by Rick Bragg
She cannot remember where Jo and Sue were; it could be, as was custom, the children were with kin, to shield them from all this, or it may be they sat with their momma on the side of her bed; odd, how she cannot recall.
She remembers, though, being so hungry, yet sick to death at the same time. They had not eaten for a day or more, and as the old ladies pushed plates of food at them, they took them, and thanked the ladies, and then just set them aside, to pile up beside them as the crowd grew larger in the old house.
People formed a line to pay their respects to her daddy in the front room, then filed into the bedroom to say how sorry they were to Ava, who had not moved from where she sat on the edge of her bed for two full days, and could not look on her husband at all. She blamed him for this, too, blamed him for dying, which to her was just another form of loafering, just another time he ran off and stayed gone too long.
Every kindness just reminded them, all of them, about what was missing.
It was unbearable.
Earl Woods, who ran the gas station in town, saw my mother and Juanita there, looking so lost, next to those stacks of plates of cold food, and went to find his wife.
A tall, thick man, he knew his way around under the hood of a Pontiac, but also seemed acquainted, at least a little bit, with the human heart.
“Them children ain’t had nothin’ to eat in a long time, and they ain’t gonna eat nothin’ here, not with all these people, not with their daddy in that next room,” he told his wife, Vivian.
“Well, let’s take ’em home, then, Earl,” she said impatiently, as if he could have cut to the chase and saved them all some wind.
Vivian, a short, wide woman, cleaned doctors’ offices and other buildings to make money, but was known as an excellent cook.
“I can whup somethin’ up,” she said.
They herded my mother and Juanita into their car, and left the crowd and the specter of death behind, for just a while, in the trees, and as Earl drove he talked nonstop about their daddy, and confessed he had told some great whoppers over time.
It was Earl who had spread the story of Charlie Bundrum the great fisherman, who would catch jack salmon so fast he did not have time to put them on a stringer, so he would just slip them into the big pockets of his ragged old fatigue jacket and cast again, and again. Some days, he would get a little drunk, and Ava would find, sometime later, a fish in a left-hand pocket. And once, Earl said, Ava washed the old green jacket and heard a thumping in the washing machine; when she looked inside, the water was swimming with fish. “And your poor momma, bless her heart, had to stand there and pick them fish out of that washing machine.” It wasn’t true, of course; maybe it was a little better than true.
And Vivian Woods told how, when she would walk to work, Charlie Bundrum would drive by in his old truck, loaded down with shingles and buckets of tar, and shout out to her, “Heyyyyyyyy, Ol’ Lady Perkins,” and people around her would look at her funny, because her name was not Perkins a-tall.
“But your daddy named everybody, I guess, so that’s who they was, who they got to be after a while. Didn’t matter what your momma and daddy named you. Just mattered what Charlie Bundrum named you…though I do believe it was Juanita who named me Petunia. Petunia Perkins. My Lord.”
“I remember him doin’ that,” my mother told her, “ ’cause I was in the truck with him, and off you went, your dress tail just a-flappin’…”
“I was Pooh Boy,” my mother said, after a while.
“I was Snag,” my aunt Juanita said.
“I know,” Mrs. Woods said.
They drove to their small house in town, and the girls sat at the kitchen table and listened as Earl told stories of the day their daddy chased off some ruffians with a roofing hatchet and a Belgium shotgun, while Vivian scrounged in her refrigerator for something she could cook in a hurry.
“How ’bout some cubed steak?” she asked.
She made up some biscuits in record time and put them in the stove, and went to work on the main—and only—course. She had some small, cheap cuts of beef, like flank steak, and she took one of those hammers that look like medieval torture devices and beat it till it was a ragged sheet of meat, beat the mortal hell out of it, till you could almost see through it, then salted it, peppered it, dusted it with flour, and laid it in the hot grease.
When it had browned and was smelling so good, she turned it with a fork, then quickly added a few tablespoons of flour, a little more salt, and a big dash or three of pepper, and stirred all this around the steak until it browned, then poured in some milk to make a nice gravy, being careful not to let it get too thick.
Some cooks would take the cubed steak out of the pan first, make the gravy, and then return it to the pan, but a real smothered steak had to stay in the pan, Vivian believed, to add the tiny little taste of the beef itself to the milk gravy. It was, of course, hell to stir it all up. The crisp bits of the breading and black pepper gave the gravy its taste, she believed, and the sisters realized that they were hungry for the first time in a long, long time. They ate their steak and gravy and biscuits at the little kitchen table, with Earl and Vivian Woods leaning against the counter, talking and talking and talking about their daddy in life.
The steak was so tender they could cut through it with the edge of a fork.
“I’d be riding down the road, and your daddy would see me, and he would flag me down or I would flag him down, and we would stop right there and talk, you know, ’cause there might not be a car comin’ for a day and a half, and if there was a car we’d pull over to the side of the road and just talk an’ talk, and I can’t tell you one blessed thing that me and that man talked about….” And he talked and he talked, but not about how he would miss her daddy, not how sorry he was. He talked about what a pure joy it was to be close to him, as if he would walk into that kitchen at any moment and be welcome to what was left.
