by Rick Bragg
Serve with practically anything: vegetable soup, potato soup, beans, greens, turnips cooked with butter and onion, or any fall or fresh vegetable. There is no need for meat, my mother believes, if you have this. The bread is the main course. My mother eats a few cracklin’s with her beans and greens, like a side.
For a true feast, serve with pinto beans simmered with fat ham, homemade potato salad, and collard greens.
* * *
• • •
It is romantic, I guess, to say that some old people are the last of their kind. But I think my maternal uncles are like that; I never expect to see their like again. I will always remember the last time I saw them together, and how my uncle William, before he walked away in his comfortable shoes, told me of one last miracle, one that occurred when he still had his used-car lot over in Gadsden, a broad-shouldered city downriver from Rome.
It was late summer, and he was cleaning out a used car for resale. As he did so, he heard an ominous hissing sound from a back floorboard. He thought it might be a snake—sometimes people booby-trapped their cars with snakes and even mean dogs—but the hissing seemed to be coming instead from inside a left-behind diaper bag. He opened it, carefully. But all he found inside was a half-full baby bottle, the milk or baby formula left to ferment—and pressurize—for days in the Alabama heat. “I picked it up to look at it,” he said, “and the nipple shot off and hit me in the eye.”
I told him that did not seem like a miracle to me.
“It was a miracle,” he said. “It didn’t put my eye out.”
· 13 ·
BITTER WEEDS
Poke Salad
From left to right, Edna (holding her daughter, Betty), Juanita, Momma, Jo, and Sue
1942
SHE WAS FIVE NOW, so Ava let go her hand and allowed her to wander a little from the path, to circle through the trees and the falling leaves or run off to chase rabbits and shadows, because the first cold snap had come and gone and driven the serpents into the earth. But the lesson had continued with almost every step, with almost every tree, bush, and creeping vine, even if Ava had to call the child back to her side every few minutes to teach and show. The path, an old deer trail under a great canopy of hardwoods and thick pines, meandered to the edge of a small abandoned pasture, given over now to knobby gray cedar fence posts, rusty wire and thick blackberry bushes, the wicked, ironlike vines now fading to brown in the cooling days. The child ran out into the clearing, careful of the stickers all around her, and stopped cold in front of a cluster of green plants that towered above it all. The tallest of the purplish stalks was eight feet high, and as thick as her leg at the base, its leaves fading from a dusty green to a purplish red. The plants, at the end of their growth cycle after a long, hot summer, were crowned now with hanging clusters of berries so deeply purple they gleamed almost black.
“Poke salad,” the child recited. “Good to eat if you cook it right, if you know…”
She reached up to a cluster of berries. They looked almost fake, as if they were painted on, and shone, unnaturally, in the fading light of the day. Children died, seduced by those berries, like something out of a dark fairy tale.
She pulled back her hand.
“The berries is poison.”
She could not yet read or do her arithmetic. But she knew.
“ ’Specially for babies.”
A pair of cardinals, a bright-red male and a dusty-red female, burst into the air.
“But not birds,” she said. “It don’t hurt no birds.”
Ava, who had walked up close behind her, had not been worried.
The child’s first steps had been across the kitchen floor, then, not long after that, in these thick woods and abandoned pastures and other wild places.
“It’s too late to eat now,” the little girl said seriously, as if she were the one teaching now, “ ’cause the berries is out. You don’t pick it once the berries is out, when the leaves turn to red.”
“Best not to eat it no-how, not this late in the year….Best to eat it in the spring, when it’s tender,” Ava said, still teaching. “You can cook it in the summertime if you have to have somethin’ for the table, if you’re careful, but not late in the summer, and surely not now, in the last warm days.” The child tried to tell her momma that she knew all this, that she was not a baby anymore, but her momma told her to hush, and listen.
