Buttermilk Graffiti

by Edward Lee

  Louis retired in 1940, citing old age and back problems. He left the store to his sons, Abe, Izzy, and Max. Max has been integral to Shapiro’s growth over the last twenty years. While Izzy was officially the boss and Abe spent most of his time in the kitchen, supervising the recipes, Max manned the front of the house. He worked there past the age of eighty, and even today, many longtime customers still remember him. “You would never go more than a minute without Max filling your water or asking how the food was” is how one customer remembers him.

  Before officially retiring, Max convinced Mort Shapiro, his cousin, and Mort’s son Brian to join him in running the business. That was in 1984. Max died in October of that same year, knowing that Shapiro’s was in good hands. When Mort Shapiro died, in 1999, his son Brian became the sole proprietor and the fourth generation of Shapiros to run the business.

  “You see all these pictures?” Brian points to the vintage photos that hang on the walls. “They aren’t just for show. My DNA is in these photos. I still remember my great-uncle Max. I am the last of the generation who actually saw how hard he worked.”

  Brian has a full head of curly gray hair. He is in his sixties, and his face shows the decades of exhaustion that come from running a restaurant this big. He agrees to sit with me as I eat lunch and interview him. He asks me what newspaper I write for. I tell him it’s for a book, and he seems irritated. He is on the phone with his veterinarian. One of his dogs is sick, and he’s worried about his medicine. While he’s on hold with the doctor, he looks down at my tray of food.

  “You gonna eat all that?” he whispers toward me incredulously.

  I like to eat a lot at Shapiro’s. My lunch spans two plastic trays: matzo ball soup, a Reuben sandwich, a chopped liver sandwich, a smoked tongue sandwich, cabbage rolls, deviled eggs, boiled greens, and banana pudding.

  I take a few bites of each plate while Brian finishes his call. The chopped liver sandwich looks gray and emotionless, but it is the perfect temperature of chilled but not too cold. The tiny speckles of fat are unctuous, and the liver tastes fresh and luxurious. I don’t need teeth to enjoy this sandwich; it literally melts in my mouth. The smoked tongue is the opposite: it is toothsome and briny, the smoke just a whisper, and the texture of the fatty tongue, sliced thin and layered two inches high, is pure decadence. The cabbage rolls are sweet, and their texture is as tender as a child’s tears. And the pastrami is some of the best I’ve ever had. Dare I say, at the risk of getting hate mail for the rest of my life, better than Katz’s?

  I ask Brian what makes the food taste so good.

  “We make everything from scratch. We do it the old way, everything cut by hand. We make so much chicken stock every day; it goes into everything—and schmaltz, a lot of it,” he adds, referring to the rendered chicken fat used for frying or spreading on bread.

  He stands up to adjust a framed photo on the wall. It is of Mort.

  “The older generations, they had the immigrant touch. They did things with their hands. They weren’t afraid to work hard. I feel a duty to them.”

  “How has it lasted so long?” I inquire.

  “Are you a chef? You own a restaurant?” He is onto me.

  “Yes,” I tell him.

  “All the chefs these days are artists, and that’s fine, but then you have a restaurant linked to an individual, not a tradition. There will never be a restaurant that lasts one hundred years anymore. Chefs change their food depending on the trends. We don’t.”

  “So there is no chef here?”

  “We don’t call them chefs. It is family recipes that are made by everyone. It speaks to the culture of a group, not an individual. If we persist in making food that is an individual expression, our restaurants will only last as long as the artist’s whim or the public’s attention span. This . . .” He gestures to the room. “This can go on forever.” Brian gets up to fix a flickering light in the dessert case.

  I grew up eating pastrami and corned beef from Katz’s, pierogis from the Second Avenue Deli, and potato knishes from the Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery. I always knew I was eating Jewish food. Maybe it was because I went to the old places that were not shy about displaying the Star of David on their menus. Maybe it was that the people who served the food sprinkled it with a Yiddish New York City accent and a side order of admonition and guilt. “Do you even know how long it takes to make this pastrami salmon?” I remember being scolded at Russ and Daughters once, when I ordered my lunch in a hurried fashion.

