Oxford American

BREAKING Bread

Who is welcome at the welcome table?

Fifty years after restaurant desegregation, why do we continue to dine apart? A special section on the dynamics of hospitality, exclusion, and food justice.

Edited by John T. Edge

- 100 - SPRING 2015 Photo by Ben Couvillion OxfordAmerican.org - 101 - taught the ‘value of discretion’ had never let on class like me, or you’re black and of any class and to make of Highlands, he says. “Fine dining was what became of some of the bills pressed into his aware of the South’s peculiar history, you can’t all about flounder with beurre blanc. And filets palm after he flambéed the baked Alaska tableside, help but glance over Goren Avery’s shoulder into wrapped in bacon, held together with toothpicks. lowering the lights so that his white gloves and our shared past. When Highlands opened in 1982, we had a line shirt stood out against the fire: The tips would out the door on the first day for shrimp and grits be donated to the cause of Martin Luther King.” unch with Goren Avery is comparable to din- with meunière and cherry tomatoes. For smoked GOING DEEPER WITH RED DOG Even then, some waiters defined their own terms ner served by Goren Avery. At every turn, trout with cappellini.” BY JOHN T. EDGE of engagement. L he exerts control like a munificent dictator. Thirty-three years into Avery’s tenure, most This past fall, during the symposium where Red Soon after we take a seat at Bottega Café, a casu- diners comport themselves in a manner he appre- Dog was first screened, the SFA also premiered an al Stitt-owned Italian restaurant up the hill from ciates. Though he still sorts his tips in shoeboxes, original oratorio, Repast, written by Kevin Young. Highlands, his eyes lock on mine. Not long after those tips are generously remunerative. He’s too His poem from that work, “Pining, a definition,” we finish a pleasantly charred lozenge of pork bel- modest to reveal his effective salary. But Avery appears in this issue. Repast tells the tragic and ly, he firmly squeezes my bicep. Physically and is proud enough of his work to tell me that, on true story of Booker Wright, owner of Booker’s emotionally, Avery commands the social moment. the night before we sat down to lunch, he took in atching Goren Avery work the an unsung hero or heroine of the food world, a That’s admirable. He’s a loyalist, who walked Place nightclub and waiter at the famed restau- I’ve known Avery for nearly twenty years. an average 34 percent on each tab. In an industry Highlands Bar & Grill dining tradition-bearer whose work and life bear wit- through the door in November of 1982 and rant Lusco’s, who spoke truths about the pains of We’ve eaten lunches of Chinese dim sum and where 19.5 percent is the norm, the numbers he room is a pleasure tantamount ness to the better impulses of the Southern ex- has remained in service at Highlands, despite segregation in 1960s Mississippi and lived big and French choucroute in New York City. We’ve puts on the board are keen measures of excellence to savoring a couple of chef perience. To mark the occasion, we produced a insistent offers from other employers. In an in- died too soon in the cotton town of Greenwood. shared a bar perch often enough for me to know and endurance. Frank Stitt’s farro-stuffed and film,Red Dog, directed by my colleague Joe York. dustry rife with turnover, that’s laudable. What In what seemed to the Delta gentry a recipro- that his drink of choice may look like a negroni, Avery reminds me that his success is rooted in Wport-glazed quail. Four nights a week, Avery A frame-by-frame study of Avery at the height I see, however, and what I think that Mountain cal relationship, Wright sing-songed the menu but, owing to a fight with pancreatitis that steered a past that’s not too long gone. “They knew what glides through this burgher temple like a camera of his powers, Red Dog is a natural complement Brook doyenne may have glimpsed, is a kind of and slung platters of pompano for tips until he him away from booze, is actually cranberry juice to do and what not to do, what to say and what grip rolling through a movie set on a well-greased to the food section of this issue, which, for the redemption, a moment of earned equity that revealed, during a 1966 NBC documentary, that on the rocks. No matter. This is just the second not to tell”: That’s how he recalls men like George dolly. Beneath the spangling lights here in Bir- most part, was born of speaking assignments Avery broadcasts to those he serves. That’s the he was not happy bucking and scraping for buckra time we’ve actually had a substantive discussion. Pearson and Irving Goldsmith, who schooled mingham, he bobs and weaves and runs and rips for SFA symposia. true gift of his career. To his patrons and his peers. dollars. “The meaner the man be, the more you The first came when Joe York and I scouted him at the Relay House, who taught him how to over polished oak floors, between linen-draped Lolis Elie’s recollection of the late Rudy To himself, his progeny, and his city. smile,” he said, his voice crackling with emotion, Red Dog. At dinner that evening, I learned that carve roasts and flambé desserts table side, who tables, alongside French brasserie broadsides. Lombard, who drove the desegregation of New Black male waiters have long played dramatic his words revealing the duplicity required to live back when Alabama football games were staged showed him how to serve without kowtowing. Avery, who has the look and charm and drive Orleans restaurants and co-edited a book that roles in this pageant we call the South. Until separate but supposedly equal lives. Blacks in the at Legion Field, Avery’s father cooked barbe- “They polished me,” Avery tells me, his eyes of a less combative James Carville and brings a profiled that city’s old-guard black chefs, is the recently, those roles have demanded varying Delta were emboldened. Whites were forced to cue on a barrel pit in their Smithfield yard and glistening. “They got me ready for all of this.” swivel-necked acuity to his profession, knows lone exception to that genesis. But read that piece degrees of subservience. Commerce and conven- acknowledge that their interracial relationships sold two-bone stacks of butter-and-beer-sauce- how to read this room. Thirty-plus years into a and you recognize that Elie and Lombard are tion have served black men who style themselves were on tenterhooks. That two-and-a-half-minute drenched ribs and white bread to fans. By the uch has changed in Birmingham during tenure that his colleagues hope will carry past the fellow travelers who have long focused their at- garrulous jesters or faithful retainers. Today, monologue—which, if you’re curious, you may time he was thirteen, Avery worked alongside Goren Avery’s career. The city elected its fifty-year mark, Avery arches back from two-tops tentions on those same welcome table issues. The restaurants remain sites of commerce where stream on the Web—laid bare the inequities of his father, dodging cars in game-day traffic to M first black mayor, Richard Arrington, in more interested in canoodling than ordering, and, paths we Southerners take to revisiting our past democracy is promised but not fulfilled. That’s the day and the affects of subservience. hustle sandwiches and rent side-yard parking 1979. (Current mayor William Bell, also African- like a dunking bird aiming for a glass of water, are sometimes circuitous. Writing about Lance one of the points that Todd Kliman makes in his Southern inequities have historically been spots. After he returned home from Berkeley, American, regularly commands a corner table at plunges into martini-thirsty foursomes, suggest- Hill, also of New Orleans—who documented the meditation on race in contemporary Washington, starker. Race is a measure, along with gender and California, and his 1970s stint at Chez Panisse, Highlands and cuts up with Avery.) In 1992, the ing appetizers of beef carpaccio to complement radical 1960s work of the Deacons for Defense D.C., dining rooms. ethnicity. Exclusion based on food choice has long before he opened Highlands in 1982, Stitt was city opened the nation’s first major civil rights their brimming gin coupes. and rallied Louisiana voters in the early 1990s In D.C., and throughout the South, jester leveraged class distinctions, especially among one of their customers. Thirty-plus years later, museum. Grasping a starched napkin in his left hand to defeat onetime Klansman David Duke—Sara waiters once were omnipresent. Bill “Bojangles” those in the mountain South. Also in this issue, Stitt and Avery are the last of the opening team When Highlands opened in 1982, the debut and twirling a pair of mod eyeglasses in his Roahen spells out the possibilities of Hill’s new- Robinson of Richmond famously spilled oyster Chris Offutt, a proud son of Kentucky, reminds to regularly walk the Highlands floor. of a restaurant didn’t seem comparatively note- right, Avery wheedles and cajoles regulars who est project, a celebration of the mirliton, a squash soup on a patron at the luxe Jefferson Hotel in the us that, when humans discriminate, wealth and On this trip, Avery and I go deeper, beyond worthy. But for a city pursuing an identity other know what they want to order before they sit that Hill believes is one means to seeding and early twentieth century and more famously won the perception of worth are always factors. résumés, to the bottoms of Smithfield, where the than Bombingham, the slander it earned during down. He joshes and spurs culinary tourists feeding community. a pardon and a theater career by dancing a soft- men labored as pipe fitters, the women worked as the civil rights movement, the rise of Birmingham who, confronted with braised pheasant per- Red Dog received a standing ovation at the shoe apology that doubled as an audition. Flossie ed Dog plays like a New South sequel to domestics, the neighborhood ditches brimmed as a New South dining citadel has been a fiscal fumed with marjoram, can’t pull the trigger 2014 SFA symposium. The film has also been Mae Raeford, who hopped running boards in the Wright’s monologue. Progress has been with sewage, and Avery (whose light and ruddy and image boon. on the venison loin swaddled in sorghum gas- well received in Birmingham. Over the course of 1950s to earn tips at Atlanta’s Varsity Drive-In, R made. Change has come. Yet recent ra- complexion and randy ways would later earn Highlands, under the stewardship of Stitt trique. With a surety that matches the mien of an afternoon and evening spent in Avery’s orbit, wore wildly festooned hats, including one he cially inflamed events in Ferguson, Missouri, him the nickname Red Dog) learned to fight off and Avery, drove that rise. Over the last decade owners Pardis and Frank Stitt, Avery shepherds I watch and listen as men and women stop him made from pill bottles, salt shakers, plastic forks, and elsewhere make clear why Avery’s life and Smithfield kids who called him “white boy” and Frank Stitt has gotten his due. So have veterans the flocks who seek purchase nightly in this on the street and genuflect. Some read an article medicated breathers, and heart-shaped lollipops, work shine brightest when projected opposite the tried to steal his lunch bucket. of his kitchens like Chris Hastings, chef-owner reliquary of a restaurant, the most vaunted in about the award in the local newspaper. Others fixed to a vegetable colander and secured to his lives of black waiters of previous generations like Goren Avery found his métier as a teen, work- of nearby Hot and Hot Fish Club, and Drew the South. This place and, by extension, this watched the film on our website. All beam with head with a necktie. Wright and Gaines and Robinson and Raeford. ing in the fine dining rooms of Birmingham, first Robinson, the chef behind rapidly expanding city, are his domain. pride. So does Avery. “If this keeps up I’m going In the deeper South, the faithful retainer was, I’m not suggesting that Avery requires that at the Relay House, a downtown businessman’s Birmingham-based Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Que. to have to start wearing dashikis and sunglasses until too recently, a model. Lindsay Gaines, head- historical backdrop. Not by any measure. Nor club, later at Hugo’s, the white-tablecloth res- Like the other men and women who get their ate last year, during a symposium that ex- to keep from getting noticed,” he tells me after waiter at the Mountain Brook Club, set the 1960s am I suggesting that Avery plays to a black-white taurant in the Hyatt Regency. (Stitt worked in due in this issue, Goren Avery has helped curate amined inclusion and exclusion at the con- a particularly effusive Mountain Brook doyenne Birmingham standard. Diane McWhorter wrote binary. His strength of character and force of that same hotel.) “People didn’t know shit back a more welcoming and inclusive South. Now it’s L temporary table, the Southern Foodways hugs his neck and busses his cheek. about him in Carry Me Home, a reportorial medi- personality subvert prevailing expectations about then,” Avery tells me, his face screwed into a his time to step into the bright and flattering light Alliance honored Avery with the Ruth Fertel Avery is a service professional who regards tation on her hometown and its role in the civil race and how it’s lived in the South. What I am playful scowl. “They didn’t know how to act, they of the kliegs. Now is our time to take a seat at the Keeper of the Flame Award, given annually to his work as a lifelong vocation, not a way station. rights revolution: “Gaines, whom the gentry had suggesting is that, if you’re white and middle didn’t know how to tip.” They didn’t know what welcome table he sets. ø

