how her mother pre- ginia, used to retrieve butter and section. It features gems like Mrs. policies, with the goal of spreading pared apples to store for the winter preserved foods her grandmother Cora Delaney Fox’s Sweet Breads electricity and telephone services months. “She’d put them in sacks, stored in a hillside cave. “I was Salad, an aspirational dish of equal to the nation’s most rural areas. like cloth sacks, and put a stick always afraid to go in that cave

parts sweetbreads (yes, the thymus Congress authorized the entity the Archives Dotson/Berea College Margaret Historical Society/ExploreKYHistory Kentucky across a barrel and hang a sack on cause I was afraid of snakes,” she

16 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 17 History

believe that the Hot Point refrig- texture or colors, but the context modernity, and the domestic erator is in my garage right now in which it’s consumed and the labor changes it represented. and still running and keeping ice, memories associated with it. And the memories of tastes that beverages cold for the kids? Six- For the farm women of eastern linger on their palates and ty-some years later that refriger- Kentucky and West Virginia, minds? Those are reserved for ator is still going.” Jell-O was a significant marker the Southern mountain fruits of Refrigeration changed house- in their lives for the convenience, their childhoods. hold and farm labor. Women were no longer tied to wood stoves, Lora Smith works for the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. She canning massive quantities of is a co-founder of the Appalachian Food Summit and writes about produce. Now, they could cut corn foodways from her family’s organic farm in Egypt, Kentucky. and freeze it. Instead of cooking beans outside over an open fire for four hours, pressure canners The oral histories in this article are used with permission from “Gathering Olive Jell-O, remembered. “After we washed could do it in thirty minutes on the Stories of Appalachian Foodways: An Oral History Project,” archived at oil on panel our hands good, we’d have to go an electric stovetop. Community by Lina Berea College in Hutchinson Library Special Collections. The oral histories Tharsing down there and take that rock off. canneries and smokehouses faded were conducted by Berea students under the direction of Margaret Dotson as And then take that board off there from the rural landscape. Gelatin part of her Appalachian foodways course. and reach down in that old cold products like Sure-Jell sped up brine and get a handful of pickled the process of preserving fruits. beans. Or if we was getting sau- Among those advances, Jell-O erkraut, we’d have to do the same was special. Many of the women thing. Oh, I hated that! Then we mentioned a “fancy Jell-O salad,” SOUTHERN had to cover all that back up. Stick reserved for holidays like Christ- BELLE SALAD my hands down in that old sour mas, as a modern dish that became brine. Muuuh! It was cold in the a family tradition. 1 bottle Coca-Cola 2 Tbsp. lemon juice wintertime to do that.” My home’s refrigerator runs off 1/2 cup chopped pecans Ice boxes set out on porches electricity from one of the earliest 1 cup hot water were an option for some rural fam- established co-ops in Appala- 1 pkg. cherry Jell-O ilies that lived close enough to a chian Kentucky. And my family 1 can Bing cherries central icehouse. They set out signs has a fancy red, white, and green 1 3-oz. pkg. cream cheese directing drivers up their roads on Jell-O salad we make only at Pour hot water over gelatin. weekly delivery routes. Christmas. It’s a bit of an eyesore, Add Coke and lemon juice. With electricity came refriger- but I love it. A scan of my local Cool. Add cherries, cheese ators. “When we first got elec- grocery store reveals ample shelf broken into small chunks, and tricity, the first thing my mother space dedicated to a carnival of pecans. Pour into individual molds or 8-inch ring mold. did was buy a refrigerator of neon Jell-Os. Dubious flavors like Serve on a bed of lettuce with course, and then she bought an piña colada and Jolly Rancher mayonnaise. Serves 8. electric stove,” said Betty Bailey. Blue Raspberry are hard to rec- “Had the house wired so that she oncile with anything resembling - Mary Frances Baals from could have those appliances. a fruit found in nature. While I What’s Cookin’ Along the Big Sandy, published by the Junior Well, in 1953, I was a sophomore do believe in the magical and Women’s League of Paintsville, in high school and she bought a healing properties of Jell-O, it’s Kentucky, in 1956. Hot Point refrigerator. Would you really not about the taste or

18 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 19 Peripatetic

have a plan for him. “These are menu, Thursday to Sunday, res- OPPOSITE experiences that have been per- ervation-only. It will be a restau- LEFT TO RIGHT: LAGOS colating and waiting to manifest,” rant for diners who want to Tunde Wey he says. “Nothing just happens. sample Nigerian food presented on St. Ann These are things that I’ve always in an intentional context. Street in OR BUST the French believed in, and everything you Wey left Nigeria because it was FROM NIGERIA TO NEW ORLEANS Quarter; believe in finds expression in how what middle-class kids already Dodo ( fried by Courtney Balestier you live.” exposed to American television plantains), jollof rice, Wey didn’t grow up cooking; shows and Burger King commer- frejon (black he is learning on the job. He wants cials did. “This is a strange place, bean coconut to serve “magnificent” Nigerian this land of burgers and women,” pudding), and obe ata food that tastes as good as his Wey remembers thinking. He (tomato stew) mother’s, and this may take him went to Detroit, where an aunt twenty years, “maybe never.” In lived, and experimented with a sense, that benchmark might be college before quitting. When he Border Patrol; has gotten married; beside the point. He is using Ni- first moved to the States, people and has relocated from Detroit to gerian food to talk about how we would ask if he missed his parents New Orleans, where he opened a value things, and how some cui- back in Lagos. Wey’s mother ran Lagos stall in the St. Roch Market. sines—and the cultures they a bakery for several years and Then, in August, Wey shuttered nourish—are marginalized while calls him before and after each that to focus on a brick-and-mor- others are not. Lagos dinner. He’d say no, that he tar New Orleans restaurant. At his Lagos stall at St. Roch talked to them all the time, but Wey started tinkering with Market, Wey would watch people then he would write poetry, and Lagos after opening (revolver), a stumble upon his menu and be all of it was about his parents. Detroit restaurant that features a confused by what they received, “You begin to realize the influence rotating lineup of chefs. He was sometimes due to translation not one of them. He wanted to issues. He even sold a chicken WEY USES pursue his own ideas by himself. sandwich for a few weeks, “my NIGERIAN FOOD Wey had never intended to cook begrudging admittance that Nigerian food but soon found maybe Americans loved sand- TO TALK ABOUT himself committed to his home wiches more than Nigerian food.” HOW WE VALUE country’s cuisine, interested in its One patron opted out of egusi in CULTURES AND ability to translate a message that a manner that’s hard to imagine CUISINES. food doesn’t have to be preten- in more normalized “ethnic” uch has happened tious. Sharing this message restaurants: “He was like, ‘It of what you came from, where in the two years since became his mission. At pop-ups, tastes weird; I can’t do this. I’m you came from,” he says. M thirty-two-year-old he served dishes like peppered sorry,’” Wey remembers. Now, the man who used to Tunde Wey began developing goat, jollof rice in tomato-pepper The forthcoming Lagos will be cook to the sounds of rap and Lagos, the Nigerian restaurant broth, and egusi, a melon-seed a more deliberate restaurant, with alternative rock plays Nigerian concept named after his home- soup with the intense flavor of an aesthetic style that Wey calls hip-hop artists like Olamide, Ice town. He’s grown it from a series fermented locust beans. minimalist bohemian (“It’s not Prince, and Davido. He also still of informal barbecues to a sell- Wey is always thinking and going to indulge anybody’s fetish writes poetry, which he shrugs out, multi-city tour of pop-up questioning. It hasn’t escaped him of Africa”) and service on his off but his friend Dave Mancini,

dinners. He’s been detained by that Nigerian food actually might Rush Jagoe terms: a prix fixe, family-style a Detroit chef and restaurateur,

