by Rick Bragg
“An opossum hath a head like a Swine, and a taile like a Rat, and is of the Bigness of a Cat,” wrote John Smith of the Jamestown Colony, in the early 1600s. “Under her belly she hath a bagge wherein she lodgeth, carrieth, and sucketh her young.”
But fairly early, the hungry colonists discovered they could also eat them.
My aunt Juanita, in ’53, was just doing her part.
* * *
• • •
“She was nineteen years old when it happened,” my mother said, thinking back. “She was keeping house for the Ropers, the same Mr. Roper who run over Clem Ritter with his store. I reckon she forgave him. I don’t know for sure; Juanita could hold a grudge. Juanita was helping to take care of Mr. Roper’s mother-in-law, who was old, while Mr. Roper was out peddling in his truck. I can’t remember her name, the mother-in-law. Juanita would stay with ’em during the week and come home on the weekend. She’d ride with [cousin] Leonard Bundrum, who was not much to look at….Well, to tell the truth about it, he was so ugly you almost couldn’t look at him, and he took up with a girl that was as ugly as he was. She had a million freckles. Daddy nicknamed her ‘The Speckled Beauty.’
“Anyway, Juanita was bad to have ulcers, and her and Mrs. Roper ate a whole dishpan full of popcorn one night and the ulcers busted in Juanita’s stomach, and she was awful, awful sick. Edna would always take us home with her when we got sick—she was just like that—and she took Juanita home with her, and tried to get her better. Juanita lived for months, it seemed like, on cream-of-tomato soup and soft crackers, but she wasn’t gettin’ no better. Juanita had always been skinny, but she was losing weight. I’d go sit with her. We were all worried. She just wouldn’t, couldn’t, eat anything solid. Finally, she come home, but she wasn’t no better.
“Well, she said she might could eat some fish if it was bland, and Daddy went up to Guntersville with his snag rod and fished for them jack salmon, and brought ’em home in his coat pockets. And Momma boiled ’em in a kind of stew, and Juanita ate that, day after day, and they gave her some strength, but she still wasn’t gaining any weight back. And then…well, I ain’t sure where that possum came from.”
Her mother baked it with sweet potatoes.
“I ate a sweet potato,” my mother said, “but I was careful not to get no possum on it.”
The flesh crisped a golden brown, and ran with a clear grease.
“It was the best thing I’ve ever eat,” my aunt Juanita said. “But it’s not true I eat a whole one. I saved a leg for Momma.”
When she finished, she got up from the table, walked to her bed, and went to sleep without pain.
“I slept like a baby,” she said. “I didn’t know you could eat yourself well with possum.”
Still, her sister and daddy stayed up all night, just to be sure.
“It was a big possum,” my mother said. “We’re talking two or three pounds, cleaned.”
“And a half-loaf of bread,” my aunt Juanita said.
“Not only did it not hurt her, but she was okay after that,” my mother said, “and she never had any more trouble with her stomach—well, not till she was in her old age.”
I asked them both why people did not eat more possum.
“Well,” my mother said, “you can’t just hit one with the car and run over and get it.”
“They eat carrion,” my aunt Juanita explained.
My mother merely closed her eyes and shook her head.
The procuring, sanitizing, and preparation are a part of our folklore and history, but a thing “ever’body just can’t do,” my mother said.
“But it’s worth it,” Juanita said.
My mother just looked sad.
* * *
• • •
As a boy, I wandered the mountains of home with a stone-dead flashlight and a flapping tow sack in my hand, following the bobbing light of my big brother, Sam, who followed, unerringly, the music of the dogs. It was so cold it burned through the legs of my jeans, but on a cold night the scent was plainer, cleaner on the ground, and the dogs locked on to it for miles, and sang it back to us across the dark.
There was Joe, in front. He was a coon dog, mostly, but he would lower himself, when he was younger, and run a possum or two if he felt like it. He was at least as smart as most of the people who followed him across that landscape, and if he didn’t like the other dogs he ran with, he would just go lie down back in the truck and refuse to associate with any riffraff. But if he felt like it, when he struck that trail, nothing could shake him.
