by Paula Deen
We set this big old silver tray of potatoes up in the back of my Lincoln Continental that had no paint on the hood. It was drizzling rain, and we were in a hurry. I was going down Eisenhower Drive, and all of a sudden the car in front of me stopped short. I had to get that Continental under control, which I did, but when I looked up into my rearview mirror, there was Dora. Bam! She hit me, the potatoes came flying over my head and hit the windshield. My beautiful tree snapped in two, vegetables flew everywhere. I ran back to Dora’s car and said, “Dora, we ain’t got time to file no accident report, it’s just you and me, so let’s try to repair this damage, fast.” We had to try to somehow bend the tree back together, and we sure lost a lot of potatoes. We were crying so hard, we sounded like cows that had been cut.
We got to the party and managed to patch up most of the food, so no one noticed any problem. Then we snuck out to the club’s kitchen and collapsed into each other’s arms. Dora’s very emotional, even more than I am. I mean, she can cry something awful, and we cried through the whole party. I remember saying, “Well, we’ll never get this business ever again,” but, you know what? When The Lady & Sons finally opened, many of the people at that Christmas party became our best customers. That day I learned the art of putting the best face on trouble, and it works. Most of the time.
But now I was trying to raise money for collateral so I could open the restaurant of my dreams, The Lady & Sons. Every which way I turned with the first bank I went to was a dead end. They wouldn’t help me out of my predicament. I remember going to Coastal Bank and they played me along for weeks saying they thought they could help me, until they called and said, “Sorry, we can’t take the risk with you.” Then I went to First Union Bank and was told I had to talk to a man named Doug McCoy. Doug gave me a tiny glimmer of hope. There was a chance, he thought. I was desperate and clung to that chance.
I felt so hopeless because I knew that if the bank didn’t come through, there was only one option left—and I hated the idea of it like poison. There were a couple of tough businessmen in Savannah who’d often told me they’d like to be partners with me. Each time I heard that, warning bells went off in my head. I knew it wouldn’t work; I was concerned that they would just use my growing good reputation, have me work myself to death, and then take most of the profit. Now, having heard I’d signed an expensive lease, they were circling me like sharks in the water. I knew I would be no good with a partner I didn’t trust with my life. Still, I was almost to the point where I had to consider it when Doug McCoy called to say maybe I could go through the Small Business Administration and put together a package with a loan from his bank. Problem was that his bank needed twenty-five thousand dollars in addition to the twenty thousand I had already saved as collateral in order for the bank to lend me money for the renovation. It was twenty-five thousand I sure didn’t have.
So it seemed the Small Business Administration wouldn’t hop aboard. The businessmen circled closer.
During all this time, I’d been talking and moaning and groaning to my Aunt Peggy and Uncle George Ort every day. I knew they felt so bad for me. They offered the most loving sympathy.
One day, I got very tired. I could feel a depression setting in; it was a terribly familiar feeling. I got up, did a catering job, and then went back to my bed. For a week, I dragged myself around but spent most of my time in bed. There just seemed no use to my fighting for this location because there was only one bit of bad news after another.
I recognized that particular kind of exhaustion, that particular kind of dread.
It didn’t help that Jamie had moved to Atlanta to start a new life for himself. He was just so ready, so eager, to get away from me and the business. He could not run fast enough. He would have rather starved to death in Atlanta—which is what he was doing at a job paying less than sixty bucks a week.
Bobby was unemployed because I’d taken him away from his job in sales to work for The Bag Lady. I needed him to deliver the corporate lunch catering jobs, which he despised. He was renting a room from a couple of his friends; he’d come pick up the catered lunches when I was done making them, deliver them, and I’d give him a portion of the money when I got paid.
We were living hand to mouth once again. And agoraphobia was creeping back into my life, slowly, slowly.
One day, when I was close to the end of my endurance, Uncle George called with more than sympathy.
“Paula,” he quietly said, “your Aunt Peggy is fixin’ to loan you the money you need.”
