by Rick Bragg
The wealthy relinquished it, gladly. You asked permission of the wealthy to hunt their land, or fish it, or pick plums or scuppernongs or crabapples off it, but you just took their poke salad. You could steal a chicken and be shot in the back, but no one that we knew of ever filled some poor fool with buckshot for stealing a weed off their land, or even off the state right-of-way.
Now and then, I will still see an old woman tottering along the roadways, stuffing it into a burlap bag, and I always slow down to make sure it is not my mother, and sometimes it is.
I told her she should not be walking the roads, picking weeds.
“I can if I want to,” she said.
It is as if she continues to eat it, in better times, out of some kind of fealty.
“Naw,” my momma said. “That ain’t it. I eat it ’cause it tastes good.”
It is not only eternal, but boundless. You could overfish a pond, even a river, and thin the deer and the rabbits, and even strip the banks of watercress and other growing things, but you could not pick enough poke salad to make a dent. Poke salad flourished in heat, and drought, and floods, and was spread broadly across the land, every fall, in the droppings of birds. In winter, it simply withered down to the root, and returned with the spring, growing as tall as ten feet. If you wiped away a pasture and put in a subdivision, it would grow in the ditch. It did not need topsoil, only the poorest, stingiest red dirt. It grew in cow pastures, in the deep shade of pine barrens, in overfarmed, abandoned cotton fields, and seemed to flourish particularly over sewage lines.
“Every time we moved, to every house, there was poke salad,” my mother said. “It’s everywhere. It ain’t particular.”
It has remained part of my mother’s diet all her life, though the more I learned about it, in my middle age, the more that troubled me. I had liked it about as much as I liked any mushy, spinachlike green, but I never bothered to know its chemistry. It grew in our backyard, but we knew, even as toddlers, not to eat the berries; that was as far as my mother bothered to explain it to us, us being useless boys. But I would learn, much later, that there was no part of the poke salad plant that was not dangerous, poisonous.
Historically, there has been no modern-day epidemic of fatal poke salad poisonings in the American South, but the danger was not just some rural legend or folklore, either. In the nineteenth century, children routinely became sick and some even died from eating the berries, which could cause paralysis of the respiratory system. Grown-ups mistook the tuber, where the poisons were concentrated, for a radish, turnip, or parsnip, and some even took the name literally and ate the poisonous weed raw in salads, or poorly cooked. Those who ingested the improperly cooked plant would foam at the mouth and suffer severe cramps. Their hearts would hammer in their chests, and then they would convulse and be unable to breathe.
“They didn’t know what they were doing,” said my mother, dismissive.
As she lay in the hospital during one of her many visits in 2016, she grumbled day after day, “If they’ll just let me out of here, I’ll heal myself….”
As soon as she could walk more than a few yards, she ventured to the edge of the pasture with a brown paper sack, to search for the first tender leaves of the spring. She found a mess of it, and spent half a day or more just preparing it for cooking. Poke salad does not require a cook; poke salad, I think, requires a chemist.
“If you eat poke salad three times in springtime, you won’t have a cold in the winter,” she said.
“I guess not,” I said, “if you’re dead.”
She did not find me amusing. She told me a story of a day she and my aunt Juanita had taken a walk in those woods when they were still little girls, to test their knowledge of the wild things. It was summer, and the place was a riot of insects and creeping, living things. The leaves from last fall still carpeted the path, but the hot, wet air held them close to the ground. They made almost no sound as they walked, and that is why they were almost on top of the snake before they saw it. They saw the ground seem to move, shift, before their feet. Half hidden by the leaves, a massive eastern diamondback, coiled in the middle of the path. The rattles hummed, and its tongue flicked at the air, tasting the heat. They could not tell how long it was, coiled—the big ones were longer than a man was tall, and as thick as a man’s arm—but it took their breath away. They could smell the musk in the close air of the trees.
They froze. The snake did not flee, did not move, except to writhe inside its own circle of coils. The great snake and little girls faced each other on the path.
They tried to remember how far such a snake could reach, and decided it did not matter. They did not have the courage to stare into those eyes any longer, anyway. It was said that a snake could charm you with its eyes, and maybe that was not folklore, either, not altogether. Maybe it just meant you went stupid, in terror, till you fell, or stumbled, and it got you. The two little girls held hands, and, together, leapt backward, pushing hard with their legs. The snake struck out but came up short. They ran back a few steps, but did not run home.
“Why not?” I asked my mother,
“It was our trail,” she said, and shrugged.
Both little girls picked up rocks. It was a mountain trail, and there was no shortage of rocks.
“Wait a minute,” Juanita said. “It’s a big snake.”
They piled up a mound of rocks, big rocks, some so heavy they could barely lift.
Together, standing less than ten feet away, they rained the rocks down on it, and one of the first big rocks, by luck, struck its head; it began to writhe, crazily. They moved closer and kept throwing, always aiming for the head, and struck it again and again, until it was still. Knowing of the dishonesty of snakes, they bashed it some more even after it seemed to be safely dead.
