by Rick Bragg
“Well,” my mother said, and called him Carter, regardless, from then on.
Anyway, back at the kitchen table, Carson (Carter) cursed Sis viciously, and as he balled up his fist, Sis pulled a snub-nosed .22 pistol from her pocketbook and leveled it at his face.
“I’ll shoot you, you snaggletoothed son of a bitch,” she said.
“You won’t,” he said.
“Did you say that I won’t shoot you?” Sis said, incredulous.
“I did,” Carson (Carter) said.
So she shot him.
Whether or not Sis had been aiming precisely at his teeth as she pulled the trigger has vanished into time. Some people say certainly so, because his teeth sometimes irritated her, but most likely it would not have mattered what she was aiming at, since a snub-nosed .22 is notoriously inaccurate, even across a kitchen table. It would not have mattered if Sis were Deadeye Dick or if she could not hit a bear in the ass with a handful of sand. She just had poor equipment for the job at hand.
Either way, the bullet struck Carson (Carter) square in his bared, snaggled canines, at the precise instant he turned his head. Much of the force of the bullet was deflected, which is a small miracle, but not so much of one that it had God’s hand in it. He went to the hospital, cursing and bleeding. Sis went on the lam.
“They kept Sis hid out,” my aunt Juanita said.
Later, Sis, incognito, and her daughter, Ruby, went to the hospital to see about him; there was still some question as to whether or not the law would want to know why her mother shot him in the first place. They walked the hall, peeking into the rooms as they went.
“He’s in there,” Sis said, at one open door. “They’ve got his damned ol’ teeth in there in a glass. I’d know them damned ol’ teeth anywhere.” Doctors said he would recover, but his teeth were pretty much beyond help.
“But he never did file no charges,” Aunt Juanita said. She does not believe that, if it had come to court, there was a judge or jury in all of Floyd County that would convict her.
“If it was me,” my aunt Juanita said, “and somebody pointed a pistol at my face and said, ‘I’ll shoot you, you little SB,’ I believe I’d of started backin’ up…well, a little bit.”
Sis went to see Carson (Carter) as he recuperated.
“You shot me, you old bitch,” he said.
But because of his wound and his bandages, it came out as: “Uh ougt meah, uh o’ mitch.”
“Just be glad all I had was that damn popgun,” Sis said. “If I’d had me a .38, I’d of killed you.”
Oddly, no one can remember what she had cooked that night for supper.
Love would win out in time, and they would reconcile.
“She grieved,” my mother recalls, “when he was gone.”
I told my mother how much I enjoyed learning about Sis, but still did not understand what that had to do—at least directly—with her recipe for chicken and dressing.
“Because of the pistol,” my mother said.
“I don’t understand,” I said, and she looked at me like I was simple again.
“Because,” she said, “it was the same pistol she used to murder Ike.”
Like I said, it is a deep, dark pool.
“Sis committed murder?” I said.
She nodded.
“Did she do time?” I asked.
“You don’t go to prison,” my mother said patiently, “for murdering a rooster.”
Finally, it was becoming clear.
“Sis’s nephew, William, had this rooster—Juanita says his name was Ike—and it was a mean rooster and it would peck Sis,” my mother explained. “Every time she went out to hang out the clothes, it would peck her on her legs. She hated that rooster. But it was a pet. I think it was one of those fancy fightin’ roosters. Well, William would always eat with them, because she was such a good, good cook. One night, she made a big pan of dressing, and William ate a big plate, and then another big ol’ plate, and finally he looked at Sis and said, ‘Sis, this is the best chicken and dressing I have ever eat in my life.’ And Sis said, ‘Well, it ought to be. It’s your GD rooster.’
“At least when she murdered Ike, she didn’t let a good rooster go to waste.” Then my gentle, elderly mother made a make-believe gun with her thumb and forefinger, and leveled it at the television.
“Same gun she used to shoot Carter’s teeth out, I believe. One shot. Pew!”