Even in spring, Ava told her, you had to know exactly what you were doing when you picked and cooked poke salad. The plant’s toxins were always there, and grew stronger as the summer slipped by. As the plant matured, the toxins concentrated, especially in the stems and stalks, and the closer to the taproot you got, the more intense the toxins became. “You don’t use no part of the stalk, and you don’t never, never use no part of the root,” Ava said, “no matter how hungry you are.” The berries, which appeared in late summer or fall, were always poison, though some old men, holding to the old ways, ate one or two ripe, dried, or pickled berries once a week or so, for kidney or stomach trouble. But even one berry could make a child very ill. Ava told it, all of it, in words the child could understand. It was best to pick it, instead of hacking through the main stalk, and even then you had to be careful, because the toxins could be absorbed in your skin and cause a nasty reaction, like poison oak. You could, however, if you were careful, use the juice from the berries to dye clothes; it ran a blood red when the berries were crushed.
The lessons went on and on till they were part of the child, like the color of her hair or eyes, or the shape of her face or length of her bones. This was a science lesson, really, and a mostly accurate one, though their knowledge was doctored sometimes with folklore, but even in that there was some truth if you knew how to sift it from the nonsense, if you were lucky enough to be born into a ragged dynasty of people who knew, and had always known. Some of it, a little, had been instilled in Ava by her own people, but most of it had been passed down from the mean old man—still teaching, from the grave.
Ava showed the little girl the stripped-clean vines of muscadine, scuppernongs, possum grapes, and small black wild cherry, and she cursed the jaybirds, cardinals, and crows for their gluttony. They followed the vine of a hog potato to its root, and dug it from the ground just so Ava could tell her child it was poison, too. She used a small pair of scissors to snip some highland cress—they pronounced it “creases”—and pulled some wild onion, the crushed blades rank and strong on their hands; it sweetened, like most onions, as it was cooked. Ava would fry it, blades and all.
“A wild onion’s got a flat side to the blades,” the child recited, again. “Wild garlic don’t. You can’t eat no wild garlic.” Both would turn a cow’s milk into an abomination if cows ate the green blades, so, before you hemmed in a cow, you walked the pasture, searching for onion and garlic, and pulled it up. It had been one of the little girl’s first jobs, to toddle through the pasture and pull the wild onion.
Together, they searched the hillside for sassafras, to make tea, and ginseng, to sell for cash money, and rabbit tobacco, to roll in old newspaper and blow into a baby’s ear to ease an earache. “It’s yit too green to smoke,” Ava said. By winter, it would be dry and brittle on the thin stalk, and ready to pick.
They did not hurry as they went. Ava knew there would be a full moon to see by on the walk home; she knew things like that. She pointed out that some of the leaves on the shrubs and trees had turned their undersides to the sky, a sign of rain or bad weather, and a bad winter coming, for sure. It was not yet dark, but a screech owl, like a woman screaming, sounded in the dusk, and small birds huddled together on the ground. Signs. Signs upon signs—to make haste, to make ready, to gather as much as you could as fast as you could, before a hard winter set in. When the weather turned, it would snow, or sleet. Ava knew that, too, because there had been a ring around the moon.
As the sun began to slide over the lip of the ridge and the hollers began to pool with dark, they stood side by side to watch a grouchy
gray squirrel high in the fork of a water oak, chattering, scolding, accusing, and the little girl asked her momma what in the world they had done to him. She knew her momma would know; it was as plain, all this, as a printed sign in a grocery store. You just had to learn how to read it, and there was no school for it except a walk in the woods.
Ava pointed to the squirrel’s nest, and to a hollow where he had stored his food. “He’s fat as a little pig—see how fat he is? He’s gettin’ ready, and he’s mad that we’re gonna steal his food he’s put up.” A gray squirrel’s tail can be a scrawny, ratty thing, but this one’s tail was bushy; that also meant it would be an early winter. They got the same message in the bogs when they stopped to listen to an odd, high trilling, so loud the little girl covered her ears. It had been bone-dry; the grass was burned brittle where it had not given way to dust. Now the frogs were crying for rain, but with the rain would come the cold. The woods said so.
They came upon a gray possum, portly himself, eating his way up a small persimmon tree. If you find a persimmon tree, Ava explained, there will always be a greedy possum not too far away, and this one had eaten, it seemed, half a tree of ripe persimmons. They kept their distance from the creature—Ava had never trusted possums, which were inscrutable—and they just watched it feast on the pulpy, waxy fruit. “It’s how you know they’re ripe, for a possum won’t eat no persimmon if it’s not ripe,” she lectured the little girl.
