by Rick Bragg
Me and Sam
1964
THIS IS NOT the first memory I have of food. My first memory, I believe, was when I ate the Wet-Nap that came in the bottom of a two-piece dinner from Kentucky Fried Chicken just outside the high-school football stadium in Sylacauga, Alabama, because I believed it was food. The less we say about that, considering that this is a cookbook, the better.
This is only my first memory of my mother’s food.
And I thought I would die.
I had already been banished from the kitchen, banished from any proximity to the hot stove and sharp instruments. She made me step back even a few steps farther, beyond the door, in case I should suddenly go peculiar and fling myself into the cabbage grater. I had exhibited some unusual behavior already, even beyond the Wet-Nap incident, behavior that made biting into a moistened towelette seem almost humdrum in comparison. I had, after chewing on it like it was gum, somehow poked a plastic poinsettia berry up my nose, requiring medical attention. The less said about that the better, too—though even that should not be strange for the son of a woman who walked around with a marble in her mouth for about three years. I also went crazy at a lumberyard. That time, they said it was probably just sunstroke.
So I stood in the doorway, at a safe distance, and watched her work. The holidays were approaching, and all manner of fine things appeared as if by magic from that little stove. She did not talk to herself then, but she did sing, and over a lifetime of memories of my mother’s cooking, those first days, listening, hold a peace and a warmth I cannot put into the right words no matter how hard I try. I guess the less said about this, too, the better.
Of this day, I mostly remember the smell. Later, much later, I would recognize it as a blend of butter, roasting pecans, melting brown sugar, vanilla flavoring, and more. When she pulled the thing from the oven she showed it to me, a perfect pecan pie, at or near the top of the pinnacle of what a great Southern cook can do with a dessert.
“It has to sit and cool,” she told me, “and then you can have a piece.”
“How long?” I asked.
“A hour or two,” she told me.
I had a peculiar habit, as a boy, of spinning in a circle when I heard something I did not want to hear.
This time, I damn near went into orbit.
“One HOURRRRRRRR!”
That equated to starvation. I would be down to rag and bones, crawling across the floor, faint and quavering.
“Can’t he’p it,” she said.
“Damn,” I said.
“What did you say?”
I think I shrugged.
“Let me get my belt.”
She had never actually struck me with a belt, and would never. But I still harbored some fear of the unknown. I fled. If you did not want your children to learn any new words, you should not let them play in the proximity of pulpwooders, or anywhere close to the playground at the Roy Webb Junior High School Halloween Carnival.
One of the first things I had learned about my mother was that, although she had the memory of an elephant, her wrath was short-lived, and a lap around the house or a sprint through the cotton field usually took me out of danger. But the smell of that pie kept me in a tight orbit of the house, as if it were calling my name. I circled and circled until I saw her, finally, step out the front door and head down the short walk to my aunt Juanita’s house.
As soon as I saw her reach for the door, I was inside the kitchen, reaching for a knife. I was usually not allowed to touch knives, for fear that I would cut off my own head.
I did not cut a piece. I cut a slab. Half, roughly. Maybe half and some.
I did not take a plate. There was something just wrong about stealing a plate. I cradled the still-hot pie in my hands and sprinted across the backyard and took a hard left turn to the horse pasture, and the shed that sheltered a long legacy of poor choices in the selection of Shetland ponies. I settled down behind it, well out of sight, and started to eat.
Lord.
There is nothing else to say about it.
Just…
Lord.
I did not wolf it down. I savored it, trying my best to keep the filling from running through my fingers. It was like trying to eat a very savory puddle of mud. I would learn that this why you had to let a pie “set.”
I ate it all. I licked my fingers clean. I passed out.
It may be I just had a nap, but when I woke up I had a little trouble walking a straight line, and I think I was seeing double. I think I was mildly drunk, and at the same time talked very, very fast. I had the strength, the energy, of a hundred little boys. I giggled, and I hopped.
I was so drunk I staggered straight into the house, straight into her.
“What did you do?”
“Et some pie,” I said, and giggled.
I do not recall being beaten then. I guess she figured that pie theft was in my history, in my genes. I do recall that it was quite some time before I could see right again.
She would have liked to present it to us at supper. It deserved that, not to be wolfed down behind a shed by a nitwit.
She just did what she often did.
She sighed.
“Well,” she said, “you can’t have no more.”
Any more and I’d have floated into space.
Pecan Pie
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
1½ cups chopped pecans
1 cup brown sugar
½ cup granulated sugar
1 stick butter
2 tablespoons flour
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¼ cup pecan halves
1 pie shell
HOW TO COOK IT
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Mix everything except the pecan halves and the pie shell. If it seems a little thick, you can thin the mixture with about 2 tablespoons of water. Then pour it into the pie shell.
Top with the half-pecans in whatever design you wish, or just eat them.
Bake about 45 minutes, but check it after 40.
Let it set, under guard, for 2 hours, covered only with a clean cloth. Do not cover it with anything airtight. It needs to breathe.
Some people eat this with ice cream, but that is just crazy talk.
“You sure don’t want no more sugar,” my mother believes. “That’s just askin’ for trouble.”