20 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 21 Peripatetic

Egusi (stew thickened feel like New Orleans is Detroit with melon with better weather and nicer seeds) and buildings. Great buildings.” eba (ground cassava) He also recognizes the similar- ities that West African foods like bean fritters and jollof rice share with Southern dishes like Hoppin’ John and jambalaya: “To the extent that what I’ve eaten is Southern food, it’s very much West African,” he says. Not that he’s going out to dinner much. Mostly, he works on Lagos and plays soccer. He’s currently scout- ing locations in New Orleans, where he will open Lagos both again and for the first time. calls “stuff that people who study parents or whoever, ‘you’re here for like eight years,” he says. “It With a dedicated brick-and- this kind of thing don’t ever get for a reason. Don’t forget why the wasn’t a preoccupation, but it was mortar location also comes the to.” Wey’s interests are diverse, fuck you’re here.’ And here means very present. I faced the frustra- suggestion of permanence—signif- and they play into Lagos in cre- the United States, here means tions and limitations of being un- icant for a guy who admits that he ative ways, from the soundtrack alive, here means your presence documented every day.” He plans always starts with high expecta- to the offbeat e-mails advertising isn’t just an excuse for frivolity. to apply for a status adjustment. tions, then gets bored and moves his pop-ups: A mailer plugging You should do some shit. That’s Wey likes New Orleans, which on quickly. A mentor counseled a goat-centric dinner joked that very Nigerian.” reminds him of Detroit: “I feel him once on the idea of breadth anecdotal evidence suggested Wey came to the United States like the same kind of white cool versus depth, suggesting that he Serena Williams, Rihanna, and on a visiting visa, then changed his kids who live in Detroit also live pursue a single project for a month Mother Theresa enjoyed the status to become a student. Even- in New Orleans. This is to stereo- or two, then a year or two. At the meat, because “everyone knows tually the permissions expired. type, of course—but the con- time, Wey resented the idea that only goat can improve your This January, Wey was on a coach scious, black, educated folks who he had to specialize. tennis game, make your skin bus to Los Angeles on a pop-up live in Detroit and are advocating Now, he thinks about that glow, and engender empathy.” tour that included Chicago, New for Detroit’s equitable distribu- prompt to stick to one thing and Wey is not cavalier, though he York, and New Orleans, where his tion of resources also live in New realizes that Lagos, through all feels he sometimes appears that now-wife, Claire, was living. This Orleans. And then, the same sort its evolutions, is that thing. “The way. Instead, he’s awake to a con- dinner was to be held at Roy Choi’s of underprivileged class of mostly blips that happen are just the stant sense of responsibility, im- POT. Wey had cold-emailed POT, black people, a predominantly cadence of living, but I have been parted by his parents’ generation. not quite realizing Choi’s renown, black city, also live in New doing Lagos for almost two years. “I share this with all people from because he felt its vibe was sim- Orleans. And the history, the And I’ve been doing me for longer a certain generation who grew up patico. In Las Cruces, New Mexico, culture. The fear and the presence than that, and Lagos is an exten- in Nigeria and moved. I think if Border Patrol agents pulled the of random violence also exists. I sion of me.” you live there it’s worse, because bus over. Wey, undocumented, you just see it all the time,” he spent weeks in an El Paso, Texas, Courtney Balestier, a native of West Virginia, lives in Detroit, says. “Even when I’m having a detention center. Michigan. Her writing has appeared in Lucky Peach, Punch,

good time, I’m reminded by my “I’ve been living undocumented Rush Jagoe Rush Jagoe and Gastronomica.

22 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 23 A WHILE BACK I LIVED ON A RIVER AND GOT AROUND IN A DENTED JOHNBOAT WITH A SIX-HORSEPOWER ENGINE.

I was mostly broke during those years and bought the boat used. For an anchor I embedded an eye-bolt in a coffee can with cement, then tied a rope to the bolt. Mainly I cruised upriver then let it drift back. An old friend visited one weekend and we took the boat out on a very hot day. Bruce is a big guy from eastern Washington, descended from outlaws and lawmen. Accustomed to a colder climate, Bruce removed his shirt and hung it on the wooden post that served as my dock. We filled the tank and headed downriver, farther than I’d ventured alone. We drifted, stopping now and again to investigate debris, and ran out of beer. At a wide, slow curve was a tavern overlooking the water.

We made land, climbed the bank, and boat. Like to get a couple of beers.” entered through the back door. Everyone “Boat,” the bartender said. stopped talking and looked at us. We I nodded and someone went out the were muddy, and Bruce wore nothing back door to confirm our mode of trans- but cut-off shorts and flip-flops. As our portation. A tall man came my way, his eyes adjusted to the dim light we realized bare arms scrolled with jailhouse tattoos. that it was a biker bar filled with tough I waited calmly. In my experience, big men men in leather, denim, and an occasion- don’t mess with little guys. It’s usually the al head scarf. No one spoke. The bartend- other way around, and he might have been er had his hands out of sight below the testing me in case I was one of those Na- bartop, no doubt a weapon at the ready. poleon-types who needed to prove himself. Bruce was as big as any of the bikers, Fortunately for all of us, I am not. but I was the smallest man there. In a “Yes, a boat,” I said. “We came from NO HISTORY ANYONE SHOULD BE PROUD OF scuffle, I could maybe beat up the jukebox down past the woods where those BY CHRIS OFFUTT with a chair. I moved to the bar, sensing wrecked cars are holding the bank from

Kate Medley & Emily Wallace Medley Kate everyone’s eyes, and spoke: “We came by washing out. Ran out of beer.”

24 Winter 2015 | 25 The big guy put his arm over my shoul- states passed laws that barred flag des- ders. It felt like a load of lumber. “Anybody ecration, focusing mainly on physical who don’t drive a car can drink with me,” misuse such as mutilation. By 1989, the he said. “Set ’em up.” Supreme Court ruled that damaging the “Can’t,” the bartender said. “Law says flag was protected by free speech. In the they got to wear a shirt. I been warned 1990s, flag-burning became trendy again. twice. Next time they’ll shut us down.” Politicians attempted to amend the Con- “All righty,” the guy said. “Somebody stitution and make burning the flag give him a shirt. Big Girl, you still got illegal. The legislation didn’t pass. that one on your sissy bar?” In the hills of eastern Kentucky where A huge man from the back of the bar I grew up, I walked through the woods went outside. The bartender put two to school. Each classroom contained the bottles of Bud on the counter, and I re- Bible, a picture of George Washington, alized I didn’t have my wallet. While I the Kentucky flag, and an American flag. was worrying about that, the giant came After the teacher called the roll, all of back carrying a tattered gray T-shirt. us stood beside our desks and recited Bruce put it on. The front was embla- the Pledge of Allegiance, then the Lord’s zoned with an American flag and the Prayer. My mother had a large plastic flag? Would Bruce go to jail if he burned the university nickname of “Ole Miss” words try burning this one! American flag that she displayed on the T-shirt? was an affectionate term shortened from We stayed about an hour, during which patriotic holidays. I have attended dozens of Indepen- “Ol’ Mississippi.” As it turns out, “Ole we drank for free and learned that “Big One of my childhood chores was car- dence Day celebrations, typically cookouts Miss” was the term slaves used for the Girl” was actually “Big Earl,” and anyone rying firewood in winter to heat the house. in backyards. Often a cake is decorated to wife of plantation owners in the Deep who said it wrong got stomped. I made The other was burning the household resemble a flag. For a group of children I South. The owner was often known as sure to enunciate his name carefully, garbage twice a week. I regarded fire as once made an oblong pizza that depicted “Ole Massa” or “The Colonel.” Shortly speaking like someone new to language. a practical matter with a distinct purpose. the American flag, using food coloring for before my arrival in Oxford, the school Bruce kept the shirt when we left. The Flags were easy to get and very flammable, the blue field of stars with alternating administration changed the sports next time I went to the bar, it was per- which made burning one simple. I never stripes of cheese and tomato sauce. My mascot from Colonel Reb to a bear. Tra- manently closed. understood the impulse to do so. wife said it was the ugliest pizza she’d ditionalists were very upset, and many Bruce visited me in the mid-1990s, After Bruce left, I had many thoughts. ever seen, but I didn’t mind. The kids still are. Colonel Reb’s image continues when the issue of flag-burning was in What if you made the flag yourself? loved it. First they picked out the Parme- to appear all over town—a cartoon the news, on television and the radio. Suppose it was colored in crayon on paper, san stars, then started on the rest. Essen- drawing in a red or blue coat with formal Throughout the 1970s, nearly half the not really a flag, but a representation of a tially, they desecrated the flag by eating tux tails and red trousers. As a Kentuck- it. Who, then, should be arrested—me for ian, I didn’t understand the controversy making it? The children who ate it? The but recognized that it was a deep rift. host of the party where the crime took In Mississippi, I learned that all my life place? Or the parents, for allowing their life I’d wrongly used the term “Stars and I NEVER UNDERSTOOD kids to mutilate the flag by mastication? Bars” to refer to the traditional rebel flag. That name designated the first flag of the i moved to mississippi five years Confederacy, with a circle of stars in the ago, unable to recognize the state flag upper left quadrant. It was very similar THE IMPULSE TO BURN A FLAG. courtesy Blackwell of Scott R.A. Miller, from the other forty-nine. I assumed that to the Star Spangled Banner carried by