“Then we covered it up with rocks, just to make sure…and so we wouldn’t have to look at when we walked back home.”
They went on their way, and headed home when it was getting dark. As they approached the mound of rocks, they saw the snake’s battered head, rising, rising, as it worked its way free.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“We killed it…some more,” she said.
This is what you do with the poison in poke salad. You kill it and kill it and kill it, kill the poison in it, “and then it won’t hurt you a bit.”
* * *
• • •
The precautions, the consideration of poke salad, must begin long before you cook it. If you are not a careful person, you should probably stick to kale.
“Remember, you can only eat it in the spring or the earliest part of the summer, when the leaves are young and tender, and for sure way, way before the berries, the seeds, grow on the stalks,” my mother warned. It is safer not to pick the poke salad at all from midsummer on, because that is when the toxins will grow stronger in all parts of the plant as it matures. My mother eats it only in the spring, when the leaves are at their most tender, and the toxins—if the dish is properly prepared—not likely to harm.
Even picking the plant can be dangerous. Some people are more sensitive to the plant’s natural defenses than others. To be safe, wear gloves to pick and strip the leaves, and watch for snakes.
“I admit,” she said, “that you ort not fool with it if you ain’t sure of yourself.”
I reminded her of the last snake she’d killed. It was in the garage, and she had spotted it on the concrete slab.
“It was just a little ’un, but it was a copperhead,” she told me when I came home.
She had dragged it out onto the driveway with a rake, and chopped it up with a shovel. She was proud of herself, and took me outside to show it to me.
On the driveway, killed all to hell, was a rubber worm that had slipped off the hook of one of my fishing rods.
“I saw it wiggle,” she said.
“It’s designed to,” I said.
To her credit, it was the same color as a copperhead.
Kind of.
“Don’t tell nobody,” she said.
“I won’t,” I said.
I gently mentioned that a woman who can’t see well enough to judge a copperhead from a bass lure might be better off not handling toxic weeds. She made me no promises.
Poke Salad
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1 mess of poke salad leaves (a mess is at least an old-fashioned brown paper grocery-bag-full, packed down, though how much a mess is depends on whom you ask)
½ to ¾ cup bacon grease or the drippings from fatback or hog jowl
½ tablespoon salt
½ teaspoon sugar
2 eggs
HOW TO COOK IT
In the sink, in a large pan of at least 1 to 1½ gallons of water, wash the poke salad leaves thoroughly, and drain. Repeat this process at least three times, till the water is perfectly clear. If it is not clear, keep doing it. There should be no bits of stalk or stems in the poke salad, only the leaves.
In the large pan, cover the poke salad leaves with water and boil over medium heat 1 hour, until the leaves go tender. The water will be dark green at this point. Drain the leaves into a colander, and use your hands, once the leaves have sufficiently cooled, to squeeze the juice from the poke salad. Be sure to dispose of the first batch of cooking liquid, thoroughly rinse the cookpot, then return the poke salad to the pot, cover with fresh water, and bring to a boil again. Discard that liquid, and rinse the cooked leaves at least three more times, till the water stays perfectly clear. If the water still has a green color, you have not done it right. Some people skimp on this, God rest their souls.
In a large skillet, melt the bacon grease or drippings and add the poke salad, salt, and sugar. Cook for about 5 minutes over medium heat, then, over low heat, stirring continuously, for as long as an hour, until the leaves almost disintegrate—till, as my mother says, “the poke salad is almost the same color as an iron skillet.”
When you are almost ready to take it up, stir in the two eggs. They will cook to a soft scramble in less than 1 minute.
“You can eat it plain, but I think the eggs add a little something,” my mother says. It has been compared, by some chefs, to eggs Florentine. Really.
You can also add a slivered green onion or chopped small white onion, if you wish, as you boil it.
“But I don’t like to mess with the old recipe,” my mother said. “It’s very, very good with cornbread.”
The finished product is not pretty, and that should not concern you. It always looks like you left it on the stove too long. But, then, if you’re cooking poke salad to impress somebody, you need to reconsider your life.
“It would impress me,” my mother said. “Used to be, you went to somebody’s house, you got poke salad. Now they give you…well, nothin’ good.” I asked her if she would trust anyone else’s poke salad not to poison her, and she said probably not, “but it would be nice to be offered.”
I will have to wait a long, long time before I bring up poke salad again in her presence. Nothing makes her angrier than having to answer a question twice, or three times, because of someone’s incredulity. She thinks incredulity and snobbery are the same thing, and I guess there is sense in that, sometimes.
I asked one last time why she worked so hard for what amounts to a plate of perennial ornamental weeds that must be washed, squeezed, washed again, and again, and again, and twice- or even thrice-cooked, to render them safe to eat, especially in a time when she does not have to do this anymore to have a plate of fresh greens. She pretended to be intent on a Western she had seen seventeen times already. “Matt Dillon don’t get killed in this one, either,” I said. She never answered me, really; some people, as she likes to say, “can’t be told nothin’.”
