by Julia Reed
It has been more than a decade since my Mississippi wedding, but apparently the snakes continue to hang around the doorsteps. The last time I was home, my mother shrieked at me to “shut the door!” using additional language she reserves for dire occasions. For a refreshing change, the mosquitoes weren’t swarming, so I was confused. “It’s not the mosquitoes,” she said. “It’s the snakes.” Snakes? Okay then, best to keep the door shut. There’s a reason Mississippi State University’s Extension Service has issued a downloadable pamphlet called “Reducing Snake Problems Around Homes.”
The pamphlet makes the point that chemicals and fumigants have never effectively repelled snakes, and that home remedies concocted to keep rat snakes (the proper name of the chicken snake that attended my wedding lunch) at bay also have proved fruitless. These range from cayenne pepper spray to artificial skunk scent, but at our house we’ve always gone straight for the hoe. It is usually wielded by Frank Liger, the man in charge of my parents’ house, garden, and pretty much every other aspect of their lives, but he is often forced to employ a helper to stay on top of the reptile situation. Frank reckons that hundreds of snakes reside in our six-acre yard and says that even when he is not actively looking for them, he runs into one or two a day.
The morning after my mother’s meltdown, I found Frank and his helper with three black racers they’d cornered in a clump of bamboo. This is not easy to do. Described as curious (they will raise their heads out of the grass to check out what’s going on) and extremely quick (Frank calls them road runners), they also eat stuff like rats and even other snakes. But Frank was not interested in their more helpful qualities, he was interested in keeping them out of the house. “When I see one,” he said, “I try to do him as quick as I can.” What about king snakes? I asked. Their diet actually includes racers, and unlike their prey, they don’t often strike. “I don’t trust them either,” he said. “A snake is a snake. I’m not fooling with anything crawling on their stomachs. I know they are the devil.”
Which brings us to another point: the resurgence in snake handling in certain Pentecostal churches. In May 2012, a preacher named Mark Wolford died of a bite inflicted by a yellow timber rattlesnake during a service in West Virginia. Though his father had died the same way twenty-nine years earlier, and he himself had barely survived at least four bites from copperheads, he remained undeterred, believing that if you die, it simply means it’s your time to go. It also means that you provoked the hell out of a normally skittish snake—copperheads in particular will try hard, according to my snake book, to avoid confrontation. Prior to the fatal attack, Wolford had passed the rattler around to members of his congregation; when he sat down on the ground next to it, the snake put an end to the proceedings by biting him on the thigh.
At this point, I have to say that I’m sort of with the snake. According to my buddy Rob Ballinger, a biologist with the Mississippi Fish and Wildlife Foundation, 75 percent of all bites from venomous snakes occur when someone is trying to kill or harass them. Being passed around to people shouting, speaking in tongues, and jumping up and down in time to tambourines must surely qualify as the latter. Still, the preachers persist. Less than two months after attending Wolford’s funeral, Andrew Hamblin, the twenty-one-year-old pastor at the Tabernacle Church of God in LaFollette, Tennessee, asked his county’s commissioners to repeal a state law prohibiting the ownership of venomous snakes. The commissioners quashed the resolution, and the law, enacted in 1947 after snakebites killed five people in churches during a two-year period, still stands.
Hamblin, who has been bitten four times, ignored the vote, posted news of an upcoming service on Facebook, and allowed a news crew to film it. Before the service began, a church member pulled three copperheads out of a wooden box, swung them over his head, and handed them to Hamblin, who raised his free hand in prayer. “My main thing is to see lost people saved,” he said, “but I would love to do it under the anointment of God with two rattlers in my hand.”
All this stuff goes back to a little-known passage in the Gospel of Mark, which reads in part, “They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them.” I’m no theologian, but I’m not sure that’s the first passage referring to snakes I’d zero in on. For one thing, most biblical historians say the passage wasn’t even in the first Greek versions of Mark. More important, the serpent was identified as the guy you want to seriously avoid pretty much from the get-go. In case anyone needs reminding, my aforementioned friend Jessica and her two sisters, Eden and Bronwynne (aka the Brent Sisters), recently released an excellent CD of their mother Carole’s songs, one of which contains the following instructive lyrics: “Adam and Eve had a real nice pad in a kingdom by the sea./Along came a snake, a rake on the take, and the landlord demanded the key.”
