by Rick Bragg
As they finish, cover each with a slice of cheese, or preferably two. This will make a mess but will be worth it, we believe. If you are cooking for a voracious meat eater, just put two patties, separated by a slice of cheese, on the bun. Again, it is the crispness that matters.
To build the burger:
Do not toast the buns. Place the patty—or two—on the bottom of each bun, cheese side down.
This will keep it from sliding around.
On the patty, put a nice dollop of sauce—enough to cover it, but not sloppy.
Then, in this order, add about two pickle chips, one slice of tomato, a handful of lettuce, and one wheel of Vidalia, the whole slice. Spread a little mayonnaise on the top bun.
Serve it with chips or, of course, fries, and a side of slaw.
A root beer does not hurt.
* * *
• • •
“I didn’t get to work there as long as I’d liked to have. Me and your daddy got back together, and we moved off—up there to Spring Garden, up above Piedmont—and I didn’t have a car, and Granny Fair just couldn’t come and get me every day all the way up there,” she said. It might have been more than she could stand, anyway, to ride the entire length of Calhoun County with that death-defying old woman in her four-door rocket ship.
“I heard, a long time later, that Shelby got his restaurant, and I was happy for that.”
· 28 ·
“WHEN MOMMA WAS ALL RIGHT”
Tea Cakes
My brothers and me, at the beach with Ava
1966
I WISH you could have seen her stalking those chickens, and her nearsighted.
Oh, she was still able, even still limber, eerily so. And she still had a fine memory of their transgressions. She could remember being pecked, just once, for years and years, and that old woman could hold a grudge. But game chickens tend to look a lot alike, and sometimes she would bait them, lure them, snatch them up, get a good grip, and…at the last second realize she had snatched up the wrong bird.
It would have been a grand story if she had then flung it away to run free and gone in search of the right, bad one, but she did not have time to go plucking roosters from the yard like daffodils.
My big brother and I watched with growling stomachs, and fascination.
“She get the right ’un?” I would ask.
“Nope,” he said.
A terrible squawk would pierce the air.
“But she’s still quick, ain’t she?” I said.
“Yep,” he said.
But sometimes she would spot the right, bad one as it fled the carnage, or at least the one she believed to be it, and she would go after that one, just as intent, just as patient, till she had it in her grip, wrung its neck, looked a little closer, and…
“Damn,” she said.
It was a two-chicken day, two iron skillets cooking side by side on her stove, and we were not sorry a damn bit. A great cook can do that to you, can make you bloodthirsty like that.
I do not know if she ever got the right, bad one. Her mind had never been the same after her husband died.
“But Momma was all right when I let y’all stay with her,” my mother said. “I never would have left y’all to stay with her if she hadn’t been all right.”
When I remember my grandmother, it is not the woman in her middle eighties, rocking quietly, a little befuddled, in a chair in a room filled with stuffed animals and the other doodads that the young, for some reason, bestow upon the old. I think of her the way I did when I was a boy, and she was still the most interesting creature in my world. I guess it is a cliché, but she spoiled me, spoiled us, in the only way she could. She cooked, and cooked, and…
“Y’all went and stayed with her every weekend when we moved up to Spring Garden, and she fried you a whole chicken every time, and made you chocolate pies, and fried pies, and she made you a sack-full of tea cakes…every time.”
“There wasn’t nothin’ wrong with my grandmother,” my brother Sam said.
It may be, he reasoned, that “ever’body else was crazy.”
She, and her great food, was our sanctuary then. My mother, with our little brother, Mark, running buck wild around the house, struggled to survive a marriage that was doomed, and she sent us on those weekends back to my grandma’s little red house, with its mountains of old, cheap purses crammed with prayer requests and empty Juicy Fruit wrappers, and forgotten bags of seed corn, and old radios that were as mute as stone. There were Sears catalogues from the Korean War, newspapers from God knows, and water bills from 1959.
We were ignorant of a lot, but smart enough to know this was, in many ways, as good as life could be.
We ate, and ate, and ate, and at night she told us story after story, of the past of our people, and the fables built on the natural wonder of the foothills, and the creatures there.
I guess there wasn’t anything wrong with her.
In the mornings, she would stand in that tiny kitchen and shake her head.
“There ort to always be some tea cakes,” she said.
Only in the Depression, in the worst of it, did she fail in that.
She would bake them the old way, with plain flour, mixing in her salt and soda. A tea cake was a delicate, subtle thing and should not be messed with, lest something be forgotten somehow in the messin’ around.
She used the most basic ingredients, just butter, egg, sugar, vanilla flavoring, and such.
“I use buttermilk,” she said, “but don’t tell nobody.”
She always said that, about everything.
Even if she gave me a dollar—“Don’t tell nobody.”
She made her dough, rolled it out, and used the lid of a can of Bruton snuff to cut them out. Once she had cut all she could, she rolled out the scrap and cut that, and rolled it again, till she could not cut any more and there was just one little wad of dough that had to be shaped by hand.
Every batch had that little, single, ugly cake.
“Why do you use a snuff can?” I asked.
“ ’Cause it’s sharp,” she said.
