by Paula Deen
Like a thunderclap, the words to the Serenity Prayer—the ones that alcoholics use at Alcoholics Anonymous—went through my mind: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference. I’d heard it for years, never paid it much attention, but on this Savannah morning, this sweet, sunny day, I understood the prayer and what I should be praying for. I was free, free at last.
At last, I got it. Sure, I’m gonna die, I said to myself. My children are gonna die. Everyone I love is gonna die. But God has given me today and I’m gonna go out and live today. I won’t die today.
Maybe it was because I was ready, maybe because I’d come to the bottom of my rope and there was no way to go but climb back up, maybe the annoying Denise bugged me so much I had to do something: for whatever reason, at last I understood that I had mentally struggled against accepting my momma’s and daddy’s deaths for too long. Inside, I’d thought if I fought their dying, they might come back. I’d thought if I fought their dying, maybe I’d find out I was adopted and my real parents would come find me. I’d thought—oh, I don’t know what all I thought. You just think crazy like that from the pain. Finally, I knew I would be able to start living. And breathing. And going outside.
It didn’t all get better right away, of course, but now I had that prayer to fall back on when I felt I was going to panic. It was a maddeningly slow process but now I had a handle on it. I devised a gradual cure for myself—walk one block, go home; drive two blocks, drive home; walk two blocks, walk home … Finally, I was able to separate from my safe place. I wanted desperately to improve my life and, most of all, to give my boys wings through either education or a business. Prospects for a college education didn’t look that rosy because money was so tight, so it was going to have to be business, I figured. Together, just maybe, we could figure out what we did best.
I got better and better, and the next thing you knew, I could get in my car and drive all the way to Albany, which was a good thing because too much was going on in Bobby’s life and he failed all his courses in his senior year. I had to go get him and bring him back to me, that was the right thing to do, the thing I should have done right from the start. Bobby finished up his senior year at Windsor High School in Savannah, and by the end of the school year he wouldn’t have gone back to Albany for all the tea in China, but at the time when I retrieved my child, it was traumatic to the bone for him. I was forty-one years old. I’d lived for twenty years in anguish, waiting every day to die. Death fear didn’t paralyze me anymore. I felt as though I had two birthdays; the first was January 19, 1947, the day I was born to my momma and daddy; and the second was June 19, 1989. That was the day I was born to myself, the day I came back to living my days, the day I took control of life. Slowly, I left my house, all by myself. Step by step, I began to make my way in the world.
My husband, in contrast, was losing his way in the world, working less and less and making almost no money. He still held a certain amount of security for me, though, even if his credit in the outside world was pretty horrible. He couldn’t have borrowed a plug nickel if we needed it, and the time was fast comin’ when we’d need that nickel, plug or not. I had to get a job. I decided that I wasn’t putting myself on any front line of a bank again, so once I got out of my bed, I thought I’d be best off registering at a temporary-employment agency and just work around at a couple of places so I could learn my new city. It was only a day or two later that the agency called me to say there was a two-month position available with a Savannah hospital, Memorial Medical Center. Was I interested? Was I! I never will forget the day that call came. Bobby was in his bedroom, and I went in and said, “Son, you will not believe this, I just got a job.”
“Where, Momma?” he asked.
“At Memorial Medical Center,” I answered. “They have hired me to do only light surgeries like tonsillectomies and appendectomies and things like that.”
And he looked at me and he said, “Momma, that is wonderful.”
I had to tell him I was kidding but it felt good to know he thought I could do anything once I got out of the damn bed. Why shouldn’t his momma be able to go over there to do simple tonsillectomies and appendectomies? I kind of thought, after that, if my son had that kind of faith in me, I really could do anything, maybe even a simple hernia repair.
Sometimes when I meet people today, they just assume I was a cook all my life, but it isn’t so. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in any of my orifices and I also wasn’t born with any great desire to cook. I didn’t know what I was born to do but I knew as a young woman that my greatest desire was to be a wife and mother, as I had seen my mother do. It was my dream that my husband would earn the living and take care of us, and that making money would never be my responsibility. I was there for the home and for the children and that’s just the way it was, especially in the South.