That’s Southern roots. I was not her biological child but I was hers, anyway. Aunt Peggy knew I was being pushed into a terrible corner and I’d have to give up everything I worked for in the last seven years. She believed in me and was willing to put her money where her mouth was. She and Uncle George came over that night and brought with them a certificate of deposit for twenty-five thousand dollars—exactly how much I was short for collateral for the bank loan that would let me start renovating the building. They put up that CD and saved my life; they saved all our lives. My Aunt Peggy gave me more than money—she gave me a choice. I didn’t have to kowtow to any businessman and just take what some stranger would be willing to throw my way because it was a good deal for him. I could be self-sufficient and stand on my own two feet.
I will never forget: here I was, scared and powerless, and that was the exact moment when my Aunt Peggy told me she was so proud of me. “I know a winner when I see one,” she said.
Oh, I will never forget. The depression flew out the window and I was back in business!
It crushed me so bad that I had to be helped that way, but I vowed it would be the last time I was ever in that position. Well, don’t you know that not only did Aunt Peggy’s CD money earn her the regular interest because it was still in the bank (only in my name), but I also paid her double that interest. She was making three times as much as she made before she lent me the CD. Aside from having the greatest heart on the planet, my Aunt Peggy is a shrewd businesswoman. It was a good deal for her, she said, and she trusted me to make her whole again, financially. We were family, weren’t we?
I would have eaten dog poop and barked at the moon before I didn’t get that CD back to her, plus the double interest while the bank held it as collateral for me. I’d do whatever it took to make it work. In only one year, actually, I built up our account so much that the bank felt comfortable in releasing that CD back to me, and Aunt Peggy.
But money was still so tight, so tight. Bobby and I couldn’t even bear to watch the renovations as they started; it was too painful and too scary. Finally, I saw the light at the end of a great darkness—we were really going to get it done.
After that, every single day I didn’t have a private catering job I came downtown to watch my restaurant grow during the year it took to get the job done. I’d take bologna and bread so Bobby and I could have sandwiches at lunchtime.
In those days—now we’re talking 1995—it was like I was wearing blinders. I was a one-vision gal—a single woman with two children trying to survive—and I didn’t allow myself to mentally move out of my own little world. I’m ashamed to tell you this, but I still didn’t know, nor did I care about, anything else that was happening in the United States, Europe, or Africa. It was my way: if I didn’t concentrate on what I needed to do I’d be distracted from my way.
It happened to be the year O. J. Simpson was on trial for murder, 168 people were killed when a federal building in Oklahoma City was destroyed, and everyone was talking about the Unabomber. I hardly noticed. Closer to home that year, the Carolina Panthers beat the New York Jets, and in Virginia, Christopher Reeve was paralyzed in a riding accident, ending his career as Superman.
I wasn’t really connected to any of it. I was working too hard on being Superwoman, or, at the very least, Miss Wilkes.
Even watching the new restaurant get rebuilt was stressful—and expensive. I was driving a used-up old Lincoln Continental that I’d bought from my ex-husband, who was back s
elling cars in Albany. At first I was so proud of that car, but I didn’t have it long before the darned engine burned off all the paint on the hood. Not a good look. I would park downtown to oversee the renovations as best as I could, but some days I literally did not have parking-meter money. To add a little more misery, I had an expired registration on the car and couldn’t afford to buy a new tag. Every time I got a parking ticket (and I got plenty!), I also got an extra fifty-dollar ticket for the expired tag. Before that restaurant was finished, I owed the city well over a thousand dollars in tickets that I simply didn’t have the money to pay off.
It was a year of downtime with literally no income but what my catering business brought in. As the construction dragged on, I became poorer with each passing day. One day Bobby came to me and said, “Momma, I’m real hungry but we have zip money.” It was true. We had none, none at all. It was then I thought of a little change box I’d stowed away and, with Bobby following close behind, we went to check it out. Sifting through the coins, my heart stopped: there at the bottom of the box was a fifty-dollar bill I’d hidden for a rainy day. The rain was coming down but the sun was shining! Bobby and I laughed our heads off, then quickly headed to McDonald’s and ordered two number-three Value Meals.