- 102 - SPRING 2015 OxfordAmerican.org - 103 - PINING, a definition BY KEVIN YOUNG

Look like last night the light hardly wanted

to leave—it hung round in the pines

for what seemed hours after the sun said

its goodbyes. Sometimes can get hard

to just go, you know— we stand around talking

not noticing the dark rising up around

our feet. Stand up & maybe

stretch & see ourselves home. We

be a gas station dog waiting for something

to fall, so we can eat awhile

& sleep. When morning decides to wake

maybe just this once it’ll be late

& we can join the table already set, like fate—

welcomed by the knives— & just from the scent

of what someone we love cooked for us

feel fed.

- 104 - SPRING 2015 “Column” (2013), by RaMell Ross OxfordAmerican.org - 105 - CODING AND DECODING DINNER BY TODD KLIMAN

outhern hospitality is more than ing field, in politics, in the military, and we what we call “etiquette.” It’s a sen- congratulate ourselves on our steady march sibility. A way of being in the world. to racial harmony. But our neighborhoods A philosophy. A spirit. You don’t and our restaurants do not look much dif- just open your doors to a stranger; ferent today than they did fifty years ago. Syou lavish that stranger with kindness, atten- That Kingly vision of sitting down at the tion, and care. Nor are you simply accepting same table together and breaking bread is as someone you don’t know into your home. smudgy as it’s ever been. In the purest sense, you are accepting that stranger as an extension of yourself. have a day job in Washington, D.C., as a This is what is known as “welcome” in the food critic. I’ve done it for ten years. Dur- South. And there is no thinking of it except in I ing that time, the city has become bigger the purest sense. “Welcome” is an almost mythic and more cosmopolitan, the restaurant scene conceit, one bound up with the very ways the has evolved from that of a steak & potatoes region chooses to think of itself—sun-dappled town to that of a vibrant metropolis, and land of kindness, grace, and mercy. people now talk excitedly about going out to But if we choose to see the South as it really eat. But what no one talks about is the almost is, and as it once was—and if we are honest in total absence of black faces in that scene. admitting that in many ways what is is not so I count faces, I have to confess. It’s a habit. very different from what was—then we find Something I began doing when I was teaching ourselves with a messier, more authentic at Howard University, when I was made to picture of welcome. see myself as white in the world—whiteness Last year, on the fiftieth anniversary of not as neutral, as baseline, but as an idea, a restaurant desegregation, we celebrated a sig- construct. I began to keep a tally, each night, nifying moment in the long march toward full of the non-whites in the room. I eat out, on and equal citizenship for black Americans. But average, ten times a week in restaurants that heavily represented in both the government invite attack or censure. And, he reminded Most of those folks are white; the men who we delude ourselves if we don’t acknowledge span the gamut from ambitious fine-dining bureaucracy and the workplace. And Prince me, most whites would not care. make decisions in the restaurant world—they that there is a difference between being ad- to so-called ethnic mom & pops. So let’s do George’s County, where I live, is home to This was meant, I suppose, to dissuade me are almost unfailingly men—are almost unfail- mitted and being welcomed. the math. That’s 40 restaurant visits a month the largest black middle class in the country. from wading too deeply into choppy waters. ingly white. The common denominator of my The court order that ended desegregation for 4 months, or 160 restaurant visits. Only So why aren’t they coming to dinner? It’s From wasting my time. But my fascination with honest but off-the-record conversations with stipulated that every café, tavern, waffle 8 times—8 times out of 160—did I see more a question I’ve been asking for almost as long the question has not gone away, and, if anything, these white insiders—the one thing they all house, and roadside joint must open its doors than 10 black folks in the room during any one as I’ve been a restaurant critic. And—not that as the years have gone on, I am more interested spoke to me about—was something I’ve taken to all. It did not, could not, stipulate that lunch or dinner. On more than 90 of those I’m surprised—no one seems interested in in finding the answer or answers, not less. to calling the 60-40 line, a line they live in whites in the South must also open their restaurant visits, I did not see any faces other answering it. Or even addressing it. I mentioned that I’ve lately been keeping a fear of crossing. hearts and minds to all. Welcome was, and than white faces. tally. Well, for the past five years, I’ve also been Sixty-forty: that’s a dining room that’s 60 is, the final barrier to racial parity. We’re not talking about Provo, Utah. Or ’ve tried, for almost ten years now, to get making notes and interviewing restaurateurs percent white and 40 percent black. Forty We have witnessed remarkable progress Johannesburg, South Africa. We’re talking a publication interested in a piece that and industry observers for a piece I thought percent is the tipping point, they all said. More over the past five decades, yes, and we should about a town enshrined in song, four decades Iwould go in search of an answer. That’s dy- might never reach an audience. None I have than 40 percent black, and suddenly, they acknowledge this, too. What seemed fanci- ago, as Chocolate City. namite, one editor told me—and then he im- spoken with over the years has been willing said, the numbers don’t just flip. More than ful, even utopian, a generation ago is now so Yes, the black majority may be a thing of mediately sought to make me understand how to go on the record and put a name and title to 40 percent, and—said one—the whites scurry commonplace as to not bear any comment the past—the recent census shows that whites fraught such a piece would be. I was white, he the observations and insights they’ve shared to their holes like mice. Soon, he said, you’re at all. We have come to expect and accept now make up a paper-thin majority—but said, and that meant simply taking on a subject with me. So you’ll have to take it on faith when looking at a restaurant where the clientele is black and white in the workplace, on the play- blacks remain a force in local politics. They are like this, in a candid and honest way, would I say that the things they’ve told me are true. predominantly black.

- 106 - SPRING 2015 “Old Chairs,” by DeeAnne Wagner OxfordAmerican.org - 107 - I said I thought that might be just a tad are no blacks in the dining rooms, because— A place, in other words, that is unlikely to communication by signs and symbols and paranoid. This one restaurateur, a good, there are no blacks in the dining rooms? generate broad excitement. patterns. well-meaning man—they were all good, well- “I mean, don’t laugh,” he said. “Seeing black So much of what I was hearing, on both I don’t see coding as inherently malicious. meaning men, the men I spoke with—looked faces out front—the GM, the chef, that would sides, came down to fear. The 60-40 was about But we need to remember that restaurants have at me and said that you could never be too go a long way. But we don’t have a lot of black fear. About not taking chances, and not risking long existed to perpetuate a class of insiders careful when it came to running a business chefs or GMs. Having black staff—you know, a good thing. The exposure theory, the remark and a class of outsiders, the better to cultivate where every day you essentially began from a third black, for example—that surely would about culinary conservatism—these, too, were an air of desirability. Tablecloths, waiters in scratch. But 60-40 would seem to me to be help. But again, you don’t see much of that.” about fear. Not venturing beyond safe harbor. jackets and ties, soft music—these are all forms a problem to think about only if you have a Those who were most outspoken feared Sticking with the known, with what’s easy. of code. They all send a very specific, clear 40 percent black audience. And there aren’t reprisal from two directions, from whites and Needing reassurance. message. That is, they communicate without more than a handful of restaurants in the city blacks. These, to me, were the most interest- It is no wonder we talk so much about com- words (and so without incurring a legal risk or that can say that. ing—people whose ideas were likely to disturb fort foods, I thought. Food: it’s where we run inviting criticism or censure from the public) The black folks in the industry I’ve spoken folks on both sides. to for safety. It’s what we hide behind. the policy, the philosophy, the aim of the with have been similarly reluctant to go on I shared the former GM’s exposure theo- establishment. the record, mostly for fear of reprisal; they ry with a woman who has been in the food t was a man named Andy Shallal who Today, there are many more forms of code don’t want to be seen as angry or unhappy or world in Washington for more than twenty- helped me to understand the possibilities than the old codes of the aristocracy. Bass- ungrateful. One, a former general manager five years, as a cook and a consultant. She I for a better, more integrated future while thumping music. Cement floors and lights who now manages an underground supper said, “Well, exposure, sure. But also the fact also reinforcing the manifold problems of the dangling from the ceiling. Tattooed cooks. But club, told me that it was important to remem- that, I’m sorry—black folks are just plain ol’ present. Shallal made me understand that no these are still forms of code. They simultane- ber that it hasn’t been that long, historically. conservative in their tastes. Nobody wants one ever need say, “keep out.” That a message ously send an unmistakable signal to the target Yes, he said, blacks today have a mobility to hear that, but it’s true. So you take a fish is embedded in the room, in the menu, in the audience and repel all those who fall outside their grandparents lacked. But that’s not to restaurant, or a fish and seafood restaurant, plates and silverware, in the music, in the that desired group. say that they’ve been exposed to the experi- or a barbecue place, and you’re gonna see color scheme. That a restaurant is a network I spoke to a restaurateur not long ago who ences many whites have. This explains, he black folks. Guaranteed. These are the foods of codes. It’s a phrase that, yes, has all sorts of told me, “I don’t engage in coding.” I respond- said, the glaring absence of blacks from most we know. These are our comfort foods. Now, overtones and undertones, still, in the South. ed that I begged to differ. We code even when Indian, Vietnamese, Bolivian, Afghan, Thai, you take unusual foods, and in a setting that I’m using it, here, in the semiotic sense—the we’re not aware that we’re coding. He may and sushi restaurants in the D.C. area. doesn’t feel familiar, and with lots of white When I pointed out that I myself have only folks in the room? Uh-uh. Remember, why been eating sushi for twenty years, he said, do we gather to eat? For most of us—black “But see, you were exposed to other kinds and white—it’s to feel good. To feel a sense of food earlier. And that probably prepared of well-being. Of home.” you for sushi.” I thought about her comments recently What about younger blacks who are grow- when the office of the Prince George’s county culinary ing up in a world in which sushi can be found executive invited me to lunch to solicit my in grocery stores? I asked. And yet you still ideas for attracting a name restaurant. I said don’t see them in the restaurants. that I thought the right kind of restaurant “Because their parents didn’t grow up eat- would be a crossover restaurant, a place that crossroads ing sushi,” he said. would appeal equally to black and white. Ide- “Well, neither did mine.” ally, I said, a fish and seafood spot of such Just as two highways here meld into a rich blues culture, so “But your parents grew up eating—I’m high quality and freshness that diners from The New York Herald do varied geographic, racial, and religious backgrounds come guessing—grew up eating all kinds of dif- all over the region would be persuaded to Reports the Assassination together to create some of the most authentic food you’ll find ferent foods, right? And you grew up, I’m make the trip. One of the CE’s staff members, Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division anywhere. Check out an Amish bakery, Lebanese and Italian guessing again, in a world that was not a seg- a woman, nodded her head enthusiastically Alexander Gardner/Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division regated world. Most black folks, they grew in agreement. restaurants, tamale and barbecue diners, farm-to-table cafes, up in black neighborhoods and went to black And then I began talking about the hy- Now through Sept. 13, 2015 and soul food in juke joints and clubs. You can drool over schools. So: exposure.” pothetical menu. Stews teeming with lan- See the first-ever display of all seven New York Herald special descriptions all day long, but you have to come taste in person. And what about the non-so-called ethnic goustines, mussels, and cuttlefish. Oysters editions from April 15, 1865, reporting the assassination of restaurants? on the half shell and other items from the President Abraham Lincoln, as the nation marks the 150th That’s a matter of exposure, too, he said. raw bar. Crudo. anniversary of his death. We’re saving a table for you. “To know the protocol. To interact with a “Crudo?” she wrinkled up her nose. sommelier. Whites—not all whites, but more “What’s that?” whites—have been doing it for longer. They I told her. P. O. Box 1770 tend to know these things. Going out to din- “Raw fish? Uh-uh. Nope. Not gonna work.” Clarksdale, MS ner isn’t just about the food. It’s a whole sys- She suggested instead a fried fish restaurant— 662.627.6149 tem you have to learn. And an etiquette. It’s “you know, something like the Neelys on TV visitclarksdale.com not as simple as just showing up.” would do”—and began describing the kind of NEWSEUM.ORG 555 PENNSYLVANIA AVE., N.W., WASHINGTON, D.C. There was a Yogi-ism in here, I said. There place that, even new, would feel like a relic. TripAdvisor’s 2014 Top 10 Travelers’ Choice Museums in the U.S.