26 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 27 Northern troops. The resemblance high school drove muscle cars, their rear created such confusion on the battlefield windows draped with the rebel flag. Ev- that Confederate General P.G.T. Beaure- eryone had an eight-track tape player THE PHRASE “HERITAGE NOT HATE” gard demanded a new banner. The second wired to large speakers that played Lynyrd and third official flags of the Confedera- Skynyrd, The Allman Brothers, and Mar- cy included the Southern Cross in the shall Tucker. We had guns and long hair upper left corner—a blue X containing and considered ourselves outlaws. People CREATES A FALSE CHOICE. thirteen stars on a field of red. Most of in town didn’t like us and we didn’t like the flag was white, which proved prob- them. The rebel flag embodied our sense lematic. Lacking wind, the cloth hung of exclusion from conventional society. with their own present circumstances. service. Most were from poor families limp and looked like a flag of surrender. We didn’t care what the Confederacy was That’s a damn shame. that did not own slaves. Defenders of the The result of these clumsy designs was rebelling against, only that the flag was a I’ve always been proud of the Kentucky flag say it represents history, heritage, the widespread use of the battle flag of formal sanction of rebellion. flag, which depicts two men shaking and Southern pride. That may be the case the Northern Virginia Army. It proved I left the hills with this identity, drift- hands—one wearing the buckskins of the for some. But the designer of the original recognizable due to its large Southern ing from state to state and city to city. I hills, the other a flatlander in a suit. If flag wrote that the South was “fighting Cross on a solid red expanse. read and wrote, published books and had that image were subject to change, I’d be to maintain the Heaven-ordained su- In 1894, politicians added the Southern children. I bought a house. My hair adamant in its defense. I love that flag premacy of the white man over the infe- Cross to the Mississippi state flag. Due turned gray. I wore glasses and taught and hang one in my writing room. The rior or colored race.” That is no history to political ineptitude, the flag was not college. Nevertheless, that outlaw iden- state motto, “United We Stand, Divided anyone should be proud of. formally adopted until 2001. Today it is tity—and the music—stayed with me. We Fall,” is not offensive so much as it is The nature of Southern pride is ex- the only state flag that retains an image None of us at home had associated the an outright lie. Men in suits never shake tremely complex. Losing a war is a dev- of the Confederate battle flag. Recently flag with either history or white suprem- hands with hill people. State politicians astating blow. In addition to death, it has been the subject of newspaper acy. There were no slaves in the hills. don’t give two whits about us. Their goal suffering, and loss of home, it is a humil- editorials, radio talk shows, and shrill Most families barely had enough income is seldom serving the people. They pass iating attack on pride. Many brave men “debates” on social media. The difference to maintain a vehicle and clothe their laws they don’t follow, raise taxes, then fought in the Civil War. In typical Ken- of opinion is simple. What does the children. Nobody ever had the money to vote themselves pay raises and take ex- tucky fashion, my own family lost soldiers Southern Cross stand for: slavery or own another human being. pensive vacations. on both sides. I am a proud Southerner. I history? The University of Mississippi These days I understand more about After moving to Mississippi, I had to like our cultural traditions of family student senate recently voted to stop the flag than I did as a teenager, but I revise my thinking about the Southern loyalty, respect for elders, and deep at- flying the flag on campus, and the faculty don’t look back with shame. I learned a Cross and its inclusion in the state flag. tachment to land. I am particularly proud senate concurred. The flag no longer long time ago that growing up in rural I talked to opponents and supporters. of my own efforts at being a good father, appears on the grounds of the state’s isolation meant I was an ignorant country Both sides made good points. Opponents husband, and citizen. flagship university. boy. There’s no shame in lack of knowl- said it represented the repugnance of But I am not proud of our nation’s My own relationship with the Confed- edge. It’s normal. Everyone has to learn, slavery and a wrong-headed belief in history of slavery. It is our collective erate battle flag is complicated. In the either from family or teachers or expe- white supremacy. They believed the flag shame. Yes, it flourished in the South due early 1970s, I was a rebellious teenager in rience. The only true shame lies with is deeply offensive to many people who to terrain and crop, but Northerners a town of 200 deep in the hills of Ken- people who willfully maintain their ig- live here—white and black. owned slaves as well. Slavery is a deplor- tucky. I wore a Levi’s jacket with an em- norance despite information; people who Supporters of the flag often traced their able practice, barbaric and criminal. broidered patch sewn on each shoulder: don’t alter their perspective with age and lineage to the Civil War, descended from People take great effort to conceal family One was the peace sign and the other was maturity. Many of these people rely on soldiers who’d died because they were histories of slave-owning. The actor Ben the Confederate battle flag. Older boys in the past because they’re disappointed courageous young men conscripted into Affleck had that information expunged

28 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 29 from a PBS documentary. These days the the flag was used to symbolize abhorrent A white businessman and native of clusively about black people. same money that once purchased a beliefs and justify criminal behavior. Jackson told me that thirty-eight percent Will changing the flag make any dif- human being can now buy suppression The phrase “Heritage not Hate” creates of Mississippi’s citizens are black, so ference in the day-to-day lives of Mis- of that fact. a false choice. One does not rule out the there’s nothing to be gained by alienating sissippians? No. Not any more than In regards to keeping the Southern other. In today’s world, the Confederate more than a third of the population. baking a flag pizza could influence a Cross on the Mississippi flag, a common battle flag represents both. It also rep- Another friend of mine has run a retail child’s patriotism. Sewing the rebel flag phrase arose among its supporters: resents history, which should not be store in Oxford for thirty years. He to my jacket as a teenager did not make “Heritage not Hate.” I gave that a great rewritten simply because truth makes attends church twice a week, owns guns, me a rebel to society. It was a symbol, not deal of thought. There is truth that the us feel unpleasant. Public monuments votes Republican, and displayed a large an action, but symbols are crucial tools flag is a significant part of our nation’s to dead soldiers are displays of honor Dixie flag in his store for two decades. of identity and communication. heritage. History should not be ignored, regardless of which army the soldiers Upon hearing that its presence might be The current Mississippi flag has no MANY PEOPLE RELY ON THE PAST I AM A PROUD SOUTHERNER. I LIKE OUR BECAUSE THEY’RE DISAPPOINTED WITH CULTURAL TRADITIONS OF FAMILY THEIR OWN PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCES. LOYALTY, RESPECT FOR ELDERS, AND THAT’S A DAMN SHAME. DEEP ATTACHMENT TO THE LAND. lest it be forgotten and lessons never served. Military museums preserve the problematic, he promptly asked his black historical significance other than being learned. But in the past thirty years, the artifacts of history such as weapons, customers if the flag was offensive. -Ev 121 years old. It did not exist during the battle flag of Northern Virginia has uniforms, and the battle flag of the North- eryone who answered said yes. He took Civil War. If the flag is changed, everyone become associated with a variety of ern Virginia Army. the flag down. These are pragmatic ex- must maintain a clear view of the reasons. discriminatory groups, such as the Ku Many Mississippians are concerned amples, motivated by economics and The problem is not that it offends black Klux Klan, Skinheads, and Neo-Nazis. about the effect the current flag has on social politics. They make sense. But they people. The problem is what the flag says If preserving the importance of the flag business, tourism, and the ability of the also view the problem of the flag as ex- about white people. as heritage was a priority, it should have University to attract diverse students, been protected when hate groups ap- faculty, and athletes. It’s not just progres- Chris Offutt is an award-winning author of six books and ten screenplays. His work has propriated it. Instead, the people who sive people who are disturbed by the appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories believed in heritage stood idly by while state flag, but some conservatives as well. from the South. His most recent book is a memoir, My Father, the Pornographer.