As for Jamie, Atlanta had not turned out to be everything that he had thought. I said, “Well, son, we’ve got the building, and Bobby and I are going to open this fabulous restaurant downtown and we’re going to call it The Lady & Son.” My heart about stopped when, one day, my older boy told me he’d thought about it and realized he had to be with his mother and his brother. Jamie came back, and Bobby and I were ecstatic. Now the restaurant would become The Lady & Sons, in honor of my boys.
Before we opened I had to deal with hiring a staff. I was the main cook, of course, but now we also needed some trusted professional help.
When we finally got The Lady & Sons open, there was Dora, of course, Jamie, Bobby, me, and a young man whom I will love forever like he was my third son—Rance Jackson. I’ll never forget the day he came into our lives. We had a cardboard table set up in the restaurant, and Rance, who had been a cook in the army, came in to apply for a job as a cook. I was on the phone but I was watching this young man talk to my sons, who told him we didn’t need any more cooks—and I watched him walk out. Just as soon as I could get away from what I was doing, I asked Jamie, “Who was that young man and what job did he apply for?” Jamie said, “Don’t know who he is but he wants to be a restaurant cook.”
“Chase him down. Go get that young man,” I said.
I’d seen pure goodness in his eyes. I can always tell about people. So my two boys hauled ass running down that street to catch Rance and they brought him back and we hired him on the spot.
Our projected opening date kept getting moved back, and moved back, and moved back. My dream was to open by St. Patrick’s Day, 1995; then I said if we can open in September 1995, it will be all right. When that didn’t happen, I remember saying if we can open in November and get some Christmas business, we’ll still be all right. Well, everything just drug out, and drug out, and drug out. We were still living on my catering jobs out of the house—I had one almost every day. But it was like God was trying to tell me it was time to move on: the day after Christmas, all the calls for catering just stopped. It was like someone turned off a faucet. How would we have lived if we didn’t have the new restaurant opening? I don’t know. I only know that God was on my side.
Nobody called me for another catering job, and we opened the restaurant on January 8, 1996.
My children didn’t want me to open for dinner. They wanted us to come in, serve lunch, and get out. Well, disaster almost struck that very first day. It wouldn’t be a Paula Deen melodrama if everything went off smooth as butter. So here’s a memory that sticks in my craw like a chicken bone; I don’t ever open the doors to my restaurant today without thinking of it.
Early on January 8, the place was a madhouse, with us getting ready to meet and greet the world in the brand-new Lady & Sons. The telephone rang about ten in the morning, around forty-five minutes before opening time. It was my dear friend and accountant, Karl Schumacher. Karl’s the most moral man you could ever hope to meet; I know his momma must be so proud of him. You know, I’m not the brightest bulb in the bunch, but I’ve had enough sense to hire people who are smarter than me.
“Paula, we have got to talk. We are in terrible trouble here,” said Karl.
I was running around like a wild woman trying to get this restaurant open at eleven, trying to think of everything. I mean, I was insane running around, no makeup. I just looked like hell, and was trying so hard to get everything done, and trying to teach this little staff how serious it all was, no less than life or death, and if they were going to help me, they had no choice but to do it right. But Karl quietly said, “Paula, both your bank accounts are overdrawn.”
He was talking about my business and my construction accounts—I didn’t even have a personal account to be overdrawn. I said, “Karl, we’re like forty-five minutes away from opening. Please just give me an opportunity to get this restaurant open.”
When I hung up the phone with Karl, my heart in my mouth, I happened to look in the cash register.
“Well, just kick me running naked,” I groaned, because I saw that I had no money at all to make change. I couldn’t have made change for five dollars.
Lovely. Real professional.
I turned around and picked up the phone, and I called my banker friend Doug. Since I was only a little fish in the bank’s big pond of big-shot customers, Doug had turned me over to a junior associate, the most precious young black man named Eric. Doug got Eric on the phone for me.
“I know my accounts are overdrawn, Eric,” I said, “but I’ve got a terrible, terrible, problem. I’m opening in about thirty minutes, and I don’t have a plug nickel. Would you and the bank please let me cash a really bad check for two hundred dollars?”