- 108 - SPRING 2015 OxfordAmerican.org - 109 - not have been trying overtly to exclude—I The restaurant was a kind of multiplex, from the start the restaurant drew throngs of know he would never do such a thing—but his which, in addition to serving food, would customers, black and white (and Asian and La- restaurant speaks a very particular language. serve as a coffeehouse, a bookstore, and a per- tino), old and young, hipster and square, and It has a microbrewery on the premises—and, formance space. There were nightly events, emerged as a new symbol of U Street—that NOW HEAR THIS! according to the Madison Beer Review, only sometimes two or three plays or performances magical third place we all seem to want so three percent of craft beer drinkers in the or readings in a single night. He spoke to me desperately in our neighborhoods and towns. U.S. are black. Its staff is almost exclusively at length, and also with great angst, about white. Attached to the restaurant is a general how important it was to not schedule too he first Busboys and Poets opened ten store selling penny candy, knickknacks, and many events in any given night that would years ago. I was hopeful, then, that other nostalgic oddities that take browsers attract a predominantly black crowd. If the T its success and the exciting vision it back to the Fifties—hardly a time that most restaurant scheduled no events that attracted portended might inspire a new generation. black Americans want to relive. a black audience—if its programming was re- There’s a contagiously progressive spirit in When Shallal opened the first location of garded as appealing much more to whites than the air right now, and some young D.C. res- Busboys and Poets, near U Street in Wash- blacks—then that was just as bad. Busboys and taurateurs speak earnestly and excitedly of ington, D.C., he told me that he wanted to Poets could be a spectacular financial success, blurring the old divisions. The city is witness create a restaurant that would knit together but he said he would consider it a failure if to some fascinating experiments in high-low, black and white. He was not the first D.C. the mix tipped too far in one direction or the in rusticity and refinement, as chefs draw in- restaurateur to make the attempt. Gillian other. His menu, I understood that day, was spiration from old truths to create new ideas, Clark’s Colorado Kitchen, now shuttered, written in code. new techniques, new flavors. was the kind of homey, self-effacing place “I have field greens on the menu,” he said. But black and white are still largely sepa- you see much more of in the South than in “Only I don’t call them field greens. I say— rate. Shallal was interventionist in coding this the North. I once described it as the most lettuce. I have chorizo on my pizza. Only I restaurant, flagrantly and unapologetically integrated restaurant in the city, which was, don’t call it chorizo—I call it pepperoni.” so. He made explicit, sometimes straining in retrospect, a regrettable bit of sloppiness. On the tables he would not put out just overtures to a long-neglected audience, while Yes, blacks and whites came together to break salt and pepper, he would also include tiny being careful to limit their numbers in the bread, but allow me now to adjust the image bottles of hot sauce. And that was not the building. He purposely framed his cuisine that is no doubt taking root in your mind. end of it. He commissioned an artist to paint so as to not exclude anyone, underselling From the time it opened until about seven murals on the walls—murals that included the quality of his ingredients for what he o’clock, the room was predominantly black. images of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, perceived to be the greater good. Yet Busboys From seven until closing, it was predomi- Gandhi, and others. and Poets has inspired no followers, other nantly white. In the sweet spot of about 6:45, Shallal knew that what he was doing was, than Shallal himself, who promptly opened the dining room was, yes, the fulfillment of at some level, a form of pandering. And that three more locations, with another on the King’s vision. Clark told me that it bothered some, like my more waggishly cynical black way (there are now six locations along the her to see this division, and that she tried hard friends, would see his restaurant not as a sym- East Coast). to integrate the room. To little avail. bol of hope, but as an emblem of condescen- Is it that everyone is too fearful to take a Shallal decided to try harder. U Street was sion. At lunch one day not long after Busboys chance? Or is it that there is only one Andy a kind of hallowed ground for black Washing- and Poets had opened, one of those friends Shallal? Or both? tonians, the heart of their nightlife during the of mine nodded toward the mural along one Or is it that this kind of social engineer- benighted period of Jim Crow, where Duke wall, with its images of King, Malcolm X, ing in the context of dining out feels, even Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, and and Gandhi, and its inspirational quotations, to some progressive ears, not just intrusive, others played nightly to packed houses. It was and smirked and said, “I feel like I’m walking but somehow also contrary to the very spirit destroyed in the 1968 riots and was slowly down the halls in junior high.” of breaking bread, of the table? groping its way back to life. His hope, Shal- Shallal and I spoke for five hours that day, Food is intimate. We take it into our bodies. lal told me, was to create a space that would and as the afternoon light receded and the When we gather at the table with friends and show what the new U Street could look like. house lights came up, I told him that he had family, we’re gathering to affirm something. He felt uniquely qualified for the task, given gone to lengths that no other restaurateur in When we gather for business, we’re gathering that he was Iraqi and had for years brought the city had gone to. He looked at me across to cement something. The table, the notion of together Jews and Arabs in the Peace Cafe din- the table and said, “I have to. If I don’t go to breaking bread—this is meant to establish an ner discussions he hosted after performances these lengths, it just won’t work.” In other intimacy and gesture toward trust. Subscribe to the SFA’s Gravy podcast on iTunes. at the Washington, D.C., Jewish Community words, if he didn’t make a very conscious— What Andy Shallal has proven—indisput- A new episode airs every other Thursday. Center. Shallal was well aware of the 60-40 even self-conscious—attempt at reaching a ably proven—is that it’s possible. It’s possible principle, and as much as he intended the black audience. to bring black and white together under one Bite into a collard sandwich with members of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Experience restaurant to be a place of racial harmony, he It’s impossible to know whether people roof. It’s possible to do it both peaceably and Christian coffee house culture in Knoxville. Wade into the water issues restricting oyster growth in was careful not to cross certain lines. Sitting came because of his concerted efforts, or profitably. But not without enormous work. Apalachicola Bay. Drink and dance with the Saturday morning crowd at Fred’s Lounge in Louisiana. down with me one day to talk about his vision whether they would have come anyway, be- And not without conscious and even self- a few weeks after opening, he told me that cause Busboys and Poets is such an interesting conscious outreach. And not without a daily, 60-40 guided many of his early decisions. and irresistible mix of elements. But almost even hourly, tending of the delicate mix. ø Or visit us at www.southernfoodways.org, where you can become an SFA member.