Temptation, as we know, strikes everyone, even in this seemingly off-putting area. A roundup of recent deadly snakebites in our region includes one in Chattanooga that occurred when the victim was trying to determine a copperhead’s sex and another in Putnam County, Florida, when a fire marshal reached for a rattler who sought refuge under a shed after his neighbor shot at it. I am fairly sure I don’t know anybody that crazy, which is why we didn’t incur the wrath of the chicken snake that day at the party. My snake book says that rat snakes are “ill-tempered” and “will readily defend themselves” when provoked. In our case, no defense was necessary, since we were all too busy eating and drinking to notice the thing, much less provoke it. Also, I think the snake was just biding his time. The species has been known to climb trees as high as forty feet in search of birds and the contents of their nests. As it happened, the lunch tables’ very chic centerpieces were abandoned nests collected from the wilds of a typical Delta backyard. The nests were empty, of course, but the snake didn’t know that. What he knows is that he and the birds (and the bears and the deer and the gators and on and on) still own the place. The rest of us are very recent visitors.
Mastering the Hunt
I come from a state, Mississippi (and an area within it, the Delta), that is widely known for its passion for outdoor pursuits, chief among them hunting. According to a recent survey, Mississippi boasts more than ten hunters per square mile, and I swear I think I know at least half of them. I have feasted on countless carcasses of their venison and duck, I’ve been presented with such unlikely (but much loved) tokens of affection as turkey feet and feathers, I’ve been a guest at many a festive field breakfast to mark the opening day of dove season. Arguably the most famous hunt on American soil occurred just down the road from where I grew up—the 1902 bear hunt at which President Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot his cornered quarry, an act that gave birth to the now classic teddy bear.
It’s embarrassing, then, that hunting to me has been all about breakfast casseroles and Bloody Marys. While I’m happy to avail myself of the spoils of other people’s wars, the only thing I have successfully aimed at and hit was a rusted beer can atop a fence post.
There was one misguided duck-hunting foray during my college years with my lifelong running buddies Anne and Elizabeth McGee and my Georgetown roommate, Anne Flaherty. The latter, who hailed from Boston, was then a Delta novice, and it was decided by the McGee sisters’ maternal uncle Jody Gee (yes, Anne Ross Gee married Burrell McGee and good things happened all around) that she should be schooled in our native pursuits. Since he had never thought to school the rest of us, we were singularly ill prepared when we piled into Elizabeth’s Ford Granada to make the trek to Carroll County for the afternoon hunt. In order to look good for the ducks (or, more to the point, our fellow hunters), Anne McGee plugged a set of electric rollers into the car lighter and began to roll her hair. I am pretty sure some beers were consumed. When we got there, Jody had us practice on some Schlitz cans, and we were feeling pretty competent until we got into the boats. That’s when we realized that the ducks were far, far away, plus they moved. Not that there were very many of them. Jody had made the grave error of spl
itting us between two vessels, which meant that we had to yell to make conversation and/or ask for the flask to be passed. In the end, everyone gave up. When we gratefully disembarked, Jody’s friend Herman thought it would be hilarious to impersonate the game warden and demand to see our hunting licenses, which of course we didn’t have. Given that the rest of Jody’s companions were named Perchmouth, Rubber Lips, and Fat Cat, we had to wonder if Anne’s grooming efforts had been worth the trouble. Either way, I can safely say that none of us has endeavored to repeat the experience.
Not until almost forty years later, that is, when I participated in two life-changing hunts. The first was in February, a re-creation of the momentous bear hunt, organized by Hank Burdine, master of the hunt—and pretty much everything else to do with grand times and big fun—at our friend Howard Brent’s Panther Tract, a 4,400-acre wilderness paradise near the Yazoo River. In Roosevelt’s day, thousands of black bears roamed the Mississippi Delta, which was then also home to enormous swaths of bottomland forests. But by the 1930s, the desire to get at the Delta’s fertile soil meant that most of the forests had been cleared and the swamps drained, and the bear population had dwindled to a tragic dozen. Now protected, with its habitat on the mend, the black bear currently numbers more than 150 and is happily on the rise.