30 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 31 IMAGINE YOURSELF FOR A MOMENT in a pew in a South Side Chicago church, in 1965, or 1966, or 1967, with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the lectern—serious, head down, staring at his notes. A choir sings, one voice rising above the others. Dr. King turns away from the congregation toward the voice and smiles, the sweetest smile, a smile of true joy, as the voice sings a battle cry: “Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho, Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down.” The men and women in the pews begin to clap and sing even louder as they are gathered into an army, not by Dr. King in the pulpit, but by the woman leading the choir, a beautiful woman, large and brown, in a crisp silk suit with giant buttons. When the song comes to its end, when the crowd fin- ishes thundering its readiness to fight, led by this singer and this preacher, Dr. King says, “I think I can say, concerning this great gospel singer in our midst, our dear friend, my great friend Mahalia Jackson, that a voice like this comes only once in a millennium.”

Mahalia Jackson was an international Glori-fried or glorified? Is there more star, a principled artist who refused to to the franchise than yardbird, salt, pep- sing music that was not gospel. A pas- per, and grease? Does the business ex- sionately political woman, she could ploit the Queen of Gospel’s associations wrestle attention from Dr. King, even with the sacred, or is her involvement while giving him pleasure and respite. with the chicken enterprise a kind of Why would she choose to lend her name savory and secular beatification? to a fried chicken franchise? I was born in Detroit in 1959. I remem- I have given a lot of thought to this ber my family waiting and wanting a question in the last few years. Mahalia Jackson’s to open in Motown. I knew that my first husband’s godfa- I had a vague impression that Mahalia ther, a black man named DeBerry Mc- Jackson’s was important to black Amer- Kissack, had designed the iconic build- ica in the 1960s. But I couldn’t tease out ings that housed Mahalia Jackson’s Fried just why. Chicken. I knew that John Jay Hooker, I was overeager to find the original a prominent white lawyer, entrepreneur, recipe for the chicken, hoping there was and friend of Muhammad Ali’s, had some magic in the formula that would backed both Minnie Pearl’s Fried Chick- prove Mahalia’s genius, hoping there was en and Mahalia Jackson’s Fried Chicken. something in the taste of the chicken equal GLORI-FRIED I knew that both businesses had failed. to the sound of her voice. There wasn’t. AND I sensed that country comedian Minnie I have spoken with many, many folks Pearl’s was fundamentally wrong and who ate the chicken, loved the chicken, Mahalia Jackson’s was somehow funda- adored the chicken. None of them mentally right, even if they shared the thought it tasted more than good enough. GLORI-FIED same or similar recipes for fried chicken. What they loved was the idea of Mahalia

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images Michael Ochs Archives/Getty I couldn’t tell you why. and chicken. MAHALIA JACKSON’S CHICKEN 33 BY ALICE RANDALL orn mahala jackson on water street in uptown new Orleans in 1911, the future greatest gospel singer of all time began singing at Plymouth Rock Baptist Church and Mount Moriah Baptist Church. Since the mid-1950s, the New Orleans neighborhood where she lived has been called Black Pearl. Back when she was born, it was simply called “Niggertown.”

Mahala moved to Chicago in 1927, join- women, mainly black women, under- ing a church choir almost immediately. stood Mahalia to be putting down at the She renamed herself Mahalia in honor end of a long Monday? Could it have been of her beloved aunt. Four years later, in a cast-iron frying pan? Could it have been 1931, she recorded her first song, “You a maid’s apron? In young Mahala’s ex- Better Run, Run, Run.” It would be near- perience, where did black women like ly twenty years before she had a smash her mother and aunt go on Monday hit. In 1947, Mahalia Jackson recorded morning? To work in a white woman’s “Move On Up a Little Higher.” It sold kitchen and house. Mopping and wash- over 8 million copies. ing and frying chicken. And that’s where Those 8 million copies sold meant Jackson eventually went. that Mahalia Jackson impacted the Before she moved to Chicago, Jackson South’s understanding of itself, and she worked as a domestic servant in New helped frame the North’s understand- Orleans. To feel the weight of that state- ing of the South. Eight million copies ment, remember: She was only fifteen or sold meant that some 80 million people sixteen years old when she left the South likely heard the song. Mahalia Jackson for the North. Her first appearance in the was the first, and arguably the most white world was in a maid’s uniform. She significant, black female superstar of left school in the eighth grade to work as the twentieth century. a cook and washerwoman. When she Harry Belafonte declared her the “sin- arrived in Chicago, she took jobs as a gle most powerful black woman in the hotel maid, a laundress, and a babysitter. United States.” He believed there was not By lending her name and her image to “a single field hand, a single black work- the fried chicken enterprise, Jackson was er, a single black intellectual who did not trying to put a choir robe over a maid’s respond to her civil rights message.” uniform before stripping them both off “Move On Up a Little Higher” is a song in favor of a knit business suit. She en- that seems a simple promise about going tered into respectability through the to heaven. It is so much more. shaming kitchen door, kicking the door When Mahalia Jackson first stepped down as she stepped. into the national spotlight, she made a Jackson ventured into the kitchen to prediction about food. “I’m going to feast be far more than respectable: She used with the Rose of Sharon,” she sang, de- respectability to introduce radicalism. claring herself a black woman fit to eat And like Floyd McKissick’s Soul City in with whites. She claimed an integrated North Carolina, Mahalia Jackson’s Fried table. She raised her voice like a mighty Chicken empire was a fabulous failure. sword, singing, “Monday morning, soon But before it failed, it enjoyed some very one morning, I’m going to lay down my significant successes. Mahalia Jackson cross, get me a crown…. Soon as my feet sought to use franchise food as a kind of strike Zion, lay down my heavy burden.” Trojan horse to introduce economic vi- What was the cross that millions of tality into the belly of black communities.