It turned out that many times came when I had to rethink my Southern upbringing and assumptions, because I needed to bring in that second income to give Jimmy some relief. At different times in my married life, depending on how well I could function, these are some of the occupations that I pursued: Would you believe I got a real estate license? Would you believe I got an insurance license? I was a banker. I’ve hung wallpaper for a living. Would you believe I took a job at Kroger’s Market hoping one day to be promoted up to a checker? That job was particularly horrifying to me because when you first go to work for Kroger, you start by cleaning. So, there I was in that big old Kroger store on Slappy Drive in my uniform out mopping that floor, cleaning those bathrooms. I was so frightened that an old boyfriend might come into Kroger and see me mopping floors and think that’s how far I had come in my life. I was married. I had children. It was an honest living, but in all honesty, I felt like I was too good for that kind of job and I was just so embarrassed that people would come in and see Paula, the captain of the cheerleaders, carrying a Kroger mop. Is this what I had come to?
One time, I even got this harebrained idea that I was going to sell a grease absorber to garages. Jimmy built me a wagon and painted it the color of my car. I went to the animal-supply wholesalers and bought fifty-pound bags of kitty litter. Then I went around to different garages selling those bags as grease absorbent that could be sprinkled on garage floors. I made sixty dollars a week selling kitty litter.
Not one of those jobs had anything to do with Southern cooking, as you might have noticed. And when I got the job at Memorial Medical Center, I thought that job was just so perfect—even though I wasn’t hired to do no simple tonsillectomies. I was only one block from my house so I could walk to work. I was a biller in Medicaid÷Medicare, maybe the easiest position on the planet, but I made some good friends, really enjoyed my work, and I loved being able to breathe again in the outside world. I probably brought home about two hundred dollars a week, which certainly helped out our situation. That two-month temp job turned into two years.
So, we rocked along for a couple of years. Then it had to happen: in 1988, Jimmy began to get dissatisfied with the Savannah job, as he did with every other job. He decided to take another position, in Warner Robbins, which is right outside Macon, Georgia. He moved there, leaving me and the boys in Savannah, and he’d come home and maybe spend Sunday with us. It was lonely; I still wanted to be with him. I still wanted us to be a family.
There was nothing for it but for all of us to move to Warner Robbins. I emptied out the old house that we’d worked hard to fix up, and put it on the market. The realtor called me one night with a lousy offer. As badly as I needed the money, I said, “No, that offer is pretty insulting. I don’t think I’ll take it.” I would not give my house away, even though we were desperate for money. Maybe that should have been my first sign that I could be a businesswoman: I knew instinctively that you don’t jump at the first offer. But we had to move and we had zilch in our pockets. Until now, I had never asked anybody for money. I would eat shit and bark at the moon before I
would ask anybody for money. But now I had to break down and go to my Aunt Peggy, my momma’s sister, and ask her if she would cosign at the bank with me for a twenty-fivehundred-dollar loan. It was humiliating, but Aunt Peggy came through—she did then and she always does.
So, Jimmy was working at this new dealership, and I was staying at home in Warner Robbins, but I knew I’d have to find a job in this town soon. I was wrong. We were there three months when Jimmy came home and said, “Well, this guy can’t pay me a salary anymore. He doesn’t have the money. I’m going to have to go on straight commission. We’re dead.”
I could not believe it. We’d never survive without a salary.
“The house in Savannah hasn’t sold,” I told him. “We’re going home.” And we did. We moved back into our old Sixtieth Street house and I went right back to work in the hospital. Now I was plotting and planning how to better take care of myself and the boys, figuring out how we could gain our independence. It had finally become crystal clear: I couldn’t rely on my husband. I had to take charge of my own life, and that of the boys.