Needless to say, we would not be going after the fragile bear, but wild hogs, which have all but taken over the state. For historical purposes the hunt would be much like the bear hunts of old, in which hunters on horseback chased hounds on the scent and often literally jumped into the fray, killing the bear with a knife or a pistol rather than a rifle (better to protect the prized dogs). I get that the visceral nature of things may well gross some people out, but it keeps things authentic and highly sporting, and we’d also be performing a service of sorts. The hogs are an extraordinarily expensive nuisance, eating up pretty much everything in their paths, including the levees, the crops, and the Natchez Trace Parkway. A single hog consumes an astonishing ton of food per year, and they are also super busy. They give birth as early as six months of age, and they’re seriously good at outsmarting people.
All this is to say there’s no season for wild hogs—I know farmers who hire helicopters from which to shoot them from the sky at night. While folks insist that their meat makes excellent eating, there aren’t enough diners in the world to reduce the population by 70 percent a year, which is what it would take just to keep them stable. But these pesky problems were far beyond our purview on the glorious, crisp morning of the hunt. For the occasion, Hank had managed to assemble most of the descendants of the participants in the original hunt, including: Roosevelt’s great-great-grandson Simon Roosevelt, a devoted conservationist and avid hunter; Billy Percy, great-grandson of Roosevelt’s friend Senator LeRoy Percy; Harley Metcalfe III, who brought the knife his grandfather Clive Metcalfe used during a second (more successful) hunt with Roosevelt; and Huger Foote, the photographer son of Civil War historian Shelby Foote and great-grandson of Roosevelt’s hunting partner, also named Huger. (The decision by Foote and the president to leave the blind for refreshment was what led to the tethered bear—when the beast was chased through, there was no one on hand to take a shot. The fearless guide, Holt Collier, wrestled the bear to save his dogs before tying him to a tree.)
The event began the night before with a huge bonfire, lots of guitar playing, and a feast that included a (domestic) pork roast. At daybreak, dozens of hunters on horseback arrived, the dogs were let out of their pens, and the chase was on. True to form, the hogs proved elusive, though at least a half dozen were dispatched. I was proud to note that there were as many female hunters as male, though I was not among them, content to view the proceedings from the back of a four wheeler. Still, it must be said that I was not just a little jealous of my pal Melody Golding, the good-looking and gifted horsewoman who’s written a book about hog hunting and who sported a formidable handmade knife on her hip. I also learned that more than freezer fodder can come from having a hunting-obsessed loved one. Harley Metcalfe’s ever-stylish wife, Gayden, wore not a knife but a beautiful pair of gold-capped boar’s teeth on a chain around her neck. Mostly, though, I was just happy to be there. The setting was stunning, the company good, and the opportunity to mark the hunt held 115 years prior in such a respectful and celebratory manner was not lost on any of us. Thus it was that the aforementioned Mr. Metcalfe persuaded me to go deeper into my exploration of hunting’s pleasures. For years I’d ribbed Harley and his fellow turkey hunters about engaging in a practice I’d always perceived as the worst kind of torture. As anyone who has ever met me will attest, I’m the most impatient person in the world, and for the life of me I could not fathom the allure of sitting stock-still, forbidden to make a sound except with a turkey call, waiting—and waiting—for hours on end for a turkey to pass by. But I’ve known Harley all my life, and he’s an intuitive fellow, so I figured he might be onto something.
As it turned out, our timing might have been better. The night before our 3:30 A.M. wake-up call, Hank’s beautiful daughter Alden got married on the banks of Lake Washington. By the time we reluctantly tore ourselves from the festivities, we had an hour-long trek before us to Catfish Point, the hunting club where Harley keeps a very chic “cabin” on stilts and another of God’s wonders: twelve thousand acres on one of the Mississippi River’s most stunning bends. After a quick biscuit breakfast, we repaired to the clubhouse, where a dozen additional members had gathered to draw for their spots. Despite the abominable (to me) hour, it was a jolly group, with muddy Labradors running all about and bits of gossip (there had been two more weddings in town) exchanged, and I remembered how much the familiar bullshit patter of Delta men and dogs thoroughly restores my soul.