- 110 - SPRING 2015 A REVOLUTIONARY VEGETABLE BY SARA ROAHEN

ot long ago I asked a bookseller and then his Ph.D. from Tulane University’s in New Orleans whether she history department. His dissertation topic carried Dr. Lance Hill’s book, was the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an The Deacons for Defense: Armed armed self-defense organization that formed Resistance and the Civil Rights in Louisiana during the civil rights movement. NMovement. “Is it for you?” she asked, jumping In The Deacons for Defense, published in 2006, up from her seat. “Because you should totally he argues that armed working-class African read it. Lance Hill is a badass.” Americans were more effective at compelling Lance Hill is a man who does not let quiet the federal government to neutralize the Klan heroes be forgotten. Not the quiet heroes of and uphold civil rights during the 1960s than the civil rights movement, of disaster recov- was the more popular nonviolence position of ery, or of the Thanksgiving table. Nor is he civil rights leaders and middle-class African someone who lets villains win without a bat- Americans. It’s wholly convincing. tle. Not the villain called white supremacy, “Somewhere along the way the Deacons not social passivity or root-knot nematodes. were forgotten—and for a reason,” he writes. He lost most of his friends following Hurri- “They simply did not fit into the myth of cane Katrina when he wouldn’t shut up about nonviolence. They stood as an embarrassing what he believed were rampant injustices. testimonial to the level of force that was nec- And then he gained a whole new community essary to bring African Americans into full of kindred spirits when he set out to save the citizenship.” Louisiana heirloom mirliton right when that Hill is a hard-truth teller, an agitator, and lowly plant desperately needed a patron. A a change maker. He’s best known in some lumberjack of a figure with a poetic, Willie circles for directing the Louisiana Coalition Nelson–like tenor to his voice, Lance Hill is Against Racism and Nazism, a group that most definitely a badass. An interdisciplin- outed David Duke as a Nazi sympathizer and ary one at that. former-but-not-reformed Klansman in the A Kansas native, Hill seems to have been 1990s, when Duke was running for office in born with an activist gene. His early biography Louisiana, including for governor. LCARN, includes composing anti-segregationist poetry and therefore Hill, is largely credited for as a preteen in the early Sixties, instigating a Duke’s defeat. strike for higher pay at his first job in food Hill spends most of his days working as service, being expelled from the University the executive director of the Southern In- days later when he heard from his grandson, African Americans—from coming back to Losing friends wasn’t such a big deal for of Kansas for anti-war demonstrations, and stitute for Education and Research at Tulane, over the telephone, that thousands of people the city,” he says. “I mean you’d have to be Hill, who decided that a hermit’s lifestyle serving a prison sentence on marijuana charges. which he co-founded and where he studies were suffering without food or water or medi- blind not to see that. I took a very high profile suited him. Never having enjoyed the theater He moved with his wife from Kansas to Ham- and teaches tolerance education and race re- cal care at the convention center just a few and public position on what I saw as a sort of social life anyway, he abandoned such con- mond, Louisiana, in 1979, specifically to do lations. His focus since Hurricane Katrina miles away. Hill drove to the scene, assessed of indifference in the white community, on ventions as lunches out, coffee dates, dinner anti-Klan work and to work as a labor orga- has been collective trauma and racial healing the situation, and returned with supplies. He racism in healthcare and in education and in parties, weddings, and birthdays. (He con- nizer. They started a family and Hill made a here and in other displaced communities. It’s does not mince words when he describes the politics. And so I think I lost pretty much tinued attending funerals, as ignoring those living there as a shipyard welder. Eventually important to note that Hill walks the walk: atrocities he witnessed there, and the atroci- every friend I had in that process, not so much would just be too rude.) He might have lost they moved to New Orleans. While continu- he didn’t evacuate prior to Katrina, and he ties that followed. because of them but because I didn’t see these some friends, but he still believed in com- ing his activist work—against Klan activity, lived through the storm in his Uptown home, “Politically, after Katrina, I took up a very as debatable intellectual topics. I saw this as a munity, and he had plenty of community- as well as the nuclear and apartheid move- which remained sturdy and dry enough to strong position against what I saw as an at- moral obligation and people who didn’t take building ways to fill his time. The mirliton ments—Hill earned his bachelor’s degree inhabit afterward. That’s where he was five tempt to prevent African Americans—poor a stand as failing a moral test.” was one of them.

- 112 - SPRING 2015 “Nya in the Garden,” by Preston Gannaway, from Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea OxfordAmerican.org - 113 - he mirliton is a vining perennial that, in places of low elevation and hard sun like ture (even a tree), a mirliton vine can reach cookbook library, which includes roughly because they’re out there at four o’clock in Hill’s interest in the mirliton ramped up along with melons and cucumbers, be- Louisiana tend to be larger, lighter in color, up to fifty feet and produce several hundred seventy volumes ranging from The Picayune’s the morning stealing your pecans that are during the post-Katrina era when New Or- T longs to the gourd family Cucurbita- furrowed, more oblong, and sometimes spiny. fruit in a single harvest period. The mirlitons Creole Cook Book (a reprint of the 1901 ver- hanging over the public side of the street. Or leans was rebounding but everything about its ceae. Botanists refer to the vegetable, which In other words, significantly uglier than the must be consumed or prepared and frozen sion) to Cajun Men Cook (1997) to Cooking their kids are throwing rocks and sticks and culture still seemed fragile, jeopardized, and has a single centermost seed, as a fruit. The smooth, green supermarket specimens. Locals within about thirty days of harvest or they Up a Storm (2008), revealed mirliton recipes trying to knock them out of the trees. Scarcity in dire need of a life insurance policy. In part mirliton is better known by the name “cha- didn’t know anything but their ugly heirlooms will send out shoots and begin to shrivel. in forty-one of them—and several contained breeds atomization of the community, and because his reflex is to fight for the underdog, yote” in this country, outside of Louisiana until about 1995, which is when Hill says that Suffice it to say that there could never be too more than one. When I make stuffed mirliton, abundance brings people together.” in part because he can’t back away from an and other pockets of the South. Christophene, the imports debuted in Louisiana. many recipe options or enough freezer space I use the recipe in Austin Leslie’s Creole Soul, Hill had his own backyard mirliton vine intellectual challenge, and in part because he vegetable pear, custard marrow, one-seeded While Louisiana heirloom mirlitons are during good harvest years. Hill found a recipe written by the late chef who didn’t survive for many years, until a hard freeze—likely simply missed them, Hill made reviving the cucumber, cho-cho, chouchoute, sayote, more robust in flavor than their imported for mirliton wine, a Jamaican tradition, in a his Katrina evacuation to Atlanta. aided by the microscopic, root-eating worms Louisiana heirloom mirliton—what he calls mango squash, and Sechium edule (its botani- brethren, all mirlitons have a subtle dewy journal called China Brewing and at one point called root-knot nematodes—took it out in the traditional land race—his mission. So cal name) are additional aliases. Louisianans taste similar to a summer squash. Hill calls was in talks with a vintner offering to make he mirliton appealed to Lance Hill’s 1995. Over the next decade he followed the monumental was the task, and so headlong pronounce “mirliton” in a number of ways, the mirliton’s most prominent flavor qual- forty gallons of it. community organizer sensibilities from popular advice of local horticulturalists and did he plunge, that it’s difficult to imagine from phonetic to a French-leaning “MEL-a- ity “crystalline.” A mirliton’s texture varies The most iconic preparation of the vegeta- T the first time he received some as a gift backyard growers that to grow a mirliton all how he also held down his all-consuming tawn.” Hill believes that the first mirliton to depending on the variety, but in general it ble in Louisiana is stuffed mirliton, for which from a Louisiana neighbor. “I often make the you have to do is buy a mirliton at the grocery paying gig at the Institute. grow in Louisiana probably arrived with the snaps when raw, like a jicama or kohlrabi, you parboil or steam the mirlitons whole, argument that mirlitons bring out the best in store and plant it. The mirliton is itself a seed, After a couple years of research and trial several thousand people who fled Haiti after and gives good crunch to slaws and salads. halve them, and scoop out their flesh, keeping people because of their abundance,” he says. so this should work. Still, his efforts failed and error in the dirt, Hill learned that, besides the Saint-Domingue Revolution between It gets soft and waterlogged quickly when the skins intact. Then you mash the mirliton “It used to be that there was a mirliton vine again and again to yield a vine. Then, around the obvious abuses and neglect the plants suf- 1804 and 1806. Haiti is the only other place cooked, and its muted flavors pair well with meat and mix it with breadcrumbs, the holy on every block—maybe two or three—and 2007, Hill decided he would no longer take fered during and immediately after Katrina, where the vegetable is called a “mirliton.” rich ingredients like cream and cheese. Mir- trinity of seasoning vegetables (onion, cel- when the mirlitons came in, your neighbor, no from a plant. He set about researching several significant factors had contributed The mirlitons sold in United States super- litons are also good for candying and baking. ery, green bell pepper), lots of butter, often who hadn’t spoken a word to you for the last how to grow a mirliton once and for all and to the Louisiana heirloom mirliton’s demise. markets have been imported from places like Hill makes a mirliton pie, which he describes cayenne or hot sauce, and some combination year, would show up at your front door with became what he calls a “citizen scientist.” In so First, imports. Ever since imported mirlitons Costa Rica and Mexico, where they are bred as being like banana bread. His kids used to of ham, shrimp, crabmeat, and ground beef. a Schwegmann’s grocery bag full. And so mir- doing he learned that he was not alone in his had entered the market, locals had grown ac- for uniform green color and smooth texture request it as their birthday cake. You mound that stuffing back into the hol- litons are a vegetable that builds the bonds of struggle—that, in fact, there were virtually customed to year-round access to what was and grow to about the size of a large pear. The Once established and supported by a chain- lowed-out mirliton shells and cook them like civility and community, in contrast to pecans. no Louisiana heirloom mirlitons growing in once a strictly seasonal vegetable. The super- heirloom varieties that grow more successfully link fence, trellis system, or other such struc- twice-baked potatoes. Mirlitons are primarily Pecan trees make you hate your neighbors and around New Orleans. market mirlitons were inexpensive, leaving harvested in the late autumn in Louisiana, and this preparation—expensive and time- consuming—is a traditional Thanksgiving Piano Kraft dish here. The New York Times even included offers a large an item on mirlitons by Kim Severson in a Thanksgiving feature entitled “The United selection of States of Thanksgiving.” “Mirlitons are the pianos and perfect expression of Louisiana,” Severson digital pianos. told me. “They’re just charming little things. They’re watery and troublesome and a little Choose from new bit bland. They’re hard to love in a way. But Yamaha, Kawai, Young like with so many foods, Louisiana cooks take Chang, or pre-owned these gnarly things and make them delicious. Steinway, Yamaha, Just like they do with boudin sausage, or big Kawai, Baldwin, and old weird chunks of pork, or even roux— other major brands. which is nearly burned fat and flour. It all sounds crazy but turns out delicious.” Many If you’re looking for Louisiana cooks, in the interest of preserving service, tuning, tradition but saving prep time, skip the hol- or piano moving, lowing out and bake the stuffing in a casserole call Piano Kraft. dish instead. It’s then called mirliton dressing or mirliton casserole. The mirliton itself is such a subtle backdrop Piano Kraft’s some people don’t even notice it, and it would certainly be possible to eat one’s way through 1222 MAIN STREET “Last Tuesdays” LITTLE ROCK AR 72202 the restaurants of Louisiana and never en- 501-372-1446 free concerts counter one. Mirlitons, like jambalaya and PianoKraft.com (limited seating, crawfish bisque and ya-ka-mein, are much first come basis) Call about piano availability in your area. more often cooked at home than in restaurant kitchens, and they make frequent appearances in cookbooks. A survey of my own Louisiana