* * *
• • •
I never had a piece of pie that good again, but, then, my mind was not sound. I believed, for at least part of a day, there was some kind of dark magic in that pie that crossed my eyes and gave me the giggles and set me to staggering and hopping like a fool. My mother said it was probably just sugar; you can get roughly the same effect with a Ding Dong and a large RC. I know. But though I am ashamed to admit thinking this way, it might have been a little better, that pie, because it was illegal pie. I think I know how James, William, and Rodney Rearden felt, so long ago, when they absconded with pie. I remember all manner of morality tales and fables about boys who stole pie, and were hexed, vexed, and haunted, so many and so often that I came to believe that pie thievery must have been a very common thing back then. I would not do it again—it would be unseemly. But sometimes I pass a pie in a bakery, and I wonder. It would probably just taste like pie. “But how will I ever know unless…”
· 27 ·
RED’S
The Hamburger Steak with Brown Gravy, The Immaculate Cheeseburger
Granny Fair
1965
HER NAME was Irene, but no one called her anything but Granny Fair. She wore cat’s-eye glasses with little rhinestones in the sharp corners, and what she could not make out through those thick lenses she ignored. She drove as if her hairnet were a crash helmet, and a ’51 Chevrolet were a rocket ship to the moon.
“And she,” my mother said, “was my ride to work.”
We lived with Grandma Ava then, on the Roy Webb Road. My mother landed a full-time job cooking at Red’s, a café just
this side of Anniston, on the Jacksonville Highway. She got a white uniform, and a hairnet of her own.
“You ride to work with me, child,” said Granny Fair, my uncle Ed’s mother, who waited the tables and worked as a carhop there. “You just sit back and rest.”
You could hear her coming as far as the highway, pumping the brakes and grinding the gears. She approached every turn like it was a surprise, as if it had, that second, crossed her mind. My mother waited for her at the end of the walk, atremble. Tires smoking, Granny Fair made the turn into the driveway by inches, scattering the loose gravel of our driveway; there she slewed and fishtailed and, finally, ground to a shuddering halt. My grandma had planted a row of buttercups inside some old tires, and though this was not their original intent, they more than once kept Granny Fair from driving straight into the living room.
“I wore out a good pair of shoes on that car, wore a hole in the floorboard, ridin’ the brake that I didn’t have. I think I rode ’em for a year at least, and I wasn’t even drivin’ it. I had to ’magine me a brake on my side….I mean, I ’magined hard, and I mashed it all the way through the floorboard.
“She’d come up to every red light like she was gonna run right through it,” and come to another sliding, smoking stop, half sideways, scaring the drivers in the cars around her half to death; then she would take off, tires smoking again, as the light turned green. “Wasn’t any seatbelts back then. I didn’t have nothin’ to save me. I was just in the hands of the Lord. I remember she run into the ditch one time and just laughed, and just put ’er foot down and come slidin’ and jumpin’ out of that ditch and just kept on goin’.
“I guess she was what you would call ‘happy-go-lucky.’ ”
The old woman blistered through the little town of Jacksonville with utter disregard of the speed-limit signs or the parked patrol cars; it was just hard to give a ticket to anybody whose first name was Granny. She left a little more rubber as she headed south out of town, and sailed free and clear almost to the Anniston city limits before she veered into the parking lot of Red’s Barbecue without even breaking speed.
“She’d be right up on it—I mean, right up on the building—and she’d lock them brakes down, and the gravel would just fly, and I was so afraid that she would knock out all the windows at Red’s, and we’d both get fired. I would get out and I couldn’t even move my legs good. I guess I was stiff from fear. I don’t think she meant to scare me. I think she just drove that way.
“We worked the day shift, her and me. She waitressed, and did what I think they called curb service, and I cooked. I was always the cook. I liked my job.” Or it may be she only thought she did, and was really just glad to be alive. They might have slid and slewed up to the women’s prison in Wetumpka and she still would have thanked the Lord to be there, and asked to be let inside, please.
The kitchen had always been a sanctuary, and this one was no different. She walked in the door there and knew it was where she was meant to be.
To her, being a cook in a blue-collar café was the opposite of a dead-end job. This was the beginning of a hundred, two hundred chances to make people glad to be alive.
You could say there was no place like Red’s, or say that every place was, and you would be right either way. The forties and fifties might have been the golden age of the American diner, but the sixties, here in the turbulent South, was her time. Red’s, a combination barbecue joint, short-order emporium, and meat-and-three, brought her skills as a cook into the twentieth century, without discarding a thing her people taught her.
It was a true Southern café, not just a place for a sandwich and a cup of soup or a bland plate of toast and eggs, but a sit-down restaurant that catered mostly to working people, a place to purchase the home-cooked food that they grew up on, or just a truly good hamburger in the days before fast food taught us to settle for nothing much at all. Mothers and grandmothers might pass from this world, but their food, and their recipes, lived on and on at Red’s. You could get a real barbecue sandwich, or a plate of black-eyed peas and hog jowl, or backbone and collard greens, or a breakfast like your momma used to make.