My friend Ann Hanson told me about a lady in Atlanta who would come into beauty shops with a basket of little snacks and things for women who were having their hair done on their lunch hour and didn’t have the chance to actually eat lunch. Then came my zillion-dollar inspiration: “Well, if she can do snacks, I can do lunches,” I thought. I planned and planned, and decided to call the business The Bag Lady. I talked to my Aunt Peggy and Uncle George every day about my ideas; they were so smart and supportive and wanted nothing more than for me to succeed big. I would lie in bed at night and dream about this little business. I went home to Albany for a weekend, and my Aunt Peggy’s friend drew the most adorable little logo of a bag lady you’ve ever seen. She wore a flowered cape and a flannel skirt, and socks and a hat with a flower in it. She had those long false eyelashes that I love to wear, and wore gloves with the fingers cut out of ’em. And she had this big smile. It was a pretty fair caricature of me, and I was thrilled. My idea was that I would pack an entire lunch, tie it up in a brown bag with a ribbon, and try to sell it in office buildings, where people often didn’t have the opportunity or time to take lunch. I was gonna go into banks, law offices, doctor’s offices, beauty shops—everywhere—and just sell those bag lunches.
I called my Grandmomma Paul to tell her that I’d finally decided to follow in her footsteps. After I rattled on till I was out of breath telling her what I had in mind, I realized there was just silence on the other end. I thought we were disconnected, and was about to hang up, when all of a sudden the silence was broken by my grandmother’s booming voice.
“Paula, have you lost your damn mind?” she bellowed. “Food is the hardest business in the world to be in and you’re telling me you’re jumpin’ into the food business?”
“This is what you have to know, Granny,” I laughed. “The apple don’t fall far from the tree.”
I’d talk with my friends every day about my new idea. I was so excited and everyone cheered me on. Except Jimmy. He just said I was an idiot. It was his favorite word for me. He called me that a lot. Still, he helped me in two big ways. The first was when I told him I wanted to start The Bag Lady, and I also told him I needed some money. That’s when he gave me two hundred dollars from my income tax return check, and that’s what I was allotted to spend on my business. When he gave me the money, he said, “Knock yourself out, bitch.”
Years later, I asked him if he remembered saying “bitch,” and he answered no. But when I asked him if he remembered calling me an idiot so many times, Jimmy looked at me sadly and answered, “I’m the idiot, Paula.”
It was a bittersweet victory.
So, in 1989, when I was about forty-two years old, I jumped into the world of being an entrepreneur. At the time, if you had asked me what that word meant, I could not have told you. All I knew was I needed to become that woman of substance; a responsible, strong person to save my own life and the lives of my boys. Our salvation had to lie in food and cooking because that was all I knew—with the possible exception of cheerleading and being cute.
First off, I wanted our little business to be legal, not some two-bit operation I had to hide from tax collectors. It wasn’t an easy thing to do because the Health Department had certain strict rules about who could prepare food to sell to the public and where the food had to be prepared. I kept calling the Health Department and asking, “Can you come out and look at my house and let me fix sandwiches there?”
“No, Mrs. Deen. That’s against the law; it has to be a place sanctioned and licensed by the city as a proper food-preparation place.”
I’d call back and say, “Well, I’ve got a garage. How about if I go out and clean it up and make sandwiches there?”
“Mrs. Deen,” they said, “it will take a lot of money for you to put a professional kitchen in your garage. Then it’ll have to be inspected and approved. And after you go to the expense, it still may well not be approved.”
Who was I kidding? Putting a professional kitchen in my garage was about as financially possible for us as buying the Supreme Court Building. But then Jimmy did the grandest thing for me—next to taking in Bubba. He had a friend who owned a downtown pool hall that was licensed to prepare and sell sandwiches.
“Any way my wife could get licensed through you?” Jimmy asked his friend. “Sure,” said his buddy. Well, that was wonderful, I thought. I’d work during the night down in their kitchen when it was closed, make my lunches, and then my boys could go out in the morning and sell them. Well, it turned out that pool hall had the nastiest kitchen you’ve ever seen. I wouldn’t want to fix my dog a sandwich in that kitchen. It may have been clean enough for the city of Savannah, but it wasn’t clean enough for me, licensed or not. There were things in that kitchen I wouldn’t want in my sandwich, and they weren’t no pool cues. Hell, I wouldn’t even want those things in my pool hall. No sunshine ever entered those four walls either, so the room was always cold; cold as a well digger’s ass.