- 114 - SPRING 2015 OxfordAmerican.org - 115 - little incentive to grow one’s own. Then, even is the best means of ensuring propagation. aids must troubleshoot—by building a support In one of them he found an ad from an heir- first sat down to talk with Hill about his seed mirlitons, and he was working with urban when someone did try to grow his own, if The third main impediment to the mirliton’s system and providing drainage opportunities, loom mirliton grower in Pumpkin Center, quest to save the mirliton in 2011, by micro-farmers to help produce specimens for he used a supermarket mirliton as his seed, endurance in New Orleans was the environ- perhaps through raised beds or the fabric con- Louisiana, about 150 miles from New Orleans. I which time he was already known locally adoption. Hill described his kindred spirits in which even professional agricultural agencies ment. The soil isn’t rich enough for unaided tainer system that Hill endorses. Plant diseases After a visit to Pumpkin Center revealed that as The Mirliton Man. The project had hit its the mirliton revival as “older people looking to advised, the chances of success were slim. The mirliton growth in much of the area, but locals like anthracnose, as well as changes in weather the grower’s vines were still alive and well, stride, and his passion was in full bloom. It connect with the past, and young people who imported mirlitons were adapted to vastly dif- who learned to tend mirlitons from their par- patterns, contributed additional impediments Hill embarked on a driving tour around the was forty minutes before I got to ask the first want to be part of the past and know that the ferent growing conditions. “As I tell people, ents and grandparents are sometimes slow to to successful mirliton harvests. state in search of other original land race mir- question I had prepared, and our conversation mirliton is iconic.” Heirloom mirlitons were if they buy one of these imported mirlitons recognize this. They saw the older generation Finally, and perhaps most compellingly, liton farmers with ample vines (forty to fifty) lasted four hours, brought to a close only not for eating at that point. Every last one from the local grocery store and plant it, they achieve success with what nature provided. is what Hill calls “a break of cultural knowl- from which he could pluck seed fruit for re- because my phone was flashing with texts needed to be used for seed in order to preserve might as well be trying to grow corn by plant- But what they often don’t realize, says Hill, edge.” Growing tips and techniques are not populating the New Orleans area. He soon from the babysitter and my car had two park- Louisiana’s original land race. ing a can of corn in their backyard,” Hill says. is that their parents or grandparents lived on being passed down through the generations formalized this re-seeding project, calling it ing tickets. Hill might self-report as severely The second contributing factor to mirliton an alluvial ridge or along the river, where like they used to be. Katrina exacerbated this Adopt-A-Mirliton and writing a fifty-page antisocial, but when talking about the mir- hanks to Hill’s efforts, today the Loui- extinction was bees. Honeybees are the mirli- there were natural deposits of well-drained break by making it so difficult for the oldest growing guide for adoptive growers to follow. liton he’s unstoppable, emotional about the siana heirloom mirliton is no longer ex- ton’s primary pollinators, and what honeybees organic soil. The ground in lower lying areas generation of New Orleanians to return to the Hill ultimately discovered at least six Loui- vegetable itself, and sentimental about the T tinct in the New Orleans area. A large New Orleans hadn’t lost to colony collapse of the city and suburbs, where many families city, if they survived their evacuations at all. siana heirloom mirliton growers and identi- people who grow it. He named the heirloom paper bag delivered to my porch one Sunday syndrome vanished because there was no veg- moved, tends to be merely compacted alluvial “I set out simply to bring back your grand- fied more than nine distinct varieties. The mirliton varieties he found after their respec- in November from Hollygrove Market & etation after Katrina, says Hill. Another strike clay covered with sand. Besides that, every ma’s mirliton,” Hill says. “I just wanted the median age of these growers, he jokes, was tive growers. Others include the Ed Landry Farm contained a single, pale green, deeply against the bees is that one of their preferred backyard used to have a chain-link fence and a vegetable you could plant in the backyard and about seventy-eight. One of them, Ishreal mirliton, the James Boutte mirliton, the Jo- furrowed, spiny mirliton. I tossed slices of living spaces—attics—disappeared once people fig or pecan tree. The former provided a built- not have to spray with fungicides and pesti- Thibodeaux of Opelousas, whom Hill found seph Boudreaux mirliton, the Papa Sylvest it into a salad. returned after the storm and re-roofed their in trellis, while the latter acted as a natural cides and not do much with and that would growing a rare white mirliton, died last sum- mirliton, and the Mister Rock mirliton. He As the associate director of market- homes. My own termite exterminator fielded sponge when wet ground threatened to damage grow. And what I found out is that actually mer. The Ishreal Thibodeaux mirliton survives doesn’t divulge Mr. Rock’s last name because umbrella.org, Emery Van Hook works closely so many calls about removing beehives from the mirliton vine’s sensitive roots. But wood didn’t exist anymore for our region.” in the New Orleans area thanks to the seed Mr. Rock lives so close to New Orleans that with vendors at four weekly Crescent City attics under construction after Katrina that he fences are the fashion these days, and newer Or, it almost didn’t exist. Among the re- mirlitons Thibodeaux offered up for adoption he might be barraged by mirliton seed-seekers farmers markets in New Orleans. She cred- became a beehive specialist and a beekeeper on homes don’t generally come with full-grown sources that Hill scoured during the height of from his vines. Thibodeaux’s obituary cited if his full name got out. its Hill with what she observed as a noble the side. While bees have been making a come- fig and pecan trees. Growers whose yards don’t his mirliton research were old Market Bulletins his namesake mirliton as one of his life’s ac- At the time of our 2011 interview Hill had mirliton turnout in 2014. “I saw more this back, Hill says that hand-pollinating mirlitons already contain these natural mirliton-growing published by the Department of Agriculture. complishments. several hundred names on a waiting list for year than I have since Katrina,” she says. “A

WITNESS the creation of a lifecast sculpture of neighborhood hero Richard Hall Jr., Tuskegee Airman. March 28, 2015 • Hannibal Square Heritage Center Folk & Urban Art Festival Featuring artist-in-residence Rigoberto Torres lifecasting an on-site sculpture of Richard Hall Jr. SHARE his history and that of other community elders in the award-winning Heritage Collection. In a 2012 photograph (left) taken for the Sage Documentary Project, brothers Clyde and Richard Hall Jr. posed in front “This book of stories, shaped like a “Pam Durban writes with such deep “Mary Hood highlights the plentiful “The literature of the southern mill of the Winter Park home their father built novel, is an impressive debut, both and abiding empathy that we never humor of her cast, and, in the face of a village has been underdone and this in 1929 along with his 1968 Chevrolet. humorous and insightful. Ron Rash doubt her characters’ voices, thoughts, community tragedy, a humanity and magnificent novel adds greatly to it. has the eye and ear of a very fine or hearts, whether in the pre–Civil War warmth beyond all expectations.” What John Lane does better than Years earlier, in 1938, the Hall family storyteller.”—Clyde Edgerton South or more contemporary settings. —Dot Jackson anyone I have read is explore the inter- (right) stood in front of the same house 168 pages, pb and ebook, $18.95 Yet what makes these stories equally 96 pages, pb and ebook, $15.95 relatedness of both the mill worker and – and a 1935 Chevrolet – for a portrait Southern Revivals Story River Books that is part of the permanent Heritage unforgettable is the beauty of her the mill owner, trapped by the desires Collection of historical photographs and language.”—Ron Rash and abuses of unchecked power.” oral histories of residents. 128 pages, hc, $22.95; ebook, $19.95 —Pat Conroy Story River Books 192 pages, hc, $24.95; ebook, $19.95 Photograph by Peter Schreyer – 2012 Story River Books Established by Crealdé School of Art in 2007, the Hannibal Square Heritage Center pays tribute to the past, present and future contributions of Winter Park’s African-American community. 800-768-2500 642 New England Avenue, Winter Park, Florida, 32789 • 407.539.2680 • hannibalsquareheritagecenter.org This project is funded in part by Orange County Government through the Arts & Cultural Affairs Program. www.uscpress.com SOUTHERN STORYTELLERS

- 116 - SPRING 2015 OxfordAmerican.org - 117 - lot is dependent on weather, but from the formation and a limited quantity of mirlitons, Blair Grocery (OSBG), a sustainable urban looks of the market it seems that the crops is a festival favorite. “I have people call me and vegetable farm with educational, food justice, are replenishing themselves. I think Lance try to get in early to buy mirlitons from Dr. and youth empowerment missions. Thanks gave the mirliton tremendous visibility. He Hill. I have to tell them, ‘Nope. The booth to seed mirlitons and Hill’s guidance, the gave folks something to act on.” opens at 11 a.m. You have to be there to get gardens at OSBG did contain forty-to-fifty- Randy Stephens of the Bywater Neighbor- them,’” he says. foot vines covering an overhead trellis for hood Association, which has staged a Mirliton One of the young growers whom Hill a while. “All the old people around here Festival for twenty-five years, says that Hill’s mentored early on is Nat Turner, director were super happy to have mirlitons back in booth, from which he dispenses growing in- of the Lower Ninth Ward’s Our School at the neighborhood,” he says. “When they saw those big fat leaves, they would all stop and look and tell mirliton stories. It was a incredible spectacle.” Sadly, the vines at OSBG didn’t survive Hurricane Isaac’s prolonged winds. What’s on this menu is a fresh Turner is determined to try again, this time Cuisine approach to fine dining and with a sturdier trellis system that he will hospitality. All the ingredients LITTLE ROCK, 1304 MAIN STREET cement into the ground. you’ll need for incredible cuisine ARKANSAS It struck me while talking to Turner that and an unforgettable experience. he and Hill are both food justice protagonists, Add an array of galleries, the though I’ve never heard Hill, a protagonist of Mississippi Craft Center, the justice in every sense, use such a new-school state’s premier shopping centers term. I asked Turner whether Hill’s day job and the great outdoors. in racial healing and reconciliation ever came UPCOMING CONCERTS AT into play when they were collaborating on mirliton revival. “Of course,” he said. “It SOUTH ON MAIN came up between us because we’d like to do an event where we bring teenagers together from different ethnic communities in New Orleans—Latino, Vietnamese, African- American, Caucasian, Cajun—to taste each DIRTY DOZEN other’s way of eating mirliton as a means of coming to a better understanding of other BRASS BAND people’s food heritage and contributions. I Ridgeland Fine Arts Festival MARCH 19 still want to do that.” Hill himself sees his mirliton and race re- April 18-19, 2015 lations work as separate but connected. On FEATURING BENNIE WALLACE the one hand, studying plants is a salve. “As Santé South Wine Festival and a political activist and as a historian, there’s Ridgeland OBO Tandem Rally QUARTET not much in life that is very encouraging. And APRIL 2 there’s not much that’s predictable in human nature, and that which is predictable is not very encouraging,” he says. “But with science, HURRAY FOR you can control some things.” On the other hand, Hill’s seed-saving work THE RIFF RAFF is undeniably an extension of his activist MAY 5 proclivities. The fervor in his voice intensi- fies when he recalls a particularly exciting discovery: “I found a Haitian postage stamp of a mirliton, a beautiful stamp with a beautiful TICKETS AVAILABLE @ METROTIX.COM mirliton that looks like what we would call or by calling (800) 293-5949 our traditional Louisiana heirloom mirliton: very long, oversized pear shape, deeply fur- rowed, spiny. Along with the mirliton is a