The two old women sat quiet for a little while more, just remembering, though whether they did so together or apart I can’t be sure; the one thing I do know is that there seems to be some tonic in it, maybe even a tiny sip from the Fountain of Youth. I think it may be fine to live in the past if that is where your people have all disappeared to, if that is a place where things still make some kind of sense to you.
“Sis was about the best cook we had in the entire family, one of the best cooks that ever was, and we all watched and listened to her and learned from Sis. Chocolate cakes? Coconut cakes? My God. Well, I’m no baker, but she was the finest cake-maker I ever knew. But there wasn’t nothin’ she couldn’t do. Fried chicken? Dumplings? Beans? Cornbread? Biscuit? Vegetable soup? Stew? What a cook. She cooked in the cafés, but that ain’t where she learned it. She learned from her people. And what Sis was mostly known for was that chicken and dressing.”
“No,” my aunt Juanita corrected, “it was dumplin’s.”
“Dressin’,” my momma said.
“Dumplin’s,” her sister said.
Having done her part to set straight the historical record, my aunt Juanita said she needed to be heading home—she does not drive at night anymore. She began her goodbyes. It takes the old women a long time to say goodbye. They begin in the living room, and say goodbye again in the kitchen, and again at the side porch, and then, finally, once more, in the yard. Only when the door on her blue Chevrolet Silverado pickup slams shut is it official, and even then the two old women talk to each other through the glass—reading lips, I suppose. They have walked a million miles or more off into that shared past, and have never really been apart. Imagine all the joy and heartache, in 160 years. They lived for two decades under the same roof, then lived another four decades, more or less, as next-door neighbors, divided only by a red dirt path, about fifty steps in all. It is a wonder they can say goodbye at all.
“But it was dressin’,” my mother said when she came back inside.
Finally, after the biggest part of a day, she began to talk about what makes good chicken and dressing, and what can go wrong if the cook is a chucklehead. She knows because Sis, and her own momma, taught her when she was barely old enough to tie her shoes. One day, Sis handed her a spoon so she could stir. “This way, child,” she would say, showing her how to measure salt, sage, pepper, and other seasonings in one big hand, and mix them into the cornbread moistened with buttery chicken broth. As the years and platters passed across their tables, my mother realized that the spoon Sis wielded in her big fist was more like a wand. With a spoon or a pot handle in her hand, Sis Morrison was downright beautiful. What magic there was in cooking. It gave a person such value, such standing. And if it could make a harsh or homely woman lovable, even lovely, then surely it could make a frightened and timid child as brave as a storybook princess.
“Anyway, you start with a fresh pan of hot cornbread,” my momma said. “You can’t make nothin’ good out of old bread….You season the water, and set the chicken on to boil….”
“But,” I pleaded, “what happened to her?”
“Who?”
“Her!”
“Well, son, Sis lived a long time.” She cooked and cooked, and the legend of her food grew and grew. In old age, she cooked one last meal for my people, and laid it out before them as if she knew she would be remembered for it, for all time. “There was fried chicken, chicken cooked three or four ways, and pork chops, and potato salad, and green beans, and cornbread and biscuit, and dressing, of course, and cakes—Lord, at the cakes—and…” It made my
mother almost cry. She remembers how Sis told some bawdy stories, even to my grandmother Ava, and cursed like a stevedore. But we will forgive a great cook almost anything, as I have already said, even in a house with Jesus on every other wall.
“Nobody never told Sis what to do, never told her how to act,” said my momma. “Not till she had to go to that place.”
Toward the end of her life, her health failing, Sis went to live in a retirement home in Rome. It was a nice place, my kinfolks recall, but for a woman who could sing a hymn and tell a bawdy joke and then punch you in your eye, those pallid days of never-completed puzzles and Kool-Aid must have been hard.
One day, on furlough, the Georgia people took her to see the Alabama people one last time, but she had trouble getting up the steps to my mother’s house. One of her kinfolks kidded her about it, and she told him to “go to hell, you old son of a bitch,” and threatened him with a pistol she no longer owned. Firearms were not allowed in the retirement home.