But there wasn’t anything left.
They ate till they were full, till they realized, looking at their clean plates, that somehow life had gone on, after all.
* * *
• • •
She does not have to beat the hell out of it anymore, like Mrs. Woods did.
“You can buy it in any store now—cubed steak—done beat up and tenderized pretty good. You can still whack it some if you want to, though,” she said.
“You don’t have one of them meat hammers,” I said.
“Got too old,” she said. She thinks maybe she might have sold it at a yard sale.
Now and then, she would like to whack it again, though, for Earl and Vivian Woods.
“They’ve both gone on, too,” she said.
I told her there were some cultures—in Asia, I believe—who whack a bell to honor their ancestors, or to summon them, or something.
“I guess this is kind of like that,” I said, and she said she reckoned so.
• • •
Smothered Cubed Steak
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
4 tablespoons flour
¼ teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
3 tablespoons lard or Crisco
4 to 6 pieces cubed steak (done beat up), about a ¼ pound or less, each
2 tablespoons finely diced onion
2 cups whole milk
HOW TO COOK IT
In a bowl, mix the flour, garlic powder, salt, pepper, and cayenne.
In a medium or large skillet, melt your grease over medium heat. Lightly dust each steak front and back with your seasoned flour, and carefully lay them in the grease. Let them sizzle for a second or two, then reduce the heat to medium-low and cook slowly till they are golden brown; turn, and cook the other side till golden brown.
When they are almost done, add the finely diced onion, and let it cook a minute or so—not crisping, just going clear. Reduce the heat to low. Use 2 tablespoons of the remaining seasoned flour for
your gravy. Stir it in, and brown it to a nice tan, being sure to scrape the bits of crisped flour from the bottom as you do, allowing them to mix into the roux. Then slowly pour in the milk, stirring as you do. You do not want the gravy to be thick, just a nice medium. Do not worry if you tear up the steaks. It does not matter.
Serve with biscuits, mashed potatoes, and sweet peas or green beans. We like this with baby limas, too.
It makes my mother a little sad every time she cooks it, of course, but not enough to make her stop cooking it forever. I guess, like in all things down here, it’s just the gravy, the gravy that reminds you how good life can be, even in mourning.
“Gravy,” Charlie Bundrum liked to say, “is a reason to live.”
* * *
• • •
When the great Mississippi writer Willie Morris passed away, I stood in his kitchen, surrounded by people who loved him, with a plate in my hand. There was fried chicken, of course, and potato salad, casseroles, and tomato sandwiches with mayonnaise and black pepper on white bread, and I do not believe they were trying to be ironic, or rustic. There was a big banana pudding, and coconut cake, and so much more, the feast that follows a Southern funeral. There were authors there, and college professors, editors, poets, and, I believe, at least one governor, but the tradition and the love behind it were the same as in the house where they laid my grandfather out. Willie Morris loved such as that, such custom, and believed, fervently, in ghosts.
And I thought of a night when I sat across from Willie in his study, and listened as he, still half drunk, read some pages I had written about my people, about my own grandfather. He snapped the book closed after a while and told me that I was right to believe how important it was to record their stories. They would last inside those stories, but they would live in the language, if the language was worthy of them.
“I say it’s the language,” he said.
I had not known there was a difference, but I understand it now.
Earlier that night, he had eaten a big plate of catfish, French fries, and hush puppies, and drunk whiskey from a brown bottle, and bounced into both sides of the door frame as he meandered to the car. It struck me, later, that I had never met a great man, or even heard of one, who was perfect, and certainly not one who could hit both sides of a doorjamb on the way out of a restaurant, or this world. A few years after the funeral buffet, I wrote a story about his passing, and, like an undertaker or a coffin maker, I used all my skill, such as it was, to sing of him as gloriously as I could in a thousand words or so. He deserved ten thousand at least, but deadlines are deadlines. I guess we all cook what we can.
The people who carried those pots up that dark trail to my grandpa’s are mostly gone now, and even some of their names are forgotten, but not their kindness, or their recipes. That was their language, I suppose.
· 25 ·
GOVERNMENT CHEESE
Cheese-and-Sausage Pie, Macaroni and Cheese, Grilled Cheese Sandwiches with Pear Preserves or Muscadine Jelly
Me, early on
1959
I CAME INTO THE WORLD as a five-pound block of government cheese. Well, the whole truth is that a block of cheese was mistaken for me, across a busy town square. My mother was, it should be said, making a run for it at the time.
“Don’t matter the circumstance,” I told her. “It ain’t nothin’ to be proud of, to be mistaken for cheese.”
“But it was real good cheese,” she said.
* * *
• • •
I had not known, as I began this book, how often larceny would figure into the narrative of our recipes. It is a little sad, I suppose. I could wish that were not so, but I could also wish for a Duesenberg and would still be tooling around town in a Toyota.
My mother was involved in theft only three times in her long life, though it is doubtful you will see her name on the post office wall. She stole only one thing on purpose, which is not a bad record for eighty years; in the other two robberies, the thievery was foisted upon her by fate.
“I did steal an onion,” she said, coming clean. “I did it. I did. But you be sure,” she warned me, “not to make it seem worse than it was.”