“That dog hunts for hisself,” my brother explained to me. “He’s got personality, and it’s best not to make him mad.” He was ferocious when he caught his quarry on the ground, but would not fight other dogs; he would just look them over and show them his backside as he walked straight away.
Personality was what he had instead of ears. A lifetime of battling mean boar coons across the landscape of the Appalachian foothills had left him without those, and left his body a slab of quivering muscle, crisscrossed with white scars. He was basically a black-and-tan coonhound, my brother believes, and a little feist, and some cur dog, but what he had more than anything was that intelligent nose and that beautiful, singsong voice. You could hear him two mountains away, hear that lovely sound.
I gave up hunting long before my brother and my cousin Tommy and others still followed those dogs across the ridges and deep into the hollers, but I will always remember that sound, how it shifted when a trailing hound struck the trail, and became even more urgent when a dog had treed.
Joe ran in front, trailed by Low Booger, a black-and-tan with a low, low voice. Next came Belle, a gyp, with a lovely, ringing voice. Other, lesser dogs, young and unproved, trailed behind. It was how they learned, said Sam.
“There was one that would tree backward. He would strike a trail and follow it the wrong way, so he’d run away from the direction the possum was goin’, and the trail would just get colder and colder…and then have to double back and follow it the right way. Always found the possum. Just took a while.”
The possum is not exactly a racehorse. It can move fast for a creature that seems to lack the capacity to run; it just seems to toddle quickly.
“They ain’t like a coon. A coon will go up a big tree, go up high, but a possum will just climb into any ol’ bush it comes to,” he said.
It is believed that a possum has a fine memory and can remember a persimmon tree, recall its location, years after it feasted there. You would think, my brother said, they would remember a slightly better tree to climb.
“Sometimes all you had to do was shake the branches and it’d fall out on the ground. You had to hold the dogs back, because a possum ain’t got no chance against a dog.
“But usually they’d sull. Don’t nothing else in the whole world do that, that I know of.”
When a possum sulls, it feigns death. It keels over, its legs go rigid, its lips pull back from its teeth, and a foul odor from its anal glands wafts from the body. The fainting is an involuntary action, not a conscious strategy. The idea is that a predator will lose interest in the unappetizing corpse and not eat it. After a half-hour or so—sometimes as long as three hours—the possum will come to and toddle off.
They do not always sull. A possum, especially one cornered in a stump hole, or a hollow tree, may fight back, and bite with its fifty teeth. “They got real brave in a hole,” Sam said.
“But it wadn’t unusual to have six or seven possums in a sack at the end of a night,” Sam said. “We’d sell to the old people, for a dollar or two apiece.”
I asked him if he had ever eaten possum.
“Not voluntarily,” he said. “When I was little, they fed it to me. They fed me a lot of things when I was little. But I wouldn’t eat one now. I know what they do.”
They eat plants, and fruits like persimmons, but they also eat frogs, and eggs of any kind, small rodents, and pretty much anything good and dead.
“When I was a
little boy, there was a sinkhole in the middle of that big pasture by the house, the one where Mr. [Paul] Williams kept his cows. It was a real pasture, there at the edge of the lake, and I used to love to go to the pasture, but I didn’t go to that sinkhole but once. That was where Paul would take the cows that had died, and the possums…well…”
“Cows?” I asked
“Yep.”
“Possums goin’ every which way.”
“Sweet Lord,” I said.
“Yep.”
So you cannot just catch a possum and cook it, said my aunt Juanita, utterly unshaken. You have to cage it, and feed it for a week or so, on fruits or grains like corn, until you flush the nastiness from its system. “You have to clean ’em out,” Juanita said, and as you do, you fatten it, like a goose.
It is, in many ways, a miracle food. The flesh is oily, greasy, yet still low in cholesterol.