More information at www.southonmain.com picture of Dessalines, the revolutionary of and facebook.com/SouthonMainLR the Haitian Revolution.” He laughs to him- self and then continues, “Which tells me that it was a revolutionary vegetable in some 800-468-6078 people’s eyes.” ø www.visitridgeland.com

- 118 - SPRING 2015 OxfordAmerican.org - 119 - RUDY LOMBARD’S FEAST OF FREEDOM BY LOLIS ERIC ELIE

hat was the year? 1986? 2008? cancer wards, to the jazz clubs. Take it where it Does it matter? What was the most needs to be. great offense? Same as last time, more or less. Some white shit. h, to do this rightly and in order! Like the What was the reaction? preachers of old. To impose a chronology WOne Negro leader or another—fill in the O on this geography, a theory of evolution blank—stood in front of the cameras and de- on the progress of these ideas. To put him away clared we would do such things he knew not nice from “Soon I Will Be Done With the Trou- what! This said with a walls will come tumbling bles of the World” to “Didn’t He Ramble?” But down certainty, same as last time, more or less. And what was Uncle Rudy’s reaction to the “All the things that I touched with him, he never started televised rage? at the surface. He always started at the origin of it. Rudy Lombard the He would say, what you lookin’ at is not what you see.” would-be labor leader. Rudy Lombard the sit- —Fred Johnson, Neighborhood Development Foundation inner. Rudy Lombard the If labor unrest slowed the pace of goods coming I’ll find you a lawyer. wasn’t until recently that he told me his side of urban planner. Rudy Lom- into the Port of New Orleans, the city—even Since you haven’t found us a lawyer, will that story. He spent the night in a tree, waiting bard the cookbook author. the nation—could be injured. Suppose a young you represent us? for things to clear. Of course that was another Rudy Lombard the down- man with a college degree and International Actually, Jack Nelson has agreed to work time, a different time, not like now. A time town second liner. Rudy Lombard the pension he rambled from great idea to grand possibility, Longshoremen’s Union bona fides could ascend on this with us. when the press conference took place after the fund manager. Rudy Lombard the cancer survivor. from New Orleans to Mississippi to Syracuse to to the top of that body and flex that muscle? dangerous work, not instead of it. Rudy Lombard the South Side stepper. Rudy Harlem to Washington to Oakland to Chicago; But the freedom movement intervened. Rudy, Thus began a friendship and a client-attorney Later, when it came time for the March on Lombard the cancer victim. from the docks to the segregated lunch counters then a student at Xavier University, had the privilege that went all the way to the Supreme Washington, Jim Farmer was in a Louisiana If only I could remember the sound of it as well to Wall Street; from culture work to cancer work, money in hand to buy a lifetime NAACP mem- Court (in Lombard v. Louisiana in 1962) and jail on the usual charge: felony unauthorized as I can recall the sense of it. Something about, and a few select bars, restaurants, board rooms, bership. But the group’s tepid position on the beyond. Somewhere in the formation of that exercise of civil rights. Rudy was among the They don’t ever intend to work themselves out of a bedrooms, and beaches in between. sit-ins dissuaded him. What he and his would- bond, my father decided that I should call Rudy people who elected not to bail him out. Jim job. They intend to be doing this same shit, saying Ramble, young man, ramble! be sitters-in would need before they went to “Uncle Rudy,” as if he were biological uncle to never forgave us for that, Rudy said. But that was this same shit one hundred years from now. The longshoremen and their union make their order sustenance and redress at McCory’s lunch me, as he was to Tonya and Derrick and Damon. Martin Luther King’s day. Jim was better off in Makes you wonder: why did they call it a civil first appearance in our story when Rudy used to counter downtown was a lawyer with the guts to I grew up hearing the story of one jail. It made more of a statement. rights movement if the movement itself wasn’t work occasionally on the riverfront unloading represent them when they were arrested. Rudy Plaquemines, Louisiana, evening when the Next it was either going to be Syracuse or gonna move? cargo alongside his uncles. Those uncles would had seen a well-dressed lawyer, Lolis Edward Congress of Racial Equality had decided to Harvard. Syracuse was in New York, right? Angela Davis remembers people used to call it warn their rough colleagues not to try any of that Elie, on Dryades Street where black folks had engage in night marches of protest. The Klan/ Closer to the jazz scene. Closer to Harlem. A the “freedom movement,” perhaps better to keep funny stuff they sometimes did to newcomers like their YMCA, their offices, and where they often cops had decided to end the marches and—if map could have told him different, but Rudy its ambitions free from the narrow confines of picking up or letting go of a heavy load at an un- shopped at (white) businesses. So he asked that the fears of that night are to be believed—to was too sure of his facts to check them. So he civil codes, government actions, and higher of- expected time, leaving the novice hurt or worse. Lolis, my father, if he’d represent them. lynch James Farmer, CORE’s national direc- accepted a scholarship to the Ph.D. program in fices. Maybe Rudy Lombard was a freedom rights These men held a grip of sorts on a crucial part tor. They tear-gassed a church as part of their urban planning, only to have his own urban plan leader. Take it to the streets, yes. But take it to the of the economy. International Longshoremen’s No, but I’ll help you find a lawyer. search. CORE workers snuck Farmer to New complexify itself in a most Confederate way. mortgage companies, to the restaurant kitchens, Association Local 419 was one of the largest and But if you can’t find us a lawyer, will you Orleans in a hearse. He spent that night in my There were suddenly no vacancies behind the to the dance floors, to the N.B.A. players, to the most powerful black trade unions in the country. represent us? sister’s twin bed. But where was Uncle Rudy? It vacancy signs when Rudy’s black face inquired.