“What,” the girl asked, “if you ain’t got no possum?”
Ava searched around them on the path, among the red and yellow leaves. She found a fist-sized rock, judged its weight scientifically, squinted carefully through her thick spectacles, and let fly. She missed the possum, and the tree, and a good part of the mountain beyond. A few tries later, she still missed the possum clean, but rattled enough of the branches in the persimmon tree to send the possum climbing even higher, yet with no great urgency. Ava knew the woods, but did not trust a possum not to leap on them like a jaguar. Her woodscraft had an odd gap in it as to possums. They watched each other closely, the woman and the marsupial, as Ava sidled up to the persimmon tree and pulled a piece of fruit.
“If you eat it ’fore it’s ripe,” she said, teaching, “it’ll twist your face up.”
The little girl nodded solemnly. She knew.
“But this ’un won’t,” her momma told her. “It’s good and ripe.”
Persimmons, she explained, are only safe to eat right before they go bad, and you only have a few days, a few safe days, to eat them. You wait until the fruit changes in color to between a yellow and a dull orange, but the main way you tell is by the texture of the skin. It will begin to shrivel, to wrinkle, near the stem, and there may even be a few specks of black there. If the skin of the fruit is smooth, it is too soon, and a single bite will numb your lips and gums and draw your face into a knot, or at least that is how it feels.
“Look, child,” Ava said, “an’ I’ll show you somethin’ purty.”
She broke open the small fruit with her fingers, gave it to my mother to eat, then took a small paring knife from her apron pocket. She opened the flat seed, and in the white of the inside, in the last light of the day, was the tiny, perfect imprint of a knife or fork.
“Don’t tell me there ain’t a God A’mighty,” she said.
* * *
• • •
My mother’s education had actually begun four years before, before her first intelligent thought, before her first step, long before her first memory. She wonders now if maybe the first things she ever witnessed were that cool, dark path through the great trees, or the red carpets of wild strawberries, or the fluff of watercress that clung to the banks of the clear streams and the brown, slow-moving creeks. It may be that the first sound to register in her mind was birdsong. There are worse things to believe.
On another walk, Ava showed my mother the heart plant, which wasn’t edible or valuable in any practical way, but when you pulled it from the earth, to transplant the plant, with its purple heart-shaped leaves, to your own yard, there was a perfect little brown jug on the taproot.
“I guess it ain’t worth nothin’,” she told her daughter, “but it’s purty to look at.”
On another, she broke open a smooth green maypop, to reveal the soft white edible pulp, and a surprise, a tiny ballerina that you could spin between your thumb and forefinger, to make her pirouette. She showed it to my mother year after year after year, till one day, in pure delight, the little girl’s imagination allowed her to see it, really to see.
My mother knows, as an old woman, that it might not make much sense to some people, how her momma tried to explain this riot of life in the deep woods to someone year after year after year, especially to a child who could only hang there and drool, or toddle behind her. But I guess it is what Ava did for her girls instead of playing Mozart, or singing lullabies to them in the womb. And in time, of course, it did sink in. This is why, when you asked her all her life how she knew a thing, she would simply parrot those words: “Well, I’ve always knowed.” But it only seemed that way, after so much time.
Her sisters sometimes trailed behind them on the path like baby ducks, half listening to their mother talk. They had heard it all before, too, beginning, as my mother had, when they were in swaddling clothes, till it was all imprinted in their minds. By the time they started school, they knew the secrets of the hawthorn plant, and the value of a kudzu blossom, and how to make a salad from the dandelions. And it continued, that education, until they were twelve or thirteen.
Some of it, maybe, was less than sound in its practicality. She had them gather spiderwebs, which could be rolled into a ball and swallowed to ease asthma, and wild-cherry-tree bark to make a tonic. The children drew the line at searching for a skunk, live or dead, though it could be rendered down to oil and used to cure pneumonia. The girls decided that if the choice was death or a teaspoon of skunk oil, they would ask the Lord to carry them home. Besides, there was no assured way to kill and retrieve a skunk without paying a terrible price. You could shoot it from a quarter-mile, but some poor fool still had to go put it in a sack. So we forfeited the miracles of skunk.