Still, if city hall was going to be stubborn, and I had to do it that way rather than in my own shining, clean kitchen, I’d have to figure out a way around the bureaucracy.
Look, sometimes you have to take matters in your own hands, and sometimes there is more than one truth in a telling. I wanted to use the pool hall’s license, but not its kitchen. A gentleman I’ll call Mr. Burrows, this sweet man who used to work as a Health Department inspector, met me at the pool hall one day, and together we were going to fill out the paperwork. You know, I always had the feeling that Mr. Burrows knew what I was up to, but he was so kind, and if I had to lie a little to be legal, he was going to help me. He’d seen that pool hall kitchen.
He pulled out his papers.
Answering the very first question, I knew I was going to have to lie seriously. Thing is, I don’t lie well. Even little white lies show up in my face. But I had to say I was going to make the sandwiches in the pool hall kitchen and get my sandwich-making license through this pool hall. The pool hall was legal. Chez Deen was not. The truth was that I had absolutely no intention of making sandwiches in their hellhole. I would have killed off half the population of Savannah.
I tried to figure out how to truthfully answer the first question, which needed a lie worse than I needed mayonnaise, but the effort stopped me dead in my tracks. I looked hard at Mr. Burrows. As I stared hopefully at him, Mr. Burrows quietly said, “Paula, say yes.” I felt as though I had a stamp on my head saying, Liar. This woman is a liar. But I wrote yes. He asked me the next question, and again I just looked at him. I know that he saw a desperate woman. Again, he said, “Say yes, Paula. And the answer to the next one is no.” We went through the whole trial application like that.
Oh, that Mr. Burrows. I hope he’s readin’ this. I hope he knows how deeply I love him. I filled out the real papers as he taught me, got the license, I was legal, and I made my sandwiches in my own shining clean kitchen. No one got hurt.
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sp; Now, had my husband not laid the groundwork for me there’s a very good chance that I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this book today. I owe him for that. I took the two hundred dollars he gave me, spent about fifty on groceries, forty on a cooler, and the rest on the license and incidentals. I was legal. The Bag Lady was born.
The Bag Lady. It had a nice ring to it.
I could not get myself going quick enough to make those sandwiches. Frankly, it was a good thing I didn’t know how long and hard I’d be running, because I might not have started if I knew. Sixteen-hour, even twenty-four-hour days were not unusual. The worst thing was, in the beginning, it was all a pig in a poke. I couldn’t take orders before I started making the lunches. I didn’t have one customer yet. Instead, I had to make all the lunches first, then try to sell them—not exactly a road map to success.
From the get-go, I operated with another kind of fear—a real one this time. There were always a few people who were calling in to the Health Department and reporting The Bag Lady for “being out and peddling illegal meals that the Paula lady cooks in her house.” Of course, the Health Department would always answer, “Oh, no, she’s licensed. She’s legal.” It petrified me that one day an inspector would follow my children home and find out I was indeed preparing the Bag Lady lunches out of my kitchen.
I’ve got to tell you that making sandwiches was not the mashed potatoes I thought it would be. I knew how to cook, but I didn’t have any lessons on picnicking, and, no question about it, I was making picnic lunches. I started with tuna fish salad sandwiches. The first morning, I got up at five am and made like thirty-seven tuna fish sandwiches. I wrapped them in Saran wrap and put them in the cooler. In an hour they were totally squished. But our first route was the Medical Arts Building in which I worked, and my friends bought all those smushed-up, ugly, but delicious sandwiches. I developed a routine: when I finally made a few customer pals, I’d take orders for the next day, sometimes in person, sometimes over the phone, which I much preferred, because I wasn’t completely over my fear of leaving the house. Jamie would deliver them reluctantly. He didn’t love the sandwich business. He never wanted to be part of it.