- 120 - SPRING 2015 “Shotgun, Third Ward #1” (1966), by John T. Biggers. Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, NY OxfordAmerican.org - 121 - Discrimination? Up North? Who knew? Brer Creole Feast chefs all over the country, giving him to: get married and join a church. His leg- Rudy used to say that prostate cancer was a Rudy thrown into Freedom Fight’s briar patch them national exposure at a time when few endary life as a bachelor came to an end, first in slow-growing cancer and was not apt to be the again, this time in league with Billy Hunter, chefs of any color were well-known. All of Lake Tahoe when he married Njambi Mungai, cancer that killed you. In the end, it wasn’t the star Syracuse football player. (Later the two “Rudy Lombard was sui generis—one of a kind. Loyal, generous, that culminated in Lombard’s, the beautiful then later in Chicago when he married Caro- cancer of the prostate, but rather cancer of the would try to teach financial literacy to N.B.A. creative, and remarkably courageous. His intelligence was not restaurant in downtown Oakland where foun- lyn Merritt. It was Carolyn who brought him pancreas that felled him last December. players. Fools and their errands . . .) without humor or a razor blade. I will miss him deeply.” tains and the intricate tilework might lead one to Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, For years, Uncle Rudy and I talked about Another story, a minor one, survived from to believe, as Rudy did, that the renaissance of from which he evangelized pagan and Christian doing a revised edition of Creole Feast. But it the Syracuse era, a story as irrelevant as it is deli- —Toni Morrison, novelist and editor of Creole Feast downtown Oakland was fast at hand. It would friends alike on behalf of the church’s annual was mostly me talking and him nodding. He cious. A neighbor in Rudy’s apartment build- be thirty years and a heartbreaking failure be- Thanksgiving service. was off on something else by then. He and the ing, a white lady, a nurse perhaps, knocked on fore that renaissance. By the time he was diagnosed with prostate great photographer Frank Stewart were talking his door one night and asked for his help. He about doing a book on the culture of the step- went to her apartment and found a black man, a pers in Chicago. mental patient perhaps, crouched in her closet. president for health affairs, they worked on But so much had changed by then. The Naked. The neighbor lady wanted Rudy’s help ways to bring the university into the commu- highway industrial complex and the suburban he last time I saw Uncle Rudy, the confi- in extricating this unwanted guest. The guest nity and the community into the university. subdivision industrial complex (and why not “When I was green, didn’t know nothing, Rudy Lombard took me dence of his gait had diminished, the artful would neither budge nor converse except to “The other thing he was doing while we throw in the automobile industry and the gas with all those big chefs to New York and everywhere. People like T clutter of his living quarters had given way state a little couplet which, having forgotten the were in D.C., he was very much trying to start industry?) had made bulldozing urban com- Rudy have done so much for me. He did things for the best interest to mere clutter, and he was talking about writing date, I have chosen to rhyme for poetic effect. a restaurant,” Fletcher recalls, thus bringing to munities the national pastime. All across the of people. He had vision. People like that you don’t find everyday.” a book on friendship. It was a book to which he light largely unknown archaeological evidence nation, highways were staked through the heart wanted all of his friends to contribute essays. I November the 12th, 1962 of Rudy’s early restaurant ambitions. “He came of American cities in order to make it easier to —Leah Chase, chef, Dooky Chase Restaurant promised him that I’d write one. You don’t obvious me, and I won’t obvi- close to buying a restaurant that was already travel out to the places where the homebuilders I imagined that essay would be about those ous you. successful in D.C.” were building and away from the homes that years of Sundays when my father would drag In the 1970s, Daddy Lomby, Rudy’s fa- were already built. So Rudy led the Claiborne me across the river to Newton Street to spend What was the meaning of this mad scene? ther, used to say that Rudy hadn’t spent a Avenue Design Team, a group that published the afternoon with Rudy’s father, Daddy When asked, Rudy only repeated the couplet. solid month in New Orleans since the 1960s. a study documenting the community as it was 977: Dutch Morial elected New Orleans’s cancer, Rudy’s hard-drinking, hard-living days Lomby. It’d be about Uncle Rudy showing me Even when he was osten- and making recommendations for how the dam- first black mayor. Hurray! were far behind him. What began as a personal Sausalito and turning me on to Nat Adderly’s sibly living in the Newton age could be mitigated. (If you’re inclined to 1 1981: Dutch Morial re-elected the city’s hunt for the least invasive, least debilitating underrated cornet playing and to Donald Byrd’s Street home of his boyhood use the word “prophetic” you might insert it first black mayor. Hurray redux! treatment ended as a crusade to educate black brilliant performance on Art Blakey and the “It’s a long history, 40 some years or that condo on St. Louis here as the current movement in New Orleans 1985: Does anybody else smell monarchy? men about the dangers of prostate cancer, the Original Jazz Messengers. It’d be about the of a very, very close and intense Street in the French Quar- and elsewhere is to tear down these elevated But who would dare challenge the mayor’s necessity of regular checkups, and the general joy of taking Uncle Rudy and D. Jones and relationship. As far as I’m concerned, ter, he was only anywhere eyesores and resurrect the communities they bid for a third term? Rudy offered himself as advisability of a healthy lifestyle. Ferrouillet and my father on their first trip to he helped me raise my children. . . . part-time. Sometime in destroyed.) critic and candidate, but “Lombard for Mayor” “Talking about prostate cancer makes people Africa. It’d be about sharing a cynic’s optimism He loved Michael Jackson. When he that period he and Jerome And this errant highway led directly to Rudy had about as many endorsements from friends look down at their feet and want to change the and a belief that one day, one of these ideas is came out, he used to bring the kids to Smith, a Freedom Rider Lombard’s most lasting contribution to Ameri- and family as did Don Quixote’s Lombardian subject,” he wrote in a September 23, 2013, op- going to catch fire. It’d be about the beautiful all the concerts, even as far away as and New Orleans native, can civilization, the 1978 book Creole Feast. As adventures of old. Unlike the ancient knight ed for the Chicago Sun-Times. “I know because Dr. Haniff and entrepreneurial Willie Ad- Baltimore.” founded Tambourine and he told Poppy Tooker on the WWNO radio pro- errant, the more recent one had little enthu- I talk about it every day. Ten years ago at age ams, and meeting Denise Nicholas and Alex Fan, a community organiza- gram “Louisiana Eats,” “I said that everything siasm for the campaign part of his candidacy. sixty-four, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer.” Haley at the Creole Feast banquet. And cooking —Dr. Fletcher Robinson tion based on the masking that was unique about New Orleans could be And unlike the adventures of Shrimp 21 and Crepes Brulator and parading traditions of traced to the black presence in this city. . . . So, Dulcinea’s would-be darling, and setting the apartment on fire the city. But that idea of I could name names of African Americans who Rudy Lombard’s fourth-place with Charles Bailey’s roast duck using the working men of were prominent in all these areas of the history finish produced thousands of “I was honored and blessed to be recipe. And second lining with the community to build a and culture of New Orleans. . . . But when I said victories. For out of that campaign his pastor for a quarter of a century and Uncle Rudy and Tambourine and as it true that the admissions depart- more powerful force was never far from Rudy’s food, I’d realized I couldn’t name names. I just research came the realization that Rudy ministered unto me far more than I Fan past the Downtown Howard ment at Howard University used to mind. Specifically, he wanted to place those knew that there were blacks cooking in all of home ownership, particularly was able to minister to him. He taught me Johnson where Mark Essex ex- W require applicants to send a photo with men in jobs on the riverfront. the great restaurants in New Orleans. So, if I among working-class black New an eclectic amalgam of subjects from his ploded as if from the pages of his their applications as a means of ensuring a high “Some of them are gonna move to the ranks didn’t know it, I figured, well hell, very few Orleanians, was abysmally low. exotic Creole recipes, through the ‘inside’ own “Carnival of Fury.” percentage of pretty young women in each of being the leader of the gang as a longshore- people did.” What if an organization, perhaps stories of the civil rights movement to the It’d be about the magic that class? We sent our best man, Rudy Lombard, man. And in time we’re gonna take the next Creole Feast, a collaboration with chef Na- a Neighborhood Development rarely heard 78-rpm recording of Louis happened whenever two or three to investigate! leap where we move them to the pension board thaniel Burton, put black chefs on the map Foundation, could be created to ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong when Armstrong still of Rudy’s friends were gathered True or not, the rumors fueled years of fund,” Fred Johnson, a Rudy protégé, recalls as never before. And put American chefs on train working-class New Orlea- had a soprano voice! My life was forever together with him. laughs. Fletcher Robinson, James “Dropper” him saying. “We get them to the pension board the map, unlike other cookbooks of the times nians to buy homes? For more changed by the brilliance of Rudy’s mind.” It pretty much would have been Hobbs, medical doctors both, and Rudy Lom- fund, we’ve educated them through the ranks, authored mostly by celebrated European chefs than two decades NDF has aver- about the things I’ve written here bard, a trio of confederates brought together by they now know how to vote on where to invest and American food writers. While the book aged more than a hundred new —Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Pastor Emeritus, except without the sadness of fi- Rudy’s M.D. homeboy, Vincent Roux. While the pension board retirement money,” Johnson has survived in used-book bins and cherished homeowners every year. Trinity United Church of Christ nality and the urgency of writing it Rudy served as founding director of Howard remembered. In Rudy’s mind, that’s how you collections, what is less well-known is that There were two things Rudy said now, putting it all down as I begin University’s Institute on Drug Abuse and Ad- control the neighborhood. He said that in the the book gave birth to two food festivals that he wanted to do because he thought to feel details surrendering in the diction and Fletcher served as Howard’s vice early Seventies. showcased New Orleans chefs. Rudy took his his late mother would have wanted face of mere nostalgia. ø

- 122 - SPRING 2015 OxfordAmerican.org - 123 - TRASH FOOD BY CHRIS OFFUTT

ver the years I’ve known many on my plate. Three thoughts ran through my people with nicknames, includ- mind fast as flipping an egg. First, I couldn’t see ing Lucky, Big O, Haywire, Turtle the connection between social class and garbage. Eggs, Hercules, two guys named Second, I didn’t like having my thirty-year Hollywood, and three guys called career reduced to a single subject matter. Third, OBooger. I’ve had my own nicknames as well. I’d never heard of anything called “trash food.” In college people called me “Arf” because of I write about my friends, my family, and my a dog on a t-shirt. Back home a few of my best experiences, but never with a socio-political buddies call me “Shit-for-Brains,” because our agenda such as class. My goal was always art teachers thought I was smart. first, combined with an attempt at rigorous self- Three years ago, shortly after moving to examination. Facing John T., I found myself in Oxford, someone introduced me to John T. a professional and social pickle, not unusual for Edge. He goes by his first name and middle a country boy who’s clawed his way out of the initial, but I understood it as a nickname— hills of eastern Kentucky, one of the steepest Jaunty. The word “jaunty” means lively and social climbs in America. I’ve never mastered cheerful, someone always merry and bright. the high-born art of concealing my emotions. The name seemed to suit him perfectly. Each My feelings are always readily apparent. time I called him Jaunty he gave me a quick Recognizing my turmoil, John T. asked if sharp look of suspicion. He wondered if I was I was pissed off. I nodded and he apologized making fun of his name—and of him. The mat- immediately. I told him I was overly sensitive ter was resolved when I suggested he call me to matters of social class. I explained that people “Chrissie O.” from the hills of Appalachia have always had Last spring John T. asked me to join him at to fight to prove they were smart, diligent, and an Oxford restaurant. My wife dropped me trustworthy. It’s the same for people who grew off and drove to a nearby secondhand store. up in the Mississippi Delta, the barrios of Los Our plan was for me to meet her later and find Angeles and Texas, or the black neighborhoods a couple of cheap lamps. During lunch John T. in New York, Chicago, and Memphis. His re- asked me to give a presentation at the Southern quest reminded me that due to social class I’d Foodways Alliance symposium over which he been refused dates, bank loans, and even jobs. energy. It was easier to simply stop talking to I wanted to walk to hide my destination, but one would see her car. Now I was embarrassed presided every fall. I’ve been called hillbilly, stumpjumper, cracker, that person—forever. refusing a ride might make John T. think I was for shopping secondhand. I reminded him that I lacked the necessary weedsucker, redneck, and white trash—mean- But I didn’t want to do that with a guy whose angry with him. I wasn’t. I was upset. But not My behavior was class-based twice over: qualifications. At the time I’d only published spirited terms designed to hurt me and make name sounds like “jaunty.” A guy who’d inad- with him. buying used goods to save a buck and feeling a few humorous essays that dealt with food. me feel bad about myself. vertently triggered an old emotional response. My solution was a verbal compromise, a term ashamed of it. I’d behaved in strict accordance Other writers were more knowledgeable and As a young man, I used to laugh awkward- A guy who liked my work well enough to pay politicians use to mean a blatant lie. I told him with my social station, then evaluated myself wrote with a historical context, from a scholarly ly at remarks about sex with my sister or the me for it. to drop me at a restaurant where I was meeting in a negative fashion. Even my anger was classic perspective. All I did was write personal essays perceived novelty of my wearing shoes. As By this time our lunch had a tension to it my wife for cocktails. He did so and I waited self-oppression, a learned behavior of lower- inspired by old community cookbooks I found I got older I quit laughing. When strangers that draped over us both like a lead vest for an until his red Italian sports car sped away. As class people. I was transforming outward shame in secondhand stores. Strictly speaking, my food thought I was stupid because of where I grew X-ray. We just looked at each other, neither soon as he was out of sight I walked to the into inner fury. Without a clear target, I aimed writing wasn’t technically about food. up, I understood that they were granting me of us knowing what to do. John T. suggested junk store. I sat out front like a man with not a that rage at myself. John T. said that didn’t matter. He wanted the high ground. I learned to patiently wait I think about it, then graciously offered me care in the world, ensconced in a battered patio My thoughts and feelings were completely me to explore “trash food,” because, as he put in ambush for the chance to utterly demol- a lift to meet my wife. But a funny thing had chair staring at clouds above the parking lot. irrational. I knew they made no sense. Most it, “you write about class.” ish them intellectually. Later I realized that happened. Our conversation had left me inex- When I was a kid my mother bought baked of what I owned had belonged to someone I sat without speaking, my food getting cold this particular battle strategy was a waste of plicably ashamed of shopping at a thrift store. goods at the day-old bread store and hoped no else—cars, clothes, shoes, furniture, dishware,