34 | southernfoodways.org 35 There was a bit of Marxism in her recipe. the reaping. A place where blacks were A bit of black Muslim self-reliance. And the owners, managers, workers, and pa- a whiff of gasoline. Here’s what Gulf Oil trons. Such a place existed for a moment. had to say about the audacious plan: And this is what it looked like; this is “We are pleased to be associated with how my godfather DeBerry McKissack Miss Jackson, a respected and renowned designed it, according to New York’s il- personality, and her company. Since lustrious black newspaper, the Amster- Mahalia Jackson’s Chicken System is dam News, “The white brick, carry-out black–owned, managed and staffed and chicken stores look like highly styled, is hiring in the communities in which it modern churches with their red roofs operates, Gulf hopes it is helping to climbing to high pointed peaks. Flying provide blacks business and employment buttress wings, carrying signs shaped in opportunities.” the elongated oval of cathedral windows Beyond jobs and wages, Mahalia Jack- flank the stores on either side.” son’s offered employees paid vacations, Despite the fact that Mahalia Jackson’s low-cost life insurance, and major med- Fried Chicken System lost money, Ma- ical benefits. The System grew to include halia Jackson died a rich woman, leaving a management school. an estate of approximately four million In the late 1960s and 1970s, Mahalia dollars to various relatives. She didn’t go Jackson’s Fried Chicken opened in cities into the chicken business only to make Mahalia Jackson sings at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963. across the country. In her adopted home- money. She went into the chicken busi- town of Chicago, there were, at one time, ness to help others make money, and months after the assassination of Martin offices in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Chi- five Mahalia Jacksons. quite possibly to redeem kitchen work, Luther King Jr. My own godmother, Le- cago, Nashville, New York, Miami, and Mahalia Jackson moved on up from to transform it from a private hell into a atrice McKissack, wife of the architect, Washington, D.C. I like to think they poverty-stricken New Orleans to Euro- public and pride-filled business defined was robbed there the day it opened. She developed a taste for franchise standing pean and Asian concert halls. Her face by stock and dividends rather than slaps, entered the restaurant looking sharp, a in Mahalia Jackson’s nibbling on a fried on the chicken bucket said, this chicken insults, toting privileges, and rape. twin daughter holding each hand. A purse chicken wing, listening to all the talk is fancy, this chicken is fine. The chicken Mahalia Jackson understood the pow- with credit cards and cash swinging from about black nation-building through black gave pride back to black folk, just the way er of food. She claimed as her greatest the crook of her arm. After the official wealth-building. her music gave pride back to black folk pleasure and entertainment feeding opening, she reached into her purse and Psyche Williams-Forson has written on the hardest days that came. people in her home. She knew food to be discovered her wallet was gone. Ben ably of building houses out of chicken In the black world, Mahalia Jackson’s a personal pleasure, a spiritual necessity, Hooks and A.W. Willis, lawyers and ac- legs. My god-sisters have built skyscrap- chicken enterprise is a culinary Camelot. and a political statement. tivists who founded the flagship, called ers, national monuments, movie studio A shining, vanished moment. A place Mahalia Jackson’s Fried Chicken and cancelled the credit cards for her. buildings, and roads inspired by Mahalia where black people did the cooking and restaurants were embedded in the black Today her daughters, Cheryl McKissack Jackson’s chicken. the eating, the sowing and communities they served. Due to a per- and Deryl McKissack, the twins who tod- Respect, economic self-reliance, fect storm of white redlining, poverty, dled into the opening of the first Mahalia risk-taking, mutual aid: These were the Negro removal-slash-urban renewal Jackson’s in Memphis, are the owners of secret ingredients in Mahalia Jackson’s destruction, and rising rates of drug two of the oldest and largest black-owned recipe. At the end of the day, that day that addiction and unemployment, some architectural and engineering firms in the ends in Zion, the chicken was glori-fried of these neighborhoods were areas of world. Between the two of them they have and glorified. concentrated crime. Mahalia Jackson franchise locations were often the sites and victims of robberies. Alice Randall is an author based in Nashville, Tennessee. Read more about her The very first Mahalia Jackson’s in the featured contributor spotlight on page 4. She presented a version of this Fried Chicken franchise opened in piece at the 2015 Southern Foodways Symposium.

Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968, just Images Bob Parent/Getty

Winter 2015 | 37 bought their first home in middle i. Georgia. Thirty-two years later, as I fin- ished up my Ph.D., my father retired. I My father’s 1967 Volvo 122 smells like watered seedlings in the greenhouses, dust. Pulverized foam from the ceiling thinned young peaches with a plastic and seats, dried sweat from a thousand baseball bat, emasculated flowers during entrances and exits on summer days, pollination season, helped type the book sulfur and fuzz and road dirt from the that was the key scholarly contribution orchards. The engine putters. The of my father’s career, spent a summer windows are open, and the triangular testing mashed peach leaves for plum vents shunt hot, exhaust-laden wind into pox virus. The Station was a key orien- our faces. We are on the way to the Station. tation point of my childhood, a fixture Out of the neighborhood, past the house of the landscape as taken for granted as with a balcony and an elderly African the country roads that led us there. American gentleman in his wheelchair; up through the rural north end of Houston County, past the Dunbar place, more than ii. a century old; into Peach County, past barbed-wire fences penning in dirty white Something—someone—nags at my cattle, past trailer parks and the ruined memory. The black man in his wheel- speedway; around the outer edges of the chair, waving at passersby. He was there Station, past the thick loblolly pines and almost every day. Before his stroke, my tall chain-link fencing that keeps trespass- mother once told me, he had been a civil ers out and pesticides in. rights leader. Civil rights? In my young Here we are. The USDA Southeastern mind, this was something that happened Fruit and Tree Nut Research Station. in other places, on a national stage. What Down the long drive, rows of young kind of civil rights movement could have pecans on the right, aging greenhouses occurred in middle Georgia? on the left, we arrive at the main building, Tax records peg Oscar C. Thomie Jr. a two-story, brick-and-metal structure, as a former owner of that house with the thoroughly unremarkable in that insti- balcony, and a search for his name yields tutional style of the 1960s. Inside, several two leads. The first is that Thomie was laboratories and a cold room make up the president of the Houston County The Georgia Peach the building’s core, encircled by a hallway NAACP in the 1960s. Under his leader- and offices. Blanketing one wall are ship, the chapter filed a suit against the IN plaques with 8x10 photographs of the Houston County Board of Education that Station’s scientists, all weathered faces led to a 1969 court order to integrate—an and windblown hair, thick glasses and order that was still in place forty years plaid shirts, one impressive mustache, later, much to the consternation of those black & white two throat-length beards: the unfashion- who wished to redistrict the schools. able fashion of the late-twentieth-cen- A few months later, in May 1970, tury agricultural scientist. Thomie led 430 black protesters in a Civil Rights in the Shadow of I was born into this world just as my desegregation demonstration in Perry, parents, fresh out of graduate school, the county seat, and was arrested. Ac- Georgia’s Signature Crop cording to a telegram smuggled out of Peach pickers being driven to the orchards in Musella, Georgia. In 1936, they earned seventy- the prison from Thomie and the other

by tom okie Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress five cents a day. leaders, state troopers resorted to tear

38 Winter 2015 | 39 gas and beatings to subdue the demon- strators, and then packed them “like sardines” into schoolbuses for a twen- ty-mile trip to a condemned prison camp that Governor Lester Maddox had deemed “unfit for a prison.” The second lead directs me to the Oscar Thomie Homes, a seventy-unit public housing community in north Houston County that became a half-va- cant eyesore. One of eight housing proj- ects in the city of Warner Robins, the Thomie community was built in 1964 and neglected for decades. Pointing to the broken sidewalks, peeling paint, and rusting pipes, the director of the housing authority told a reporter in 2012, “I really don’t know what we can do to turn this around. Renovation would cost $11 million, demolition only $500,000.” A few miles from my neighborhood, this housing project fell into disrepair. A few houses up the street from my own, a local hero did the same, watching in involuntary silence as his neighbors went about their lives. Thomie died in 1994; the homes were razed in February 2015.

iii.

The Station was real to me, solid, permanent; the local civil rights move- To compare would cast these stories archival record. The underfunded and entists moved into it to do their work. How ment was, like Mr. Thomie himself, as parallel lines, which, as we know from scattered special collections at FVSU and they did so reveals much about modern something of a ghost. But this contrast grade-school geometry, never intersect. the better-situated Atlanta University agrarianism at a historical moment not was illusory. The Station’s groundbreak- In the 1890s, Fort Valley whites had their Center archives tell the black story. News- overly concerned with the countryside. ing in 1969 followed twenty years of peach orchards; blacks their industrial papers, the papers of Senator Richard B. The white civic leaders in Fort Valley, advocacy and argument, approvals and school, now called Fort Valley State Uni- Russell Jr., and records of congressional the county seat of Peach County, had administrative suspensions. Thomie’s versity. In the 1920s, whites held their proceedings tell the white story. been loyal supporters of Senator Russell desegregation victory and subsequent Peach Blossom Festivals to prove the for almost his entire public career. As a jailing, however ghostly to me, followed worthiness of their enterprise. Blacks young leader in the state house of rep- a long and determined campaign. Indeed, staged their Ham and Egg festivals to iv. resentatives, Russell had played a key the comparison is on one level patently prove the worthiness of rural self-suffi- role in pushing through the new county absurd. One campaign protested the poor ciency. In the 1960s, whites campaigned There was nothing inevitable about proposal in 1924, forming Peach County health of the state’s peach trees; the other for an expanded peach lab, and blacks the Station. Peach growers and their allies out of parts of Houston and Macon coun- the legal oppression of 1.2 million of the rallied for voter registration and city elec- campaigned for it, Senator Richard B. ties. The county voted his way for the

state’s people. tions. This parallelism holds true in the Medley Kate Russell Jr. secured the funding, and sci- governorship in 1930, and for the U.S.