“Possum is good for you,” my aunt Juanita said again, for what no one believed was the first time.
I asked my mother if she would walk me through the process of cooking a possum and sweet potatoes. She said it would be better to talk to Aunt Juanita about that. I have never seen my mother relinquish her authority in the kitchen so fast in my life.
There are two methods. My aunt Juanita prefers the traditional one.
Baked Possum and Sweet Potatoes
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1 whole possum, cleaned
4 or 5 sweet potatoes, peeled
¼ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper
HOW TO COOK IT
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a big pot, cover the possum with water and bring to a boil; then simmer over medium-low heat for another 2 hours.
Remove the possum and place it in a roasting pan. Line the possum with sweet potatoes.
Bake, covered, for another 45 minutes to 1 hour in a moderate oven, uncovering for the last 20 minutes or so. If you want crispier possum, bake uncovered for about 30 minutes.
Alternative Method
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
Same as above
A clean hickory board, about 1 inch thick, 8 or 9 inches wide, and about 12 inches long
HOW TO COOK IT
Boil the possum for 2 hours, as in the traditional method.
Then, in a large roasting pan, place a clean, water-soaked hickory, cedar, or apple-wood board.
Rest the possum on the board, and line with peeled sweet potatoes.
Bake for 45 minutes, leaving it uncovered for crispier meat.
Remove from the oven, and let stand for 20 minutes. Then, using oven mitts, carefully lift the board, with the possum and sweet potatoes on top, allowing the oil to drain off into the pan. Carry the board, possum, and sweet potatoes to the back door. Fling the possum and sweet potatoes into the yard.
Eat the board.
“I don’t think that’s funny,” my aunt Juanita said. People have damn near frozen to death, she reminded me, to procure a good possum.
Her late husband, my uncle Ed, passed away in the spring of this past year. When they were newly married, just a few years after the possum-eating incident that caused my mother and grandfather such concern, Uncle Ed went hunting with my brother and some other boys on a night when the temperature dropped to twelve degrees, to catch his Juanita a possum. It was a fine hunt, and with Joe in the lead, the dogs treed several fat possums. But, following the dogs to one last tree, my uncle lost his footing on a rickety bridge and fell into a freezing creek, losing his grip on a whole sack full of possums. My brother Sam jumped into the frigid stream to help lift him out. Uncle Ed had bad legs, broken in a truck accident when he was a child, and was floundering. The other hunters retrieved the possums, which were not drowned, and together they finally got Uncle Ed to the bank. By then, the boys were, most of them, wet and freezing and as wretched as my uncle, and faced miles of cold travel to get home. But the blue-collar Southern man has a beautiful stoicism about him as to hypothermia, or maybe that is just the effect of the hypothermia. He does not panic, at least so as you can tell, or whine. My uncle Ed acted, Sam recalls, like the prospect of freezing to death in the Appalachian foothills in the deep, dark dead of night was mostly just inconvenient.
“Well, boys,” said Uncle Ed, shaking, turning blue, “I guess we’ve got about all the possums we need. We might as well go to the house.”
They walked through the night, their clothes freezing into slabs of ice on their bodies, their faces burned red by the cold, the dogs whining around their legs.
The old dog, Joe, was nowhere around.
He knew foolishness when he saw it, and just went home.
* * *
• • •
I have a brave palate, I believe.
I have eaten a snail, which remains, to me, just an excuse for garlic butter. I think you could substitute a lot of things for snails, maybe even a piece of chewing gum, and be just as happy. I love tripe, of any variety, and lived on pig-tripe burritos in downtown Los Angeles for the better part of three months. I will eat souse, though it is a physically unattractive commodity. I love marrow, of any kind. I have eaten boiled octopus, though I wish there were a way to stop it from jiggling so much. I have eaten snake, and alligator, and once bought a street chicken in Haiti and ate it on the street, fried in what I am pretty sure was transmission fluid. I will pick the lock on a blue crab, or whack it with a hammer if need be, to get at the goodness inside. Blue crabs, stone crabs, lobsters, all bottom-feeders, are just the possums of the sea.