- 124 - SPRING 2015 “Fruit Loops Landscape,” by Barbara Ciurej and Lindsay Lochman, from the series Processed Views: Surveying the Industrial Landscape OxfordAmerican.org - 125 - cookbooks. I liked old and battered things. They I ran a multitude of various searches on li- reminded me of myself, still capable and func- brary databases and the Internet in general, tioning despite the wear and tear. I enjoyed the typing in permutations of the words “trash” idea that my belongings had a previous history and “food.” Surprisingly, every single reference Culinary before coming my way. It was very satisfying to was to “white trash food.” Within certain com- repair a broken lamp made of popsicle sticks munities, it’s become popular to host “white and transform it to a lovely source of illumina- trash parties” where people are urged to bring Community tion. A writer’s livelihood is weak at best, and Cheetos, pork rinds, Vienna sausages, Jell-O I’d become adept at operating in a secondhand with marshmallows, fried baloney, corndogs, economy. I was comfortable with it. RC cola, Slim Jims, Fritos, Twinkies, and cot- Still, I sat in that chair getting madder and tage cheese with jelly. In short—the food I ate madder. After careful examination I concluded as a kid in the hills. that the core of my anger was fear—in this case Participating in such a feast is considered fear that John T. would judge me for shopping proof of being very cool and very hip. But it’s secondhand. I knew it was absurd since he is not. Implicit in the menu is a vicious ridicule of not judgmental in the least. Anyone can see that the people who eat such food on a regular basis. he’s an open-hearted guy willing to embrace People who attend these “white trash parties” #gotime anything and everyone—even me. are cuisinally slumming, temporarily visiting Nevertheless I’d felt compelled to mislead a place they never want to live. They are the him based on class stigma. I was ashamed—of worst sort of tourists—they want to see the my fifteen-year-old Mazda, my income, and my Mississippi Delta and the hills of Appalachia rented home. I felt ashamed of the very clothes but are afraid to get off the bus. I was wearing, the shoes on my feet. Abruptly, The term “white trash” is an epithet of big- with the force of being struck in the face, I un- otry that equates human worth with garbage. derstood it wasn’t his judgment I feared. It was It implies a dismissal of the group as stupid, my own. I’d judged myself and found failure. I violent, lazy, and untrustworthy—the same wanted a car like his. I wanted to dress like him negative descriptors of racial minorities, of any- and have a house like his. I wanted to be in a one outside of the mainstream. At every stage position to offer other people jobs. of American history, various groups of people The flip side of shame is pride. All I had was have endured such personal attacks. Language #playtime the pride of refusal. I could say no to his offer. I is used as a weapon: divisive, cruel, enciphered. did not have to write about trash food and class. Today is no different. For example, here in No, I decided, no, no, no. Later, it occurred to Mississippi, the term “Democrats” is code for me that my reluctance was evidence that maybe “African Americans.” Throughout the U.S.A., I should say yes. I resolved to do some research “family values” is code for “no homosexuals.” before refusing his offer. The term “trash food” is not about food, it’s John T. had been a little shaky on the label coded language for social class. It’s about poor of “trash food,” mentioning mullet and pos- people and what they can afford to eat. sum as examples. At one time this list included In America, class lines run parallel to racial crawfish because Cajun people ate it, and catfish lines. At the very bottom are people of color. because it was favored by African Americans and The Caucasian equivalent is me—an Appala- poor Southern whites. As these cuisines gained chian. As a male Caucasian in America, I am #chowtime popularity, the food itself became culturally supposed to have an inherent advantage in every upgraded. Crawfish and catfish stopped being possible way. It’s true. I can pass more easily “trash food” when the people eating it in res- in society. I have better access to education, taurants were the same ones who felt superior health care, and employment. But if I insist on to the lower classes. Elite white diners had to behaving like a poor white person—shopping redefine the food to justify eating it. Otherwise at secondhand shops and eating mullet—I not they were voluntarily lowering their own social only earn the epithet of “trash,” I somehow status—something nobody wants to do. deserve it. It should be noted that carp and gar still re- The term “white trash” is class disparage- visitgreenwood.com main reputationally compromised. In other ment due to economics. Polite society regards #travelgreenwood words—poor folks eat it and rich folks don’t. I me as stupid, lazy, ignorant, violent and un- predict that one day wealthy white people will trustworthy. 662-453-9197 • 1-800-748-9064 pay thirty-five dollars for a tiny portion of carp I am trash because of where I’m from. This project is partially funded by Visit Mississippi. with a rich sauce—and congratulate themselves I am trash because of where I shop. for doing so. I am trash because of what I eat.

- 126 - SPRING 2015 But human beings are not trash. We are the the raw material, blend ingredients, and apply outhouse. He gave me a quick sharp look of sus- civilizing force on the planet. We produce great heat, cold, and pressure. Then our bodies extract picion. I recognized his expression. It’s the same art, great music, great food, and great technol- nutrients and convert it into waste, which must one John T. gave me when I mispronounced his ogy. It’s not the opposable thumb that separates be disposed of. The act of eating produces trash. name, the same look I gave John T. when he us from the beasts, it’s our facility with lan- In the hills of Kentucky we all looked alike— mentioned “trash food” and social class. The guage. We are able to communicate with great scruffy white people with squinty eyes and same one I unleashed on people who called me precision. Nevertheless, history is fraught with cowlicks. We shared the same economic class, a hillbilly or a redneck. the persistence of treating fellow humans as the same religion, the same values and loyal- I understood the clerk’s concern. He won- garbage, which means collection and transport ties. Even our enemy was mutual: people who dered if I was making a veiled comment about for destruction. The most efficient manage- lived in town. Appalachians are suspicious of race, economics, and the lack of plumbing. I told ment of humans as trash occurred when the their neighbors, distrustful of strangers, and him that back in Kentucky when the hole filled Third Reich systematically murdered people uncertain about third cousins. It’s a culture up with waste, we dug a new hole and moved by the millions. People they didn’t like. People that operates under a very simple principle: the outhouse to it. Then we’d plant a fruit tree they were afraid of. Jews, Romanis, Catholics, you leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone. where the old outhouse had been. gays and lesbians, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and After moving away from the hills I developed “Man,” I said, “that tree would bear. Big old the disabled. a different way of interacting with people. I peaches.” In World War II, my father-in-law was cap- still get cantankerous and defensive—ask John He looked at me differently then, a serious tured by the Nazis and placed on a train car so T.— but I’m better with human relations than expression. His earlier suspicion was gone. crammed with people that everyone had to I used to be. I’ve learned to observe and listen. “You know some things,” he said. “Yes you stand for days. Arthur hadn’t eaten in a week. As an adult I have lived and worked in eleven do.” He was close to starvation. A Romani man different states—New York, Massachusetts, “I know one thing,” I said. “When I was a gave him half a turnip, which saved his life. Florida, New Mexico, Montana, California, kid I wouldn’t eat those peaches.” That Romani man later died. Arthur survived Tennessee, Georgia, Iowa, Arizona, and now The two of us began laughing at the same the war. He had been raised to look down on Mississippi. These circumstances often placed time. We stood there and laughed until the Romani people as stupid, lazy, violent, and me in contact with African Americans as neigh- mirth trailed away, reignited, and brought forth untrustworthy—the ubiquitous language of bors, members of the same labor crew, working another bout of laughter. Eventually we wound class discrimination. He subsequently revised in restaurants, and now university colleagues. down to a final chuckle. We stood in the aisle his view of Romanis. For Arthur, the stakes of The first interaction between a black man and a and studied the toilet repair kits on the pegboard starvation were high enough that he changed white man is one of mutual evaluation: does the wall. They were like books in a foreign language. his view of a group of people. But the wealthy other guy hate my guts? The white guy—me— “Well,” I said to him. “What do you think?” elite in this country are not starving. When is worried that after generations of repression “What do I think?” he said. they changed their eating habits, they didn’t and mistreatment, will this black guy take his I nodded. change their view of people. They just upgraded anger out on me because I’m white? And the “I think I won’t eat those peaches.” crawfish and catfish. black guy is wondering if I am one more racist We started laughing again, this time longer, Economic status dictates class and diet. We asshole he can’t turn his back on. This period slapping each other’s arms. Pretty soon one of arrange food in a hierarchy based on who origi- of reconnaissance typically doesn’t last long us just had to mutter “peaches” to start all over nally ate it until we reach mullet, gar, possum, because both parties know the covert codes again. Race was no more important to us than and squirrel—the diet of the poor. The food is the other uses—the avoidance of touch, the plumbing parts or shopping at a secondhand called trash, and then the people are. averted eyes, a posture of hostility. Once each store. We were two Southern men laughing to- When the white elite take an interest in the man is satisfied that the other guy is all right, gether in an easy way, linked by class and food. food poor people eat, the price goes up. The connections begin to occur. Those connections On the surface, John T. and I should have result is a cost that prohibits poor families from are always based on class. And class translates been able to laugh in a similar way last spring. eating the very food they’ve been condemned to food. We have more in common than the store clerk for eating. It happened with salmon and tuna Last year my mother and I were in the hard- and I do. John T. and I share race, status, and years ago. When I was a kid and money was ware store buying parts to fix a toilet. The first regional origin. We are close to the same age. tight, my mother mixed a can of tuna with pasta thing we learned was that the apparatus inside We are sons of the South. We’re both writers, and vegetables. Our family of six ate it for two commodes has gotten pretty fancy over the married with families. John T. and I have cooked days. Gone are the days of subsisting on cheap years. Like breakfast cereal, there were dozens for each other, gotten drunk together, and told fish patties at the end of the month. The status of types to choose from. Toilet parts were made each other stories. We live in the same town, of the food rose but not the people. They just of plastic, copper, and cheap metal. Some were have the same friends. had less to eat. silent and some saved water and some looked as But none of that mattered in the face of social What is trash food? I say all food is trash if they came from an alien spacecraft. class, an invisible and permanent division. It’s without human intervention. Cattle, sheep, A store clerk, an African-American man in the boundary John T. had the courage to ask hogs, and chickens would die unless slaugh- his sixties, offered to help us. I told him I was me to write about. The boundary that made tered for the table. If humans didn’t harvest overwhelmed, that plumbing had gotten too me lie about the secondhand store last spring. vegetables, they would rot in the field. Food is complicated. I tried to make a joke by saying The boundary that still fills me with shame and a disposable commodity until we accumulate it was a lot simpler when everyone used an anger. A boundary that only food can cross. ø

- 128 - SPRING 2015