In time, she needed help even to stand, a woman still in her rough form but not as sharp, not as clear. She shrank inside her robe, and if she cursed at all it was under her breath. She even started to say the blessing at supper. Night after night, she bowed her head and humbly intoned, like a little lamb:
God is good
God is great
She was just another old woman, it seemed, in a place for them. As she dwindled, the retirement home held a special dinner for the residents and their families. The staff asked Sis, a proven commodity by then when it came to saying grace, to say the blessing for the assemblage. She shuffled slowly and painfully to the front of the cafeteria on her walker, folded her hands, turned her face to the rafters, and began to pray:
Bless the meat
And damn the skin
Back your ears
And cram it in
Sis shuffled back to her seat in the uneasy quiet. Then, one by one by one, the sweet little ol’ ladies in their wheelchairs and the ones chaperoned by their walkers began to titter, which was as close as it was ever going to come to jailbreak.
“She passed,” my mother said, “not long after that.”
The rivers of Rome were prone to flood in the city’s early years, so most of the graveyards in and around the city were built up high, some of them even terraced into the sides of the mountains themselves. The history of the South is interred here: Civil War heroes, slaves, freedmen, Doughboys, dam workers, the beloved wife of Woodrow Wilson, and one of the greatest cooks who ever was. My mother closed her eyes for a moment, and I thought, for a second, she might be saying a short prayer to the memory of Sis Morrison.
“His name was Carter” was all she said.
* * *
• • •
I still had no recipe. Or maybe I did, and was too dumb to see it. I had the heart and soul of it; the rest was arithmetic. In the end, it took my mother two more hours to translate Sis’s recipe for her renowned chicken and dressing, which is my mother’s recipe now. She does not believe Sis would mind seeing it written down and shared with the wider world. But if I had heard a big voice call me a GD little SB from the dark rafters as I wrote it all down, I would not have been greatly surprised.
Sis’s Chicken and Dressing
My mother insists on dark meat, only. But if you prefer mixed pieces, get a fat bird. The secret to it all is, of course, the buttery chicken fat, and you cannot get chicken fat from a skinny bird. “It’s a sin to cook with a skinny bird,” Sis told my mother. She is not sure where in the Bible it says that, about its being a sin, but if Sis said it was so, then it had to be in there somewhere, maybe hard up against Deuteronomy.
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
6 or 7 chicken pieces, thighs, drumsticks, or both, skin on; or, use a fat baking hen, cut up
1 small carrot, chopped, to season broth
½ cup diced celery, to season broth
1 large yellow or white onion, coarsely chopped, to season broth
1 tablespoon salt, for the broth
One 9-inch cast-iron skillet of cornbread
1 egg
1 large sweet onion, such as a Vidalia, finely chopped, for dressing mixture
¼ teaspoon black pepper (or to taste)
¼ teaspoon sage powder (“Do not ruin it with sage; too much and it’s all you taste”)
1 teaspoon poultry seasoning (also contains sage)
Butter or bacon grease
HOW TO COOK IT
In a stew pot, boil the chicken, carrot, celery, and coarse-chopped onion in salted water until done, “and tender—it will continue to cook inside the dressing.” Chicken drumsticks can be substituted for thighs, but the dish seems to work best with a mix of dark meat. The salt in the chicken broth should be plenty, to season the dressing. Leave the cooked vegetables in the broth. Throwing them out is throwing out flavor. Do not waste any of the chicken fat that floats to the top in boiling. It is, truly, like gold.
Preheat the oven to 350 or 400 degrees.
Break the chicken into small pieces, but do not shred. Shredded chicken tastes like straw; she does not know how that happens, but she just knows it does. Be careful to discard small pieces of bone and gristle, but do not discard the skin. In a large bowl, break the cooked cornbread into small pieces, and gradually stir in the chicken broth and egg, mixing thoroughly until you have a moist, puddinglike consistency. Stir in the chopped sweet onion and the remaining seasonings; then, at the last, gently mix in the broken-up pieces of deboned chicken.