They came out of the oven soft in the center with a thin brown ring around the edges.
I’ve used the word “perfect” a lot in this book, I know, mostly to honor these cooks.
But this was perfect.
Well, maybe all but the little ugly one, which she ate herself.
She used a spatula to lift them from the pan, and placed them in a clean cloth flour-sack, or sometimes a pillowcase, and then she hung it on a nail so we could get one every time we walked by till it was empty, till she filled it up again. But she gave the first two off the pan to us, on a real plate, with a little pat of pure white butter. The way to eat it, she said, was to put a smidge of butter on a knife and butter every single bite.
“Why do they call ’em tea cakes?” I asked her.
“ ’Cause rich people eat them with tea.”
Why, hell, I thought. We have tea. We have cakes.
I guess we were rich.
* * *
• • •
But, as with most recipes I tried to draw out of my mother, there was a hitch.
She gave it to me without a measurement for flour.
“Enough,” she said.
I pleaded.
“Just enough.”
It occurred to me that it was no great mystery.
You simply had to do it just like Ava did. Here is Ava’s recipe, passed to us by my cousin Jeanette.
· · ·
Tea Cakes
WHAT YOU WILL NEED
½ cup butter
1 egg
1¼ cups sugar
½ teaspoon baking soda
2 tablespoons buttermilk
Enough plain flour for a soft dough
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
HOW TO COOK IT
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.
First, cream the butter, and add the
beaten egg, and sugar. Dissolve the baking soda in the buttermilk, and, in a large bowl, gradually work in the flour and baking powder until you have a soft dough. Only then work in the vanilla. Roll out the dough—thinner than biscuit, thicker than pie dough—and cut the cakes out. If you don’t have a lid from a can of Bruton snuff, use a cookie cutter, slightly bigger around than a half-dollar.
These will cook quickly. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, till the middle rises, and the edges flatten and turn brown.
Store them in a cloth sack if you can.
Serve them, if you want, with a little pat of butter on the side.
You could, of course, use self-rising flour, but I wouldn’t. Some things were not intended for a modern world.
· 29 ·
MONKEY ON A STRING
Barbecued Rag Bologna Sandwich Dressed with Shredded Purple Cabbage Slaw
Me, before running off to join the circus
1967
THIS WAS THE YEAR I ran away to be a circus midget.
My mother had been mean to me for some time, most of her cruelty resulting from an incident in which I patiently waited for my big brother to get hung up in a barbed-wire fence and busted him with a rock.
I had harbored the grudge that led to that a long time, so long I had actually forgotten why I was mad at him in the first place. But he was bigger than me and as strong as a bull calf, and I knew that any revenge had to happen at just the right time and situation, one that would allow me to bust him one but would also give me a chance to run for my life and hide out, probably till I graduated from high school. I think I might have even prayed for it, for the opportunity, which is a little like praying for a good chance to steal a chicken. I had been to church twice that year, once for the Christmas play and its accompanying treats, and again for dinner on the ground, and you would be surprised how much religion you can soak up in such a slight dose.
My chance came that summer, when we were going for one last swim in the creek that ran through Mr. Paul Williams’s pasture, before the weather turned chill. Sam was squeezing through the strands of barbed wire when he got snagged, not just on the top wire, but on the one below, too. The Lord had placed a good-sized chert rock right there close at hand, so I took good aim, let ’er fly, and ran like a man on fire.
My mother did not whip me then, either, but she yelled at me, which was rare enough, and asked me what I would have done, how I would have even lived with myself, if I had killed my big brother with a rock while he was hung up in a fence. I told her I did not see what the big deal was, since I missed his head.
I missed his torso, too, but caught his knee pretty good, enough to draw a satisfying amount of threats on my life. It did not even hobble him much. My big brother was impervious to harm or pain; he went a month with a broken arm, and claims he went thirteen years with a tooth abscess, but I suspect he is lying.
I had made a few other piddling mistakes that summer, not really worth talking about. My mother, though, like all mothers, liked to stack the cold transgressions and bring them all up anew, with increasing disappointment. Sometimes, like the time I lopped the legs off a new pair of blue jeans with a pair of shop scissors, she cried. So I just had to quit that place. You make your mother cry, you got to hit the road.
I had loved this road, this yard, this place between the fields and streams and gravel, before I turned eight and became more philosophical about things. The yard, the fields, even the cotton wagons where I played were full of high adventure, even danger. We watched hawks from the roof of the shed, and gently tied June bugs to strings so we could watch them buzz round and round, till my mother, with her great heart, let them slip the string. We ran from red wasps, and spent untold hours poking at dead snakes with sticks, and digging up ant beds, to see the intricacy of the tunnels and life so far underground. My grandma continued to sugar me half to death with red and grape Kool-Aid and Juicy Fruit, and always had a dime for some black-walnut or butter-pecan ice cream.
“Why would anybody even want any ice cream other than black-walnut or butter-pecan?” I asked her once.
“God knows,” she said, over a bowl as big as mine.
Then, as if some grand revelation had settled upon her…
“Black-walnut and butter-pecan,” she said, took my bowl from my hands, and refilled it with two big scoops of each.