  Nowadays, pastrami sandwiches and Reubens and bagels can be found anywhere; they are no longer the exclusive property of Jews. They have evolved into that gray category of food that is both lauded for being part of a long-standing tradition yet consumed daily without much thought about its cultural identity. It is both Jewish and not Jewish at the same time.

  “Does it bother you when this food gets taken over by stores that sell it as American sandwiches, not Jewish food?” I ask Brian.

  “No, that’s just reality. And what’s Jewish food, anyway? We prefer to say it’s kosher. The food we serve is from eastern Europe; it has its roots in German food. Stuffed cabbage is Hungarian. Israeli food is more grain based, and it comes from Sephardic Jews. It’s still Jewish food, but totally different.”

  “You don’t think your business will suffer when it’s no longer perceived as authentic Jewish?”

  “Whenever Arby’s starts running commercials about their Reuben sandwiches, our sales go up. Tell me who is out there still using real brisket with the deckles attached. Mine is better. For as long as I am here, it will remain that way.”

  Brian shakes my hand and tells me he has to hurry off. I press him one last time for a reaction.

  “Don’t you want to preserve some of the Jewish proprietorship of this food before it gets completely swept away?”

  “It already has. Only the strict Jews care if it is kosher or not. Everyone else just comes in here wanting a good sandwich. But it’s always been that way. You’re looking for a nostalgia that just doesn’t exist. The Southside has always been home to a lot of people, not just Jews. And they’ve been coming here for generations.”

  On my way out, I order two pounds of pastrami to go. It will not last long in my fridge. I don’t have the heart to tell Brian I’m going to layer it with kimchi and gravy for a poutine.

  I nose my car slowly through what is left of Southside, or Babe Denny, as it’s now called. Shapiro’s is the anchor of a Southside neighborhood that was home to African Americans, Italians, and Jewish immigrants. It was once a neighborhood of small businesses and merchants who coexisted in a thriving community that is still remembered today, a community that, unfortunately, does not exist anymore. What is left are a few factories, vacant lots, and crumbling one-family houses. Most of the homes on the north side of the interstate are empty. The absentee owners are holding out for a developer to buy the properties. There is talk of turning this neighborhood into the next booming corridor of Indianapolis, with the familiar mix of condos, retail shops, and food halls. Looming high above these crumbling homes is Lucas Oil Stadium, where the Indianapolis Colts play to a packed crowd on Sundays in the fall.

  For generations, this neighborhood was a melting pot of displaced Appalachians looking for factory work, African Americans fleeing the South, and Jews, Italians, Irish, and Greeks from Europe. Indianapolis was centrally located and offered many opportunities for immigrants who found New York City too crowded. During the Great Migration, more than two million African Americans moved away from the Jim Crow South to the industrialized North. Between the boll weevil infestation and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the northern cities offered hope and the promise of a new life. Indianapolis, a northern city, was a resting point before heading to Chicago. Many decided to stay. At a time in America when racial tensions were boiling over, the Southside enjoyed relative peace. Jews and African Americans alike remember it as
a golden era of cooperation and mutual respect.

  I drive past a small home where an older African American man is raising an American flag on his front porch. Through the doorway, I can see a sparse living room with fraying upholstery and a few framed pictures on the wall. The man’s aging hip forces him to lean awkwardly to one side as he lifts the flag. I park my car and speak to him. His name is Perrie Morris.

  “This used to be a great neighborhood,” he tells me proudly. “Everyone had fruit trees and mulberry trees out here. Where you see that empty lot was all houses, friends and relatives of mine. We all lived here. Kids be playing out on the streets. The Jews and Italians and blacks—we all lived together, and it was a nice place to live.”

  “Why did you all get along so well?”