40 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 41 Senate two years later. In that race, he find the answers.” The future of the in- faced U.S. Representative Charles Crisp dustry was at stake, the growers said, and of Americus, who had two decades of its demise would eliminate an essential national political experience and en- fruit (rich in vitamin A and only thir- dorsements from most of the state’s ty-five calories!) from the nation’s diet. major newspapers. The younger Russell It would also send economic shock waves won resoundingly, and his supporters across the rural South. Banks would fire around Fort Valley made Peach County their agricultural finance specialists, an island for Russell in a middle-Georgia small-town druggists would close up sea of Crisp votes. shop, manufacturers of pesticides and Russell, then, was a powerful man with equipment would reconfigure their busi- a soft spot for the peach growers, their ness or fail, freight carriers would be place, and their signature commodity. To deprived of an enormous amount of make their case for more federal support summer traffic. Intriguingly, the propos- in the 1950s, the growers used the same al also urged Congress to remember “the language with which they had celebrat- plight” of the rural labor force. With ed the Georgia peach industry since the cotton and corn production mechanized, 1880s. Peaches, to them, were a more the peach industry was the only thing sophisticated alternative to cotton. The standing between these rural Southern- people of the “land of cotton,” they wrote ers and either migration to the North or in 1950, had “learned from bitter expe- West or “the already crowded offices of rience that they can not live on cotton our welfare agencies.” alone.” They needed better varieties of The hearing itself was not much of a fruits, berries, and nuts, for “marketing grilling. At several points, Russell helped in the north before northern crops are the cause with his own interjections. ready” and to “round out the diets of the “When it comes to eating fruit, man has people of the new Southland.” These never yet developed anything which has would include improved peaches, of as exquisite and delightful flavor as a course, and also Satsuma oranges, per- tree-ripened Elberta peach,” he declared. simmons, feijoas, loquots, sapotes, avo- In another exchange, Senator Milton cados, olives, jujubes, bush cherries, Young (R-North Dakota) agreed that dewberries, pistachios, and quinces—to there was a “great need” for research into name just a few of the thirty-four fruits the pests and diseases that threatened and nuts they offered for consideration. the industry. Then, in what seemed to be If the proposal seemed outlandish, a complete non sequitur, he said, “I have Russell did not let on, and he promised been down in Georgia two or three times, to take it up with Secretary of Agriculture but never during the summer. I would Charles Brannan. like to do that sometime.” Russell joined Twelve years later, the growers ap- him in reverie: “It is very beautiful. I peared before the Senate Subcommittee would be glad to have you come down on Agricultural Appropriations, which and see the peach trees when they are in Russell chaired. They brought along a bloom. There is no more beautiful sight Center/Library of Congress Folklife College/American State Valley Lewis Jones and Willis James Recordings Fort at mimeographed proposal and poignant than a peach orchard in full bloom.” A photo from The Peachite, the quarterly student publication of photographs of bacteria-spotted fruit The fact that peach trees bloom in Fort Valley State College, shows a musical performance during the 1944 and stricken peach trees. “Why did these spring, not summer, underscores the Fort Valley Folk Festival, a complement to the Ham and Egg Show. trees die? What can we do to prevent this point: It was the fruit’s aesthetic quality, loss?” they asked. “We need research to its cultural importance, that moved

42 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 43 Russell. The proposal passed the Senate their case. While their proposal offered subcommittee and, after what Russell a long list of economic ramifications of The Georgia peach’s roots later described as the most difficult ne- the peach industry’s decline, the testimo- gotiations in his thirty years as chair, the ny centered on just one. As Edgar Duke sink deep into the messy racial House as well. Congress authorized put it, “Practically every other farming $500,000 for the planning and construc- operation in the South is now or shortly politics of Southern history. tion of the lab. Letters and telegrams of will be mechanized, so our unskilled farm thanks poured into Russell’s office, like labor must depend almost entirely on the this one from Georgia Peach Council pres- growing and harvest season of fruit and More worked in white-owned businesses bill that Russell helped sponsor) optioned ident Edgar Duke: “I am amazed that you nut crops for its livelihood.” As Duke and and earned promotions. several thousand acres in Peach County so willingly devoted your personal atten- Russell may have observed, Georgia’s Overt activism was new in Peach for a proposed Fort Valley Farms, a coop- tion to our request, despite the extreme- farm population was in rapid decline, County. Prior to 1963, the path to black erative project of about seventy black ly heavy demands being made on you by shrinking by 50 percent in the decade empowerment had been thoroughly families. Peach growers and their allies what, I must admit, are far more serious from 1954 to 1964, while Georgia’s non- (Booker T.) Washingtonian, led by the sent an urgent telegram to Tugwell. and important issues. I will never forget… white tenant farmer population shrank black administration and faculty of Fort “Before proceeding further with your re- that except for your active support and even faster, by nearly 82 percent. The loss Valley High and Industrial School. Just settlement project in Fort Valley,” they hard work, our cause was lost.” of the peach industry, Duke and his allies a few years after the school’s founding wrote, “we earnestly request that you in- argued, would leave these remaining ag- in 1895, principal James Torbert pro- vestigate the feeling of the citizens of Peach ricultural workers “with the decision of claimed, “The negro ought to remain in County in regard to same. You will find v. relocating in other parts of the Nation or the rural districts and buy land, improve serious and strong opposition.” joining the long lines at the offices of our it, cultivate it, and make country life more The project found a slightly more re- As Duke had intimated, Senator Russell Federal-State welfare agencies.” attractive, healthy and prosperous.” ceptive audience in neighboring Macon had other things on his plate. Two weeks Thirty years on, school president County as Flint River Farms and flourished earlier, James Meredith had registered Henry A. Hunt wrote much the same for the next two decades. In the 1950s, for classes at the University of Missis- thing: “Negro farmers must be led to see black extension agent Robert Church sippi—after an all-night battle between vi. for themselves that it is best to remain decided to get into peaches as an experi- segregationist protestors and federal on the farm instead of having the infor- ment in diversification, but he found no marshals that left two dead and over 300 The black residents of Peach County, mation given to them by bitter experi- packing shed who would pack his crop. As wounded. Russell had publicly and however, had neither relocation nor ence in the crowded cities.” In 1916, these reactions suggest, when black South- angrily protested the use of federal troops welfare in mind. They wanted to stay, and extension agent and faculty member Otis erners talked about the importance of to guard Meredith. Despite his best they wanted to vote. Angered by the 1963 O’Neal began an annual Ham and Egg staying on the farms, white Southerners efforts to “fight these outrageous mea- murder of a black inmate in a local prison, Show, a forum for black farmers to imagined them staying on white farms, as sures with all the power of my being”— local African Americans organized the exhibit their best pork and poultry prod- low-wage labor. civil rights legislation moved forward. Citizenship Education Commission ucts for cash prizes. By the 1950s, it had From 1963 until 1980, Peach County The Russell-led Southern bloc in the (CEC). Almost simultaneously, probably become a nationally recognized blues blacks fought for better electoral repre- Senate, which had stymied civil rights in response to the wave of sit-ins and other festival as well as a platform for O’Neal sentation. The first black candidate ran reform since 1957, was broken. direct action campaigns across the South, to “pound away” at the “importance of for city council in 1964. The CEC used Legislators, then as now, deal with a Fort Valley’s white leadership called for farmers staying on their land instead of funding from the Voter Education Project bewildering array of issues in short suc- a formal “racial commission,” to which throwing down the plow” for urban jobs. to run regular registration drives from cession, and many finish their careers the mayor appointed four whites and four This rural development message had 1965 through 1972. They had good pros- with uneven voting records. Blocking blacks. The many examples of civil dis- subversive potential. Whose land were pects of success. Out of twenty-three civil rights legislation and shoring up obedience throughout the South, along these black farmers going to purchase and majority African American counties in Southern agriculture may seem unrelat- with a CEC-led “Don’t Shop Where You own, after all? Still, it was popular among Georgia, Peach County blacks had the ed, just another example of senatorial Can’t Work” boycott, lit a fire under the whites—at least in the abstract. When it lowest poverty rate, the highest median schizophrenia. But there’s a connection. commission. colored and white signs got down to specifics, there were problems. income, the highest rate of high school A clue emerges from a close reading of above water fountains began to disappear. In 1936, Rexford Tugwell’s Resettlement graduates, and the second-highest rate the 1962 hearing, as the growers made Certain blacks ate in white restaurants. Administration (part of a New Deal relief of black economic independence. By 1976