As we walked out, the only sounds were those of our feet making their way through the brush and the earliest of the birds. After we situated ourselves against the trunk of an exceedingly wide tree, my first test arrived in the form of a mosquito buzzing away between my right eye and my mesh camo mask. When I moved to brush it away, Harley made his own almost imperceptible move to stop me and, miraculously, I did. We made occasional hushed conversation, watched the light come up and change, listened to the next round of birds. Every now and then Harley demonstrated his prowess with the turkey call, and when seven turkeys paraded right in front of us, I could hardly contain my excitement. A disgusted Harley explained that they were jakes, too young to shoot and too occupied by a nearby female to get out of the way.
Before I knew it, hours had passed. We moved to a blind where we heard a gobbler respond to Harley’s imitation of a love-starved hen. We waited, feeling him behind us, but we were facing the wrong way and dared not move. Finally, something spooked him and we called it a day. Now, Harley is an excellent hunter who every year bags the club limit before heading off to Texas, where he shoots the limit there. I knew he was not happy about being bested by the bearded bird (which he got the next day), and on the way back into town he apologized for the lack of action. What he didn’t realize was that I’d seen plenty. In a matter of hours, he’d turned me on to an experience that had taught me the art of Zen and made me profoundly grateful to be part of the very earth we’d been sitting on. Next year he’s vowed to teach me to shoot, and it’s a skill set I’d at long last be proud to have. Still, I doubt the next time I’m against that tree, I’ll bother to raise a weapon. There are far too many other things to do.
Part Three
Southern Sustenance
A Delta Original
One of the things I’ve always liked about the Mississippi Delta in general, and my hometown, Greenville, specifically, is that there’s always been a surprisingly cosmopolitan mix of cultures and nationalities. When Greenville was incorporated (again) just after the Civil War (during which it was destroyed by Sherman’s troops after the Siege of Vicksburg), the first elected mayor was Jewish, as were the owners of the first businesses to open and the founder of the first school. Since 1900, the majority of the cit
izenry have been African American, but there is also a sizable Syrian population, as well as large numbers of Chinese and Southern Italians. What we have never had in any significant amount are Mexican Americans.
Thus it likely came as no small surprise to the world at large a few years ago when our much-loved former mayor, the late Chuck Jordan, issued a proclamation declaring Greenville the Hot Tamale Capital of the World. The ceremony on the steps of city hall was followed a few months later by the first annual Delta Hot Tamale Festival, which featured twenty-odd vendors whose wares I was lucky enough to sample in my official capacity as a judge. Most of the five thousand folks who turned up appeared to be fairly local, so they knew better than to expect a mariachi band or the comparatively bland and crumbly Mexican tamales that bear little resemblance to the moist, delicious, and highly seasoned Delta versions.
The latter are a predominantly African-American delicacy, but the ones I’ve been eating all my life, from Doe’s Eat Place, get even more complicated. Doe Signa Sr. was a first-generation Sicilian immigrant whose now landmark restaurant began life as a juke that also sold take-out spaghetti and tamales to his mostly African-American neighbors. When his son, Doe Jr., married his wife, “Sug” (short for “Sugar”), he warned him never to reveal the tamale recipe to her lest she leave him for someone else with whom she might share the formula. More than thirty years later, in 2007, the couple took the stage at Lincoln Center with the rest of the family after Doe’s was named an “American Classic” by the James Beard Foundation, and Sug described the atmosphere of the restaurant, which remains refreshingly unchanged: “People come together, never meet a stranger, it’s the American way.”
Much the same could be said of the creation of the Delta tamale itself, about which there is much speculation but little hard info, though the good folks at the Southern Foodways Alliance have made a valiant effort. The shortest and most likely version is that it dates back to the early twentieth century, when migrant workers were occasionally brought in from Mexico to pick cotton alongside the local African Americans, who would certainly have been familiar with the two main ingredients, cornmeal and pork. Another theory has the Italian population traveling down the river and doing their own recipe trading with migrant workers.