  “We gave each other’s kids jobs. We did trade with one another. There was no real need to be nasty. If we did well, we all did well together.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “That all changed when they built the highway. That hill over there, I used to roll down them hills when I was a kid. “He points to an embankment that leads to an overpass where cars are speeding by on I-70. The interstate highway was built in the early 1970s, abruptly splitting this blossoming neighborhood in half. People who owned homes in the path of the highway were paid off through a process of eminent domain. Many took the money and moved north. Renters were evicted. Children were suddenly cut off from their schools. Residents were separated from their churches. Streets were widened. It became difficult to walk from place to place. The neighborhood now is just a series of on-ramps to I-70. There are only a few streets where you can cross under the highway by foot, via unlit concrete underpasses that shake violently from the vibration of the cars overhead. The silt and runoff flow down and flood the street with dirt. The earth sloping down the embankment is overgrown with wild grass, thistle, and honeysuckle.

  There is little evidence that a utopian society once existed here. The highway dominates the landscape. A few old factories remain, along with a small, empty playground and an old Baptist church. And then there is Shapiro’s, standing proudly at the corner of Meridian and McCarty Streets. It still draws big crowds every day. I always meet someone new at Shapiro’s, and usually they have a story to tell about the Southside.

  Leo is an older Jewish man whom I had lunch with on a recent visit. I asked him why he thought this neighborhood was so integrated and peaceful at a time when the rest of the country was going through deep racial discord.

  “Everyone owned small businesses,” he told me. “At Passo’s, you could sit down and get a fountain soda and sit next to a black man without anyone making a row. There were fruit markets everywhere, shoe repair stores, watch repair shops, hat shops, flower stalls. We all traded and bartered with each other. We needed each other to survive.”

  “Why can’t we re-create another Southside today?”

  “It’s so different now. Back then, you could see how people made their money. You lived and worked side by side with them. Today, I walk around downtown and I see hordes of people in offices just typing away on their computers. What the hell do they do all day long? I don’t get it.”

  Part of me laughs at his quaint misunderstanding of the modern economy. The other part of me grieves with him. In ten years, this neighborhood will be fancy hotels and high-rise condos. For now, though, it still holds the ghosts of the old neighborhood. I can find people who regale me with stories of the old Southside, and I’m determined to find every last one of them as they walk through the glass doors of Shapiro’s.

  Shapiro’s exists not simply because it serves good food, but also because it reminds us of who we were and who we still can be. It gives us a reason to talk to the person sitting next to us. You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate the food, and you don’t have to be from Indianapolis to understand the importance of the Southside. Like an ancient civilization that was abruptly ended too soon, Indianapolis’s Southside is a place that should be remembered and studied because it can teach us about how to live with one another with humility, grace, and respect.

  The Brownstown Speedway is a quarter-mile oval dirt racetrack tucked into Jackson County, in between a lake and a series of small farms. Every Saturday night in the summer, people come from all over Indiana to race late models, modifieds, superstocks, pure stocks, and Hornets. The speedway is more than sixty years old, and it looks it. The wooden bleachers bow in the middle, and the wire fence that separates the cars from the crowd does not look like it could hold back a hungry dog, let alone a speeding car weighing 2,200 pounds.

  It’s a week before the Indianapolis 500, the most celebrated car race in the world. Everyone is in the city for the buildup to the event. I’m at Shapiro’s getting a pastrami sandwich to enjoy later at Brownstown. The food at Brownstown amounts to a concession stand offering the usual fare of hot dogs, burgers, fries, and chicken fingers, none of it remarkable. The truck selling T-shirts is upholstered in Confederate flags and hot rod stickers. People bring coolers full of beer and Mountain Dew. I bring a sandwich from Shapiro’s.

  Brownstown Speedway is a family-friendly environment, and I’ve taken my daughter there a few times to watch the speeding cars. The sound is deafening as the cars accelerate out of their turns. Dirt track racing isn’t for everyone. You either love it or you don’t. My four-year-old daughter loves it. I press the palms of my hands over her ears to muffle the noise. Her head pivots back and forth as she follows the colorful cars racing up and down the track. She throws her fists in the air when the checkered flag comes out waving. It’s exhilarating.