44 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 45 nearly 48 percent of registered voters were black; Fort Valley elected Rudolph vii. Carson as its first black mayor in 1980. These efforts were hampered, though, The Station stands in white Peach by external pressure and internal discord. County. The original research lab, first used In 1972, Fort Valley whites filed a suit by federal scientists around the turn of the against Fort Valley State College for racial century, was a small facility in Fort Valley. discrimination, arguing, incredibly, that Researchers used growers’ fields to conduct Fort Valley’s whites had been “substan- most of their experiments. The current tially disenfranchised” by all the voter laboratory is a remodeled Navy installation, registration activism emerging from the adjacent to Interstate 75, with 1,100 acres college, and that the institution should be at its disposal. There is a curious synchro- desegregated just like the rest of the state’s ny between the movement of federal re- university system (only fifteen of the in- search in middle Georgia and the move- stitution’s 2,300 students were white). ment of Peach County’s white population. Meanwhile, Carson’s election exposed When my parents moved to middle a broader division within Fort Valley’s Georgia, they wanted to live near my black community between the original father’s workplace. Fort Valley seemed mission of the college to develop the rural too “Old South,” Dad says. Houston African American community without County had better schools, and the city overtly challenging white supremacy and of Warner Robins, home to a large Air the more activist approach of college and Force base, was friendly to newcomers. city leaders since the 1960s. Carson tried So they settled in a modest neighborhood unsuccessfully to finesse this division. After near the border with Peach County. Oscar his first year in office, he gave an interview J. Thomie Jr., for his own reasons, did to the local paper in which he appeared to the same. Only in the last eight years, as disavow any connection to the black com- I have researched the history of the munity. He did not want Fort Valley to Georgia peach, have I begun to come to become a black town, he said, nor did he terms with the inconvenient, harder want to be known as a black mayor. edges of this local history. In response, both blacks and whites The Georgia peach is an icon, serving staged major registration drives in 1984, as shorthand for Southern beauty, hos- with nearly 40 percent more voters reg- pitality, sweetness, and agrarian identity. istered than in 1980. But 90 percent of But its roots sink deep into the messy white voters turned out, compared with racial politics of Southern history. Some only 60 percent of black voters. Carson of us have forgotten all but the high lost reelection. As of 2014, Fort Valley’s points of that history. We need to hear it

Peach crate labels courtesy Extension Service crate of Georgia of University Peach population is only 13.6 percent white, again in all the fear, anger, sorrow, and compared to Peach County as a whole (51.5 joy of the original experience. So that percent), and the northern end of the even our clichés, fuzz and all, carry some county around Byron (roughly 70 percent). truth in the aftertaste. FOREGROUND:

Tom Okie is an assistant professor of History and History Education at Kennesaw

Jamey Guy State University, where he teaches courses in American and food history and mentors future secondary social studies teachers. His book, The Georgia Peach: Culture, Agriculture, and Environment in the American South will be published

BACKGROUND: by Cambridge University Press in 2016.

Winter 2015 | 47 Verse

SOME LIKE IT HOTTER by Sandra Beasley

The restaurant waits behind a steel door through the back of a Fort Worth drycleaners. The password is “Scoville.” On tap? Blenheim Ginger Ale, Old #3. Four shakers on the table— pink, rainbow, cayenne, Sichuan. The waiter brings a napkin for my lap. The waiter brings a handkerchief for my eyes. Soup of the day: cream of horseradish. Salad greens: Osaka Purple mustard. The music is always salsa. The salsa is always mango and ghost chilies, over catfish farm-raised in firewater. If the Serrano ribs don’t elicit a Holy Jesus, I get my money back. The shrimp cocktail is served with a sauce the regulars call “pepper prom”— Trinidad Scorpions grinding on Naga Vipers, Carolina Reapers smuggling in Red Savinas, poblanos feeling up habaneros in a dark corner, a seven-pot Douglah in a single pot. The chef recommends two dashes for flavor, a third for bravery. I order a cup. I dangle each naked, maidenly shrimp over that pool of lava. This island may be small, but I am its chief. Illustration by Natalie K. Nelson by Natalie Illustration

48 | southernfoodways.org Verse

INDIANOLA SUNRISE by Sandra Beasley

He leans against the car while the rest of the band loads out, scritching one quarter against the other, finding two where he’d hoped for four, knowing at the Chevron he’ll have to bypass the ToastChees, knowing when hunger is a leaking roof a man sidles up to the hardware counter: those cool, five-gallon glass jugs full of rubbery this and redhot that, knowing the soft click of fifty cents on a grimy counter as the clerk ladles out one lone, fat pickle, hand-pricked with a fork, from its tropical bath of Kool-Aid into a tall styrofoam cup, knowing he’ll get halfway to Tunica before pulling to a dirt shoulder, how alien it’ll look in his hand as he leans against the car, as he takes a bite— overripe sugar yielding to briny yellow flesh, braced by seeds, the only hint something green ever lived here.

Sandra Beasley’s latest collection of poetry is Count the Waves, published by W.W. Norton. She read these and other pop-culture poems at the 2015 Southern Foodways Symposium. Illustration by Natalie K. Nelson by Natalie Illustration

50 | southernfoodways.org Chester “Butterbean” Biggins It didn’t take long for Chester’s gravy empire to implode, felled by a truly horrific biscuit recipe. Sadly his soft, fluffy pompadour wasn’t a prescient hairstyle.

LOST FAST FOOD FRANCHISES OF THE COUNTRY MUSIC WORLD Art by Brooke Hatfield

e came across brooke art installation for our pop culture– Hatfield’s weird and won- themed symposium, we knew just who W derful art in 2013, when we to call. used one of her multimedia pieces as the Hatfield brought together two pillars cover image for Gravy. It was a portrait of American pop culture that have deep of Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird ties to the South: fast food and country dressed in her Halloween ham costume, music. Riffing on cornpone sterotypes and it was made out of…ham. and bending genders and genres, she Jerry Lee Williams If you are familiar with the SFA’s sen- created five characters who tried to sibilities, you will understand why we make it big in both industries, with Jerry Lee bought a tanning bed when he signed to Tennessee Records. At the height fell in love with Hatfield and her work. disastrous results. Meet them on the of his ultraviolet radiation addiction, this would-be cheese straw baron was a perfect So when we decided to commission an following pages. —SCM shade of sharp cheddar.

52 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 53 Sue-Bob Caruthers Erline Lang Her friends would later joke that pear salad held a Freudian appeal. Her early success opening for the Carter Family did not prepare her for the cutthroat (They would be correct.) world of potted meats. Erline spent much of the 1980s finishing off her inventory and licking her wounds.

54 | southernfoodways.org Winter 2015 | 55 DEEP FRIED FORTUNE AFTER BROOKE HATFIELD’S PORTRAIT OF “PHYLLIS TERWILLIGER” by Sandra Beasley

Hand me the cleaver, Phyllis asked her brother. That woman chopped possum like nobody’s business, which is to say, nobody makes business out of chopped possum.

Albert saw what Phyllis did not: tightening smiles, whitening grips on their pens as Tyson Foods’ regional scouting team got a lesson in gland removal. Scalding. Scraping.

Tastes great with A.1. Sauce, she chirped, before popping the creature’s jaw so they could count all fifty teeth. Phyllis had always been an optimist.

When they’d been kids, running a roadside stand, Phyllis squeezed the lemons. Phyllis sweetened the tea. But it was Albert who thought to charge extra for ice,

and watching her sift Mama Terwilliger’s secret spice batter, he had a vision— a handful of black-eyed peas, cast into that same oil, bobbing to the top like easy money.

Thank you, the reps said. We’ll be in touch, the reps said, declining to taste another nugget. Phyllis wiped her hands on her apron. Her shoulders slumped. Phyllis Terwilliger That was when Albert hugged his sister as Romulus must have once embraced Remus— She tried to popularize popcorn possum nuggets, but aside from some cousins on her loving, but already leaving, mama’s side, consumer demand played dead. Her star resurfaced during the disco era, eyes fixed on the glittering lights of Little Rock. when she had a crossover hit with “You SOB (Sure Oughta Boogie).”