It was a segregated world, and northeastern Alabama in 1965 had high and dangerous walls. Down the highway, in West Anniston, black-owned cafés cooked the same food, the same way, for the same people, same in almost every way but color. For, though the wealthy might eat at Red’s or its mirror image just down the road, might come in for a taste of their long-ago heritage, these cafés really belonged to the blue-collar people, who would be born, live, and pass from this world without ever uttering the words “poached” or “soufflé” or even “medium rare.” Things came “done,” or they came “not done.”
She belonged.
But this is not to say she did not dream a little now and then.
Wearing her starched white uniform, she worked side by side with a tall, skinny, fair-haired boy named Shelby Pollard, who cooked like an old woman trapped in a young man’s body.
“I remember, on New Year’s Day, we all sat down and eat together there. Usually, we were too busy to eat when we were open for business…but he had cooked black-eyed peas, and greens, and good cornbread, and he’d cooked his peas with hog jowl, and it had just cooked to pieces, and…” He could line up a hundred cheeseburgers on the grill, sear them perfectly, dress them with lightning speed, and make it all taste as if he had doted on each one, like it came from their grandma’s kitchen.
His dream was one day to open a café of his own, one like this. He talked about it every day, and when he did, he swore he would hire her as head cook, and they would make good money then.
He spoke with such enthusiasm, such conviction, that she believed him; day after day, over the hot stove and grill, they talked about how it might be, what they would serve. Shelby was the kind of cook she believed her grandpa to have been, unflappable, precise, who never burned, never guessed wrong. He had learned from his people, too, one pot at a time. Other cooks came and went, young men who had drifted out of the military after Korea, or came to serve at Fort McClellan and just never left, cutting themselves out of the world they had left in Michigan, or elsewhere in the Midwest, as if they had clipped themselves from a magazine. The one thing they had in common was that they were all cooks, cooks with experience, not shoe salesmen or electricians who had decided to be cooks when they saw the want ads. It is different now, she believes.
Shelby was different. He had a plan. But always, partway through the dream, the doors to the kitchen would bang open and in would come Granny Fair at a dead run, shouting out orders she might have written down or might not have. She swerved, every time, to the dessert counter, where lines of tiny chocolate, vanilla, and butterscotch puddings had been set out in paper cups for the lunch crowd. You got a pudding free sometimes with a hamburger steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans, or a barbecue sandwich, fries, and slaw, or, if you were Granny Fair, anytime you damn well wanted one.
She would snatch one off the counter, and a plastic spoon would somehow materialize in her hand, and by the time she had made her turn to go back to the dining room it was gone, and she slam-dunked the cup and spoon into the trash can and hit the doors again. The whole trip lasted maybe ten seconds, and maybe three bites. My mother tried to keep count one day, but it was impossible.
“And then, when she come back, she’d get another’n, and in three bites it was gone, too, and when she come back she’d get another’n. It seemed like, every time she came through there, she got one.” Management did not care; Granny Fair moved faster than any big woman they had ever seen, and was worth every pudding she consumed. She floated through that dining room on a sugar high, floated from car to car at the curbside, and they would have had to hire three non-pudding-eating waitresses to do that one old woman’s job.
* * *
• • •
You knew it was a real barbecue joint because they misspelled it, with pride.
The ad, in The Anniston Star, told
you all you needed to know:
RED’S PIT BAR-B-QUE
Owned & Operated by R. C. “Red” Harrison
(located in)
Harris Trailer Park
Jacksonville Highway
Open 7 days a week,
5 a.m. to 12 midnight
Call 7-2593
She knew her customers, or at least she knew most of their names. It was easy. They were embroidered right there on the pockets of their shirts. This was their place, too.
There was a reason why the phone number on the newspaper ads had only five digits. If you couldn’t figure out the rest of it, you were obviously just passing through, and they could do without you. You might try to order tuna salad, or white bread with your pinto beans, or say something mean about Lurleen Wallace. Anniston was the biggest place between Birmingham and Atlanta, but this café was never intended for tourists, though truck drivers and old soldiers were welcome as long as they did not talk on and on about how they did things up north.
It was open from 5:00 a.m. till midnight because Anniston was a twenty-four-hour city then if you worked with your hands, and Red’s caught at least pieces of the first shift, the second, and the third, coming and going. The city workers filed in all day, the ones who paved the streets, rode the garbage trucks, checked the water meters, cut the grass, and dug the ditches. The mechanics and the gas-station attendants came at noon, scrubbed clean with Octagon soap up to their forearms or elbows, sitting with the police and state troopers and housepainters and nurses, and with the insurance men in their short-sleeve shirts and clip-on ties. The body-and-fender men all smelled like Bondo, and the secretaries smelled like Evening in Paris.
They still made some steel here then, and trains lumbered through the city loaded with new iron, scrap iron, and slag, which piled into black hills on the west side. The chemical plants filled the air with the complicated aromas of dangerous toxins and money, and people will always take a paycheck over caution, even if it does come powdered in PCBs. People here wanted and needed to work; they did not call the sewing plants “sweatshops,” and you could start a revolution here easier than you could organize a union. Sweat and grime and even a little blood and poison were just what a person had to bear up to, to get by. Hell, even war. All they asked was that they not do it all hungry.