  I’m aware of the fact that I’m almost always the only person of color here, but it has never kept me away. I have never felt race was an obstacle. I’ve generally never felt unwelcome. I’ve always been comfortable in situations unfamiliar to me. Indeed, I thrive in them. I’ve met some really nice folks here at Brownstown, and they’ve always gone out of their way to make sure I feel welcome without ever making too big a deal of my ethnicity. But I’ve always wondered what it would take for a dark-skinned person to walk into a place like this and not feel completely awkward at first.

  As I’m waiting on line at Shapiro’s, I notice a tall African American man wearing a car racing jacket. He is getting the same thing as I am, and we strike up a conversation as we wait for our pastrami sandwiches. I tell him I’m on my way to Brownstown Speedway tonight. He knows the place well, he tells me. But he doesn’t go very often. He lives here in Indianapolis and promotes African American racing as a side gig.

  “I always thought racing was a white man’s sport,” I say to him, surprised at my gumption.

  He laughs and nods, as if to acknowledge both the truth and the ignorance of what I’ve just said. “Sanctioned racing, yes. But go out on Saturday nights on the Southside and you’ll see brothers drag-racing all kinds of souped-up cars and bikes.”

  He asks me if I’ve ever heard of Charlie Wiggins. I tell him no.

  “Charlie Wiggins was the best mechanic in all of Indianapolis at one time,” he says. “He built machines so fast, drivers from the Indy 500 wanted him on their teams. But he was never allowed because he was black.”

  I’m scribbling notes on my pad so I can research Wiggins later.

  “They started the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes because of him. It was the first African American motor race in America. Charlie won it three times.” He slows down his words to allow me to absorb them. “Before there was Jackie Robinson, there was Charlie Wiggins. And he had his shop right here in the Southside.”

  We get our sandwiches and head to the cashier. I follow him to his table as he continues his tale.

  Charlie Wiggins was born in 1897 in Evansville, Indiana, the son of a coal miner. He worked at a shoe shine stand outside a car repair shop. After the death of his mother, he got a job as an apprentice at the repair shop. Wiggins was a protégé in every sense of the w
ord, and he quickly rose to become chief mechanic, which made him the first African American mechanic in Evansville. Word spread about his technical skills, and in 1922, he and his wife, Roberta, moved to Indianapolis, the mecca for auto mechanics. They opened up their own garage in the Southside, and Wiggins was soon acknowledged by racing aficionados as the best mechanic in the city. In his spare time, Wiggins assembled parts from auto junkyards to develop his own car, known as “the Wiggins Special.” He tried to enter his car into the Indy 500 but was blocked by the American Automobile Association because of his race. Wiggins then began to assemble a group of African American drivers to start his own racing group. It caught the attention of William Rucker, a wealthy African American businessman who happened to live in Indianapolis. Rucker started the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes, an annual one-hundred-mile race for African American drivers on a one-mile oval dirt track at the Indiana State Fairgrounds.

  There were fifty-nine cars entered in the Gold and Glory in 1925, and only twenty would qualify for the main event. Charlie’s car, the Wiggins Special, was one. Built completely by hand by Wiggins himself, it was the only car in the race to benefit from Wiggins’s discovery: a way to make a fuel-efficient engine that ran on a combination of motor oil and airplane fuel. Wiggins painted the number twenty-three on the side of his vehicle, next to a painted image of Felix the Cat. The other drivers quickly nicknamed his car “the Black Cat.”

  His car performed beautifully in the race. While other drivers needed pit stops to refuel, Charlie’s engine went the distance without stopping once. Charlie won by more than two full laps. That night, there was a grand party for him at Trinity Hall. Wiggins was the pride of Southside. There were posters all over the neighborhood with his picture on them. Over the next decade, he would win the race two more times. Then, in 1936, he was involved in a thirteen-car wreck and lost one of his legs. Aside from being a personal tragedy, it was devastating to the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes, which folded soon after.