She taught them, in the warm weather, to watch every step they made, to listen, and even to smell the air, because of all the fears in the woods there was none so deep as that of snakes. A water moccasin had a stink, a musk, and so did a big rattler, and they all made a rasping sound, moving through the dead leaves or the dry grass, and she retold the story again and again of how her husband was thrown from the mule and almost killed the day he shot the mountain hog, and he never even saw a snake.
You could smell a den, a tangle of snakes, for yards and yards. Ava was terrified of snakes; she knew that black snakes ate the poisonous kind, and rat snakes did nothing but good unless they got among your hen’s eggs. But she had also been raised inside the folklore of the Appalachians, and spent her whole life waiting for a coachwhip snake to roll into a circle and chase her, spinning like a bicycle tire, down the path, then, upon catching her, whip her to death. And so her children believed it, too. It was ridiculous, of course…but it did make them watch where they put their feet.
Ava could not even imagine a time when the world would change so much that all this knowledge would be of no value, of no practical use. So she passed it down, as any great fortune would be handed down. The thing my mother remembers most was not what her momma said but the way she said it, how she always spoke so, so softly in those woods, as if it really was a kind of secret, and to give a loud, rude voice to it might somehow make it all just disappear.
And maybe, as odd as it seems, that was so. My mother can walk a day, a week, across her land, and not find a maypop, as if the tiny dancer inside was something she’s just imagined, all this time. The wild plums, which used to hang like yellow-and-red Christmas lights, have all but faded from her land. She always gets happy to find one at the roadside. The wild strawberries, the size of small marbles, no longer cover the grou
nd, as if they were just some kind of folklore, too. Even the trees, the great canopy, fell to the earth in time, hacked down and trucked away, leaving only thick, impenetrable tangles of new growth, briars, and weeds.
I think that we have just mucked up the land, that it really was fragile, tenuous.
Only the poke salad, it seems, has endured. Poke salad is forever.
A weed so closely associated with poor Southerners that they have written songs about it, famous and obscure, poke salad not only survives but thrives, flourishes, as impossible to eradicate as kudzu or chiggers. Modern-day farmers call it a nuisance plant, but in the worst of times it was the poor man’s salvation, rich in vitamins and minerals and good for the blood. “Spinach is the closest thing I can compare it to,” my mother says, “and everything that’s good about spinach is in poke salad. Poke salad is good food.
“Poke salad,” she said, “is a miracle.”
It contains, in varying amounts, vitamins A, B, C, and something called vitamin K, whatever that is, and beta-carotene, niacin, thiamine, and riboflavin. It includes the minerals iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and more, if you can unlock it from the toxins that are also part of its chemistry.
“Poke salad,” she said, “is medicine.”
They pronounced it “polk salat,” and spelled it that way, too. It sustained them in the deprivations of the Civil War, when war widows here in the foothills of the Appalachians went begging door-to-door for bread. It nourished them in the lingering darkness of Reconstruction, and again in the Depression. Poor women and men would return to it even into the modern day, when the food stamps ran out, or when the first of the month was slow in coming. It had always been what there was, when there was nothing else.
Poke salad identified the poor like a brand. People with money would never fool with it in the first place; they would never take the time. It could only be eaten safely if it was picked correctly—only the leaves and small stems—and rinsed repeatedly, boiled, rinsed, and squeezed, and sometimes boiled again, and finally fried, to extract the last of the poisons, a process that could take hours. That knowledge was bound to the poor by their hard history, and only they knew how to pick the lock on it; if anything belonged to them in this world, truly belonged, it was that damn weed. You would see the better-offs sometimes in the wild, picking watercress, wild onions, dandelion, and the other edible weeds that grew among the useless things, the ragweed, the Johnsongrass, but you rarely saw a rich woman in the roadside ditch neck-deep in poke salad, unless she was looking for the hubcap off her Oldsmobile.