Pour the mixture into an iron skillet that has been greased with real butter. Some of the old women insist on bacon grease; try it both ways till one of them makes you happy. Again, the mixture should be of a consistency so that it almost crawls from the mixing bowl into the iron skillet, like perfectly cooked grits. Bake in the preheated oven until the top of the dressing is crisp and golden brown and the inside is creamy. This could be anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the oven. Listen close as you break the crust with the first spoonful. That will tell you if you got it right….
Again, because every stove is different, this dish must be closely watched as it cooks, to prevent it from drying out. Slightly undercooked dressing is still very tasty if it is not too loose in texture, but it may be better to overcook the dressing slightly than to undercook it. Slightly overcooked dressing will be dense and maybe even a little crunchier on the edges but still flavorful. Leave it in the oven beyond this point and it may still have some value, as home plate in a backyard softball game. Remember, all the main ingredients were already cooked to start with.
“Your dressing is going to be crispier in the corners than it is in the middle, and that’s just fine,” my mother believes. “That’s the part I like, that crispy part…but I guess you can like any part you want to.”
Serve with mashed potatoes or candied yams, fresh green beans or home-cooked collards—canned and frozen collards taste like pond algae—and slaw.
Since dressing is not dressing without cranberry sauce, either make your own or buy a can of the 1950s variety that makes a sucking sound as it slides out of the can. Neither Sis nor my momma would think less of you. We like the jellied kind. Really.
* * *
• • •
It has been copied and cloned by so many cooks, so many generations, that people here may not even know they are cooking Sis’s recipe. Even my mother has gently tinkered with it across the years. For instance, it was my mother’s adaptation to pull the boiled chicken off the bone and mix it, gently, into the cornbread mixture, instead of pressing whole pieces of the boiled chicken into the top of the uncooked dressing and letting it crisp as the dressing cooks. Both have their merits—Sis’s original recipe is a prettier dish—but pulling it off the bone and allowing the bulk of the chicken to cook inside the cornmeal mixture means the chicken is less likely to dry out, and the dressing will be further seasoned as it cooks. I have had it both ways and loved it both ways, but even dark meat can dry out a little if the wh
ole pieces are pressed into the top and exposed to the direct heat. I believe my mother’s tinkering improved it, but I have to, I suppose.
* * *
• • •
We believe that Sis will be forgiven her cussing, that she will be forgiven everything, really, even the shooting of Carson (Carter). We do not count Ike, or all the other birds and beasts of the field she laid asunder over the years, for the sake of a good dressing or a dumpling or a fine meat gravy. And if you do hold such as that against her, then only vegetarians shall enter the Kingdom, and that is a terrible, terrible thought. How awful to spend eternity playing harps, peeling parsnips, and shuffling around in hundred-dollar L. L. Bean house shoes. I think I would rather go where Sis goes, and eat where Sis cooks.
My people tell a story about the great Ever After, one that reminds my mother of Sis. In the story, a rich and selfish man is condemned to hell, and is ushered into an endless dining hall. He sees a great banquet laid out before the assembled people there, a feast of dripping, roasted meats and savory soups and sumptuous stews. The devil’s imps file down the table to pass out spoons, but the spoons are longer than the arms of the men and women gathered there. They cannot, as hard as they try, get the delicious food into their mouths, and a great wailing and gnashing of teeth echoes and echoes through the great hall.
Meanwhile, in heaven, Saint Peter welcomes another new arrival, a common and generous man, into a similar great, long banquet hall. The newcomer sees another grand feast laid out before the diners assembled there. But, disconcertingly, the man sees the waiters pass out the same spoons as the ones passed out to the diners in hell, all of them too long for the people to feed themselves. “How, then,” the crestfallen man asks Saint Peter, “can this be heaven?”