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Guelel Kumba greets us. We’ve was once a French colony. And met him one other time. My wife, Kumba lived in Paris from 1988 to Katie, directed a nature program 1995, where he pursued sociology in Holly Springs when we first studies and first started perform- moved to Mississippi from New ing Fulani music. (His father had York, and she invited Kumba to tried to steer him away from study- play music for her young campers ing the griot tradition, hoping he’d one summer day. I drove him from pursue an academic life instead.) Oxford to Holly Springs and back Kumba moved to the United for the occasion. We talked a lot States in 2001, living first in New about Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Orleans and then New York. He since I had Cow Fingers and Mos- has been in the American South quito Pie in my CD player. for more than ten years now and “I remember you well,” Kumba has absorbed many traditions, says. “That’s a happy memory.” cooking at a wide range of restau- A happy memory indeed. Katie rants (Southern, Indian, even and I were blown away by his Japanese). In 2008, he opened a songs. Kumba, a Fulani griot short-lived West African café in from northern Senegal, moved Oxford named Mama Kumba, to Oxford in 2003. With local after his mother. He mixes and guitarist Eric Deaton, he started matches the cuisines of Africa and a band called Afrissippi, whose the African American South; mission, Deaton said in 2010, is there is, after all, a thin line “preserving and promoting the between many Senegalese and West African–Mississippi con- soul-food mainstays. Dishes like tinuum.” Afrissippi fuses north- jambalaya, gumbo, and barbecue FULANI JOURNEY ern Mississippi Hill Country with sides of collard greens and blues with string-based music black-eyed peas serve as a sort of GUELEL KUMBA’S AFRISSIPPI FOOD TRUCK from West Africa, framing the cultural bridge, another indicator by William Boyle fundamental nature of American of the West African-Mississippi music in new terms. Deaton and continuum. handmade sign advertising african food pokes up from Kumba were surprised to dis- As with Afrissippi’s music, the a muddy ditch at the intersection of Molly Barr Road and North Lamar cover how much artists like Afrissippi food truck seeks to A Boulevard in Oxford, Mississippi. Beyond the sign, up a gravelly hill, in Junior Kimbrough and R.L. keep multiple traditions alive front of a squat building surrounded by retired newspaper vending machines, is Burnside had in common with without sacrificing the spirit of the Afrissippi food truck. A small, weathered black trailer, it’s parked at the far end Fulani traditional music. any of them. On a given day, of the lot. A big white tent erected nearby and strung with lights creates a makeshift The same spirit informs Kumba’s menu may include restaurant garden. There’s a bar lined with antique candleholders, a boom box Kumba’s cooking. Fusion is a word chicken yassa, mafé (Senegalese propped on one of the scattered tables, and—close to the trailer—a picnic table. that’s maligned, and often misused, peanut stew), pastels (meat-filled I’m there with my wife and our two kids. Our son, four, has brought a backpack in the restaurant business. pastries served with habanero full of Matchbox cars. He sits on the dusty ground and lines them up, etching roads Kumba’s food truly honors many sauce), banh mi, tortas, chicken into the dirt with a shovel-shaped rock. Our daughter, one, staggers around and different cultures. It has West tchou, or lamb kebabs. He serves discovers an empty water bottle that she squeezes like a bellows, simultaneously African influence, of course, but many of these dishes over grains

blowing a raspberry. Lowrey Ava also French—present-day Senegal and starches like couscous,

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THERE IS, AFTER ALL, us. “The chicken is grilled and the A THIN LINE BETWEEN vegetables and marinade become the savory sauce, which is finished MANY SENEGALESE with chardonnay. I believe this Gravy is a publication of the Southern Foodways Alliance, AND SOUL-FOOD dish to be the inspiration for Car- a member-supported institute of the Center for the Study MAINSTAYS. olina barbecue,” he posits, refer- of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. ring to the mustard-based sauce of middle South Carolina. Schol- attiéké, fonio, plantains, or cheese ars of barbecue might dismiss this EDITOR-IN-CHIEF GRAVY PODCAST grits. Kumba even offers beignets specific claim, but they would John T. Edge PRODUCER AND HOST and coffee. He makes all of his agree that Southern barbecue [email protected] Tina Antolini bread—naan, Ethiopian flatbread, draws on African influences. [email protected] French bread, and pita. When the food arrives, my son, PUBLISHER Today he’s serving chicken who lives on peanut-butter- Mary Beth Lasseter GRAVY PODCAST INTERN yassa gyros on Ethiopian flatbread and-jelly sandwiches, takes a [email protected] Dana Bialek and chicken curry over couscous. piece of chicken yassa. He Kumba puts some Fulani music munches on it, his eyes lighting EDITOR GRAVY PRINT on the boom box and disappears up. He rips off a piece of the flat- Sara Camp Milam GRADUATE ASSISTANT into the truck. He starts cooking. bread—crisp, soft, perfect—and [email protected] Kate Wiggins My son is smashing cars together. shares it with his sister. A light rain begins to fall, pebbling My curry is shivery-good. The DESIGNER the tent-top. chicken falls off the bone, spice- Richie Swann We’ve lived in Oxford for seven stuffed. I don’t want to share it. [email protected] years, and these aren’t smells My wife, attending to our we’re accustomed to anymore. daughter, hasn’t had any of the Kumba may be fusing Senegalese gyro yet. Our son is scarfing it cuisine with soul-food standards, down. I feel like a bad husband, but today he’s reminding us of but I don’t care. It’s all about the home. Chicken on spits in open food now. windows of gyro joints. Curry The rain lets up. Overhead, wafting from a late-night Indian planes descend into the nearby counter. Hints of the Biryani Cart University-Oxford airport for the in Midtown Manhattan and Ma- next day’s football game. My son moun’s in the East Village. We’re is finished eating. Kumba comes THE MISSION of the Southern Foodways Alliance is to document, study, and in love before we see the food. over and plays cars with him. explore the diverse food cultures of the changing American South. Chicken yassa, or yassa au We tell Kumba how wonderful poulet, is a traditional dish from everything is, was. He smiles, and Our work sets a welcome table where all may consider our history and our the Casamance region of Senegal. it’s one of those big memorable future in a spirit of respect and reconciliation. “I make the marinade from just smiles, the kind that can lift you oil, lemon juice, onions, vinegar, up when you’re feeling battered SFA membership is open to all. Not a member? and Dijon mustard,” Kumba tells by the world. Join us at southernfoodways.org [email protected] William Boyle lives in Oxford, Mississippi. He is the author of the novel 662-915-3368 Gravesend and the story collection Death Don’t Have No Mercy.

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Lora Smith accepted the John JoAnn Clevenger owns and Egerton Prize on behalf of the operates Upperline, the New Or- Appalachian Food Summit (AFS). leans restaurant she founded in The AFS facilitates conversations 1983. She owes her thirty-year among contemporary Appala- success in the restaurant business chian farmers, scholars, writers, to a belief in the life-giving and chefs, producers and other inter- community-building possibilities ested parties to explore how food of dining out. Clevenger reminds traditions can become part of us that the root word for “restau- diversified local economies. rant” translates from French to English as “restore.” She is a graceful, and gracious, champion for her industry and her city. LORA SMITH JOANN CLEVENGER

In 2016, the SFA explores the Corn-Fed South, from bread to syrup.

Phila Rawlings Hach was JOIN US AT a native of middle Tennessee. She SOUTHERNFOODWAYS. ORG worked as an airline stewardess before returning to Nashville in SFA members receive a subscription 1950 to host Kitchen Kollege, the to Gravy and other benefits. South’s first televised cooking show, and went on to write more than a dozen cookbooks. For de- cades, Hach and her husband operated Hachland Hill, a bed and breakfast. She passed away on December 2, 2015. PHILA HACH TOP: Brandall Atkinson; BOTTOM: Courtesy BOTTOM: family of the Hach Atkinson; Brandall TOP: Atkinson Brandall

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