Like my brother said, there was nothing wrong with our grandma.
But, lately, the magic had just gone out of the place. First grade had been miserable, painful, all bound up, buttoned up, and slicked down. Second grade did not improve, and the teacher had an evil eye, besides. I jumped off the big yellow bus at the end of the day, with Mr. Tom Couch, the driver, telling me to slow my little behind down, and was already peeling off my clothes as I entered the door to the little red house, to get into the short pants and Kool-Aid–stained tank top that allowed a boy to breathe a little bit. But the thing about school was, it was always, always waiting on you, with that evil eye, the morning after.
I was coming off the bus one afternoon, shoestrings dragging in the dirt, when a red wasp, unprovoked, popped me right in the corner of the eye. I screamed and ran to the house, hurling my hated math book into the rosebush, yelling that, on top of everything else, now I was going blind.
My mother daubed on a little wet snuff, so now not only was I blind, but I had snuff and spit in my eye.
Well, to hell with this.
If the magic was gone from this place, this place of creeks, cotton fields, and gentle sloping hills, then I was gone, too.
Then the magic came rolling right down the road.
* * *
• • •
It was still light outside the evening it happened. I was propped in my bed in my grandmother’s little house, a shorted-out electric fan rattling off and on in the window beside my head, a ragged library copy of The Hardy Boys in my hands. The view outside my window was, literally, in black and white: white bolls of cotton and black stalks, as far as I could see. On a moonlit night, they shone not white but a ghostly silver, and as a little-bitty boy I believed I could almost reach out my window and grab a soft handful of cotton and stuff it in my pillow. Now the breeze carried a whiff of cotton poison.
The pickers, I knew, would come at sunrise. The first sound I heard this time of year, every year, was the old trucks limping into the field, and the clang of the tailgates as the pickers stepped down to their labor. My mother and grandmother and aunts would wade into the field with them, for a few dollars a day.
Sometimes, when they picked close enough to our house, the pickers pooled their money and paid my mother to cook a noon meal for them, and they would step from the field and straight to our table, or take their plates to the shade of the chinaberry and willow trees. It was usually just cornbread and beans with a chunk of fatback, but they had been raised too good to ever actually fish that out and left it for the next one, who left it for the next, till, by the time they trudged back into the field, there was still a lonely little piece of pork resting in the empty pot….But even this was good food, and they always praised her as they lifted the straps over their shoulders and dragged their sacks back into the stalks.
I must have drifted off just as the sun began to set. The Hardy Boys had always been a little slow for me; they engaged in almost no fistfights, no shooting, and no cussing whatsoever. There seemed to be few girls, and what few there were seemed to be a little proper for me. It was one of the reasons I loved Westerns. You wouldn’t catch Miss Kitty acting all stuck up and talking about Dartmouth.
I woke like a stick breaking, woke to something that shook the floor of the frame house. I woke to a great trumpeting—not of horns but of beasts. Elephants! It had to be. Elephants, at our door!
It was a sound I had heard only in Tarzan movies at the Midway Drive-In, or in a black-and-white after-school matinee on WBRC, on Dialing for Dollars. It had to be a dream, or what my people had come to fear and call merely “the crazy come early.” Then I he
ard it again, and again.
I wasted several fine seconds in disbelief, wondering if my mind, as my big brother said it would someday, really had turned to mush. Then, rumbling through the window, came what could only be the roar of a big cat, a lion or tiger, answered by another, and another, and another, then a shrieking of monkeys that could be nothing else, and a roar of what I thought must be bears, and…
I tore barefoot through the small house, banged through the screen door, and rushed out into the yard. My mother and two brothers stood in the gravel driveway, openmouthed, as a line of pachyderms as big as dump trucks, their trunks and tails entwined, swayed down the two-lane road.
The sun was setting on a parade, but not the kind the circus brings to a city’s main street, with tumblers and clowns and a ringing calliope, like I had seen on television. This was a workmanlike caravan trundling down a country road, as the circus prepared to set up its show in the fallow field across the road from our house on the Roy Webb Road. The elephants, I suppose, had been unloaded, to exercise them, and they were followed by a throng of garish circus trucks painted to promise the wonders of the universe.
The side panels and tarps had been slid back or thrown back, and massive tigers, perhaps the most beautiful creatures I had ever seen, circled inside the bars. A male lion with a magnificent black mane perused me like I was a pork chop—regally, just like they wrote about in books on Africa I had read. Then a riot of monkeys rolled by, still screaming, crazed and rude, and then an honest-to-God giraffe, and more, and more, and…I would say it was like a dream, but I had never dreamed this good.
My aunt Juanita lived next door to us, and she stood there, too, with her fat beagle, Mugsy, just as one of the elephants shook the air with a sound louder than any natural thing I had ever known. The obese beagle, who had not run a step in about six years, leapt straight up, turned in the air like a cartoon, and, his spindly little legs already in motion as he touched down, raced for the house. He tore through the closed screen door like it was paper, and hid under the bed. “Hid there for two days,” my aunt Juanita said.