But the Southern land possum has little to fear from me anymore. I have eaten them, when I was younger. My uncles used to tell my girlfriends we ate possum every Christmas, which cost me the affections of at least one horrified member of the choir at the Saks First Baptist Church. Or it could have been my mullet, which was luxurious. But I do not believe I will eat possum again, at Yuletide or otherwise. It is not the oiliness, or the stringiness, or the flavor of it. The flavor is not objectionable, though it does not taste like chicken, either. I just won’t eat it again, for sentimental reasons.
A few years ago, in warmer weather, I saw a mother possum toddling across the ridge on my mother’s mountain, a half-dozen babies clinging to her back. When they get too large for the pouch, they crawl out and cling to their momma’s fur, and she carries them that way, sometimes for miles. It is one of those sights on this earth that just make you glad to be alive.
I guess cattle do, too, grazing across a lovely pasture.
But giving up possum is a damn sight easier than giving up short ribs.
· 20 ·
STAIRWAY TO NOWHERE
Real Biscuits, with Sausage, Ham, Fatback, Fried Potatoes, Spanish Scrambled Eggs
Sam, in the beginning
1955
PEOPLE WHO grew up in empty places have a feeling about trains, and the farther out they lived, the deeper the feeling seems to be. I have heard old people talk about it, about how they felt when they heard that whistle off in the dark. Up close, it could take their breath away, so fierce it seemed to have shape to it, the way a strong wind looks in the falling leaves, or heat shimmers on a blacktop in the hot summer. From far off it was a lullaby, or a long goodbye, or just a mystery that would never be solved, because trains have not stopped here, or anywhere close to here, for a long time.
My mother does not hear any of that. When she hears a train whistle, or the distant clatter of the cars across the rails, she thinks about old men and new babies, and a stairway to nowhere, and cats dancing. And she thinks of biscuits—not slow and easy, as she would prefer to make them, but rapid-fire.
By now, she had mastered most things in the family repertoire, “ever’thing but biscuit. Momma would trust me to do most things by then, but she never turned a-loose of that biscuit pan. I guess biscuits was too important. The old people always said, ‘If the biscuit’s good, you can forgive or forget just about anything else.’ But it would be a while before I’d get my cha
nce with that by myself.”
Even by her eighteenth birthday, she was still somehow unworthy. Oh, she had the knowledge, and knew the ingredients and the arithmetic and could even tell, as her ancestors could, if a biscuit was done or almost done by its smell alone. She knew buttermilk-based, sweet milk–based, and combinations and variations thereof, and had stood by her mother and the great Sis Morrison and other legendary cooks, learning.
“But till you could make biscuit with your own hands, by yourself,” my mother said, “well, you just wadn’t much cook a-tall.” It may be that her momma never got over the days when she had to scrape the bottom of the flour barrel, when every pinch was precious, too precious to be entrusted to the apprentice as long as she was able to do it herself. It may be, as she saw her daughter’s talents bloom, she was a bit jealous, and held this specialty back, for herself alone. Great cooks, like any artists, can be that way, and Ava was a jealous creature. She was known for her biscuits. No one made biscuits as crispy on the bottom and light on top as she did, holding tightly to her father-in-law’s artistry and opinions, decade after decade.
Either way, my mother had to follow a lonely train track to a forgotten hotel in a forgotten place to prove she could, with her own two hands, bake that Southern essential. There is, as in all things, a story in it.
“I remember it was wintertime, and it was cold. And me and Juanita like to of got hit by the train….”
She and Juanita, who was fully recovered from her possum debilitation, rode their bicycles partway to Tredegar, that little ghost town where Jimmy Jim had recovered the diving cow, then walked the track the rest of the way. They went there to visit their big sister, Edna, who had moved to Tredegar with her husband, Charlie Sanders, and her growing family. She had just brought her fourth daughter into the world, and had to take to her bed, to rest.