In the late 1960s, Tony Joe White finally carried poke salad into the popular culture with his famous ode to the weed.
“Never heard of him,” my mother said.
I sang it to her, badly.
Down there we have a plant that grows out in the woods
And in the fields looks somethin’ like a turnip green
“Never heard it,” my mother said. “Are they makin’ fun of us?”
I believe, truly, her devotion to poke salad is a kind of fealty to those days when it was all there was, but, unlike squirrel stew or baked raccoon, she sees this as an everyday staple, like turnip greens or collards, and not a novelty to shock the Yankees. I expect to see her, come spring, again walking the ditches that border her property, a brown paper bag folded under her arm, searching for a good crop of weeds. I guess I will have to go with her. I suppose, if we see a rattler or a copperhead, I will hand her a rock and remind her whom that ditch belongs to.
· 14 ·
STILL HARD TIMES FOR AN HONEST MAN
Vegetable Soup in a Short Rib Base
Juanita and Mom
1942
SHE SAT ON THE PORCH of the old house and watched her daddy load his truck, and wondered if this might be the day he finally lost his mind. First, staggering sideways under the weight, he dead-lifted her momma’s big cast-iron wash pot, the same one she used to render lard and boil clothes, onto the flatbed of the truck; it weighed more than he did, and he had to cuss it up there the last inch or two. He followed that with a broken-handled boat paddle from his bateau, a battered, leaky, galvanized two-gallon bucket, a large head of white cabbage, three feet of concrete reinforcing rod, a rusted ax blade with a missing handle, a two-foot-long ladle, a big can of Rutler’s tomatoes, three big flat rocks he had scavenged from the fallen chimney of a burnt-down house, a paper bag with roughly equal parts salt, sugar, and black pepper, one gallon of moonshine, a double handful of potatoes and onions tied up in a tow sack, and a fifty-pound pine knot. Almost as an afterthought, he skewered the cabbage with the steel rod and jammed the rod into a crack in the wooden bed of the Model A Ford, like he was planting a flag.
She got up and walked inside the house.
“Daddy’s gone crazy,” she announced.
Her momma did not even turn around.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said.
Her daddy said, at least once a day, that he would lose his mind someday, that Ava would drive him to it, and because my mother was not yet six years old, she took him seriously. She watched, waited, and wondered just when that would be, but she was uncertain if she would even know when it did happen; she was not altogether sure how crazy real crazy was. Several of her kin acted strangely, singing spirituals or cursing the open air or sobbing about long-dead kin before wandering off into the dark, and this does not even include the ones on a good drunk. Some were already ensconced in institutions; others were still walking around in the small towns and wide places in the road, carrying on whole conversations with dead relatives and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Her momma’s people went crazy fairly early in life, so my mother, figuring she needed one sane parent at least to hold things together, was determined to watch for anything unusual in her daddy’s behavior. After several false alarms, it looked like the dreaded day had come.
She went in search of someone to tell who might be surprised.
“Daddy’s gone crazy,” she told James and William.
“Prob’ly just had some liquor,” James said.
“No,” she said, and told them about the truck.
They meandered into the house.
“Daddy’s gone crazy,” the boys told their mother.
“Knowed it,” Ava said.
Whatever her husband was planning that late afternoon, Ava was against it, sticking to her rule of being against everything if proposed by a man. Ava could nag a man right down to his knees, nag him through the floorboards and down into the ground, where a man would cover himself up with the earth and lie an eternity, just to be safely away. But, grumbling, she did what he asked her to do that late afternoon. She cooked two skillets of fresh cornbread, and slipped that into a clean flour sack.
“Don’t you take the children to be around such people,” she ordered as she handed it o
ver.
So, my mother reasoned, it was to be a journey of some kind. Charlie compromised, and said he would take only my mother and the hellion boys. They were in their teens by then, but still burr-headed nimrods and constantly in trouble.
“They griped because Daddy took one of the ‘babies,’ but I was Daddy’s pet, so I got to go,” my mother said, thinking back. She thinks it was because he wanted someone to talk to on the dark dirt roads, even if she only understood about every fifth word and mostly just nodded her head, and talking to her brothers was like conversing with hogs. Her momma, still grumbling, swung the curly-headed baby, Jo, up on her hip, as if she was afraid her lout of a husband would kidnap the baby sister, too, for his mad adventure. Then she bundled my mother up in two coats, a big girl’s sweater that hung to her knees, and two pairs of socks, and she wrapped a shawl around her head so tight my mother thought she would smother long before they got to wherever her momma was so dead set against them going.
“Bums,” Ava muttered.
“Hoboes,” he said.
“Bums.”
“Still hard times,” he said, “for an honest man.”