She appropriated the onion when she was just a child. She and Juanita were walking home from picking cotton. They knew they were having beans and cornbread for supper, but were out of onions. “Beans and cornbread are not complete without onion of some kind. I mean, it just ain’t right, you know?”
It matters little if it is raw, pickled, white, yellow, green, tame, wild, or minced into relish or chowchow. “But we did have nurn.” It was on the edge of a field that had already been harvested, so it was a left-behind onion, left to rot. They stood over it a moment, torn, then pulled it and skipped home. “But, you know, it always kind of bothered me. Only thing I ever stole…Well, only thing that I meant to.”
The second time, the one involving cheese, was mostly beyond her control. I was there when it was perpetrated—well, kind of. It was not my fault, either, but I suppose you could argue I was complicit, in accordance with the laws of the state of Alabama. If a bank is robbed, for instance, everyone inside the getaway vehicle is guilty. And since she was the getaway vehicle, since I had not yet actually been born into this world, I was still in on it, and essential to the caper. It started with a blue maternity dress.
“I remember buyin’ it ’cause I wanted somethin’ pretty to wear to town. It was the only maternity clothes I had back when I was havin’ you. I saved up for it. I remember the top, the shirt, was solid blue, and the skirt had little designs on it. I think it was flowers….No, it was checks. Little blue and white checks. I always wore it to town that day, the days we went to get commodities. It was always a big day.”
People told her how pretty the dress was, and the old ladies always asked when the tiny blessing was due, and what she would name him or her. She said the baby was due in July, or maybe August, and though she was still wrestling with the decision she thought she might name it Ricky if it was a boy, for Desi Arnaz, who played Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy. This caused the little ol’ ladies to walk away, uncertain. Why in the hell would a woman in the foothills of Alabama name her baby for a Cuban bandleader?
It was one of the times when my daddy had gone on the lam—this time it would turn out to be for two whole years—and my mother and big brother had gone to live with my grandmother again. She took in laundry, and worked as a cook and a maid in other people’s houses, but still qualified for a smidgen of government assistance. She got a little card in the mail, testifying that we were indeed poor by a reasonable standard, and once a month she and my big brother, Sam, traveled to town, to the recreation center in Jacksonville, to pick up our dole of government food.
My people called it “our commodities,” from the wording on the little yellow card. It was always a grim day when she and my daddy reconciled, because she had to give up the commodities if she took him back. It was not, my kinfolks believed, a fair swap. All in all, they’d rather have the cheese.
“It never occurred to me to feel bad about taking our commodities; we was doing the best we could,” she said. But she did notice, in time, that the country people who came to town to take their allotment came in freshly ironed dresses and starched white shirts and their newest pair of overalls, as if to say, if anyone was watching, that even though they were standing in line for charity they were not begging for it. This is why my mother was proud of that one good dress, and why she wore it to stand in that line.
For my people, commodity day was the single most satisfying aspect of being poor. It was not a check, or food stamps, but the actual bounty of the republic. The foods and the portions would shift over time, but in those days you got five pounds of yellow cornmeal, five pounds of plain flour, a two-pound can of good peanut butter, five pounds of rice, two two-pound cans of a processed mystery meat that tasted suspiciously like Spam, powdered eggs, powdered milk, a whole cooked chicken in a can (still one of the most amaz
ing things my big brother says he has ever witnessed), a big can labeled “cooked pork chunks,” and, per household, one five-pound block of blessed pale-yellow cheese.
She used the flour and meal for her biscuits and cornbread. The thick peanut butter, so dense you could barely spread it on a slice of bread, remains the best peanut butter I would ever taste; she used it in fine peanut-butter cookies, and on thick sandwiches with her homemade jelly. She used the whole canned chicken with dumplings and in porridge. She simmered the pork chunks, which were too salty to eat any other way, in beans and soups, and mixed the rice with butter, sugar, and cinnamon for delicious rice pudding; unlike the flatlanders and the swamp people, we did not eat rice unless it was in a dessert. The Spam-like meat she fried, mostly for breakfast; we were told the Hawaiians did it that way, which made us feel very cosmopolitan.
“It was—all of it—as good as you’d get in the store,” my mother said of her government surplus.
But the cheese—well, the cheese was something else altogether.
It was not like that stuff you buy in grocery stores, that fluorescent-orange, gummy, petroleum-based cheeselike film wrapped in its individual plastic envelopes, which always remind me of the cellophane on cigarette packs. The government cheese was firm and dense and had taste, a mild, clean, but still…well…cheesy taste. It was so good that the old people still recall its flavor to this day; when they take a bite of the store-bought stuff, they make a face like a bug flew in their mouth.
It was not rich folks’ cheese, not an earthy goat cheese or a pungent Stilton or a rich Parmesan or such, not even the sharp, hard cheddar that my grandfather loved to eat on the riverbank with his saltines. But, then, the government cheese wasn’t supposed to be exotic. It was, as purveyed by the government, an excellent source of protein and calories and vitamin D for the great unwashed; the fact that it tasted good, that it made other things taste good, was unintended, a happy mistake.