And, without missing a beat, Eric said, “Paula, we have not come with you this far to stop you now. Come get your two-hundred-dollar start-up change.”
We finally opened at eleven am and I could make change for people.
If any people came. I had no money for advertising. We hadn’t served anyone in a restaurant in almost a year and there was no way I could have let my former patrons know that we were opening up in the new location.
We built it—and they came. Somehow, seventy-six of my old customers showed up—most of them people I had served at the Best Western. The boys and I spent the whole entire lunch on the floor out there with the guests, hugging them and crying and thanking them for not forgetting us and for supporting our efforts. I’d run back and forth from the kitchen to the dining room to try to make sure everything was just perfect for those perfect jewels, those old friends and customers.
I’m proud to say that I’ve never been overdrawn since. It took me only a few weeks to get enough money to get those accounts back up and running. I learned a lesson: you have to have faith in people. What would I have done had no one had faith in me?
And the food was glorious and good. And Southern. I would work the buffet with Dora. Bobby was great with people and so he worked the front of the house, greeting the customers he knew and especially the ones he didn’t know. Rance turned out to be everything that I saw in his eyes; he, Dora, and Jamie were doin’ most of the actual cooking, with my direction. Jamie was a line cook, and to watch him on the line was a beautiful thing. A line cook is up there on the cook line of stoves, griddles, and deep fryers, doing the frying, grilling, and baking—just as you’d think. It’s a dance, an orchestration, a ballet. Jamie and Rance would station themselves back there, laughing and flipping the hoe cakes, and they became dear friends. I just loved watching those two cook together. They could turn and burn like no one else.
Well, word of mouth brought local people in. Then the tourists found us. On the south side, we didn’t know what a tourist was. We would have the most
fabulous time out there on that restaurant floor with everybody laughing and enjoying the food. I felt so blessed and fortunate. I was given the opportunity to become victorious.
That’s the good news.
I’m here to tell you what excruciatingly hard work it all was. If I thought working at The Lady was tough, I had no idea what was in store for me here in my very own place. There was, by the way, no Food Network television crew back there making everything come out smooth and in duplicates. The hours were impossibly long, and frankly, I was the control freak of the world. My method of teaching somebody was, “Give it to me, let me do it. Give it to me now, damn it.” Deep inside, I felt like if I ever allowed anybody else to touch my menus, my pots and pans, my sauces, my refrigerator, my stove, it could never possibly be right because I was the only one capable of achieving perfection—and I wouldn’t settle for anything less in my dream come true—a real restaurant of my own. Of course, Jamie and Rance and Dora and Bobby were terrific—but still, I was in everybody’s pots. I was at everybody’s station. I was taking orders and delivering plates to tables. I had my eye on every speck of food that was produced. I criticized everything.
Would you have liked to work with me? No? That’s what I thought. Neither did my sons. But whatever was necessary to complete the mission is what I wanted to do. Some people call Southern women steel magnolias to show our unfailing survival instinct. Well, if we got dimples of steel, so what. Things have to be right.
A long time ago, I’d decided we’d only serve Southern cooking. My roots were Southern, and I had to be true to myself. I always believed the old saying “Do what you know.” I couldn’t have pretended I was some European chef. I would have made an ass of myself. But I knew I was a Southern cook, with Southern plantation cuisine my specialty, and couldn’t nobody trick me there. So, that’s what I had to do.
Fried chicken, for example, was always on the buffet, and we always had a second meat that would change daily. The other meat choice could be meat loaf, it could be country fried steak and gravy, it could be pot roast, it could be fried or baked pork chops. There were a few menu items written in stone: fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, and collard greens. Those three things would never change. Why? We listened to our customers, and we found that they wanted to know every time they came in that those three were going to be on the buffet menu. They also wanted rice and gravy. They would have killed you for my pan-fried corn. They loved the squash casserole and the broccoli casserole. And then we started putting sweet potatoes on the buffet. Well, Lord have mercy!