by Ray, Janisse
With Yanna, generosity is built into almost everything she does. At the potato tastings, for example, she makes notes of friends’ preferences and, come spring, bestows a handful of slips on them. She had neighbors who had grown an old variety named Nancy Hall, but had lost it. “I got it back for them,” Yanna said. “It’s not the best sweet potato, but they’re happy growing the variety their parents grew.”
“What do I owe you for these?” a neighbor asked Yanna after one such gift.
Yanna replied, “What do I owe you for all the things you’ve taught me?”
With Yanna, I wonder if her choice of sweet potato as a vegetable to embrace isn’t significant. The sweet potato comes close to being a perfect food crop: long-storing, nutrient-packed, easy to grow—and most of all, sweet. It’s a generous plant.
“Why sweet potatoes?” I ask her.
“My son can’t get enough,” she said. “To keep him in food, I bake him a panful. That’s his staple.” It seems too easy an explanation, but Yanna has moved on. She emphasizes that she grows only what her family likes to eat. “I’m a gardener slash cook. I cook what I grow and I grow what we eat. That’s why I don’t grow okra and grow only two squash plants.” At first, she said, out of responsibility to the gene pool, she grew twenty-five plants of every sweet potato variety she collected. “Now I grow way more of what produces well and tastes good and plant five to ten of all the others.”
For over a decade Yanna has been corresponding with Ken Pecota, North Carolina’s sweet potato breeder. Sometimes he sends her slips of new varieties—“Right now he is working on purples for anthocyanins.” In turn, Yanna sends Pecota her garden records (she started keeping them in 1988)—“We compare his slips to my slips.” For many years she noted output but didn’t count the slips. “I had a blinding flash of the obvious,” she said. “What does output tell you if you don’t count the slips?”
Yanna’s garden is asprawl with vines and when I look closely, I see that not all sweet potato leaves look the same. Some are lobed, some almost ferny, others are entire. Each sweet potato variety consumes a few feet of space. Hernandez, a juicy sweet potato that Yanna says is grown for the baby food industry, is growing next to Hayman.
In 2010 Yanna nominated the variety Nancy Hall to the Ark of Taste. “While not the most productive of my varieties,” she wrote, “it has a rich golden color, firm texture, and delicious flavor.” In a Texas Agricultural Experiment Station publication, she found a 1895 reference to the Nancy Hall. Although like many vintage vegetables the origin of the potato is unclear, an 1895 letter written by A. J. Aldrich of Orlando, Florida, claims that the variety came from an accidental planting by a Miss Nancy Hall. The seed were mixed into a packet of seeds. By the 1930s and 1940s, it was one of the most popular varieties in the South. Now Miss Nancy Hall has boarded the ark.
Yanna Fishman doesn’t dally with seeds. She’s not a piddler. To understand how much effort her sweet potato project takes, I must tell you what is involved. In the fall, Yanna harvests the forty-plus varieties of potatoes. She divides each variety into two buckets, the smallest ones from the best plants for seed stock and the rest for eating. In actuality, she uses three buckets; the third is for travelers—potatoes grown on vines that spread beyond their bed and whose origin is difficult to determine. While harvesting she notes the variety with the best hill of potatoes, the variety damaged least by insects, the one most heat-tolerant, and so forth. One constant running through all her efforts is her meticulous record keeping. A stick with the name of the variety printed on it in permanent marker goes into each bucket. The potatoes are then spread on bread trays and crates all over the yard for a couple of hours, where they dry and are cleaned off.
The sweet potatoes are transferred to paper bags—eating bags and seed bags—labeled with the year and the variety. Yanna weighs the bags to see how productive the vines have been. “Some get three pounds per slip,” she says. “I average one-half to one pound per slip.”
“How many potatoes do you save for stock?”
“It depends on the variety,” she says. “Some make more slips than others. Often I save all that look good.”
The potatoes cure in the bags in her greenhouse. “They like it hot and humid,” Yanna says, “90 degrees, 90 percent humidity. There used to be sweet potato curing houses up here where people would take their sweet potatoes to get the curing done quickly. The owner of the curing house would take a portion of the potatoes. They were a big crop.”
After the curing, she stores the bags of potatoes in her pantry. On the spring equinox or thereabouts, preparing for spring planting, Yanna beds the potatoes. She makes a trip to the local sawmill for sawdust, then fills an assorted collection of buckets with the moistened shavings. The tubs stay in the greenhouse until no longer threatened by frost. “This begins the Sweet Potato Cactus Wars,” said Yanna. “Cacti that have been living luxuriantly in the greenhouse start getting moved all over the house.”
When the potatoes sprout, sending up green shoots from the tuber itself, and when Yanna is ready to plant, she cuts the slips two inches above the potato and holds them in yogurt containers labeled with the name and year and filled with water. These go into the ground and are liberally watered for a few days. Then for the growing season she mulches and weeds and waters and cares for the plants, until it’s time to harvest and the process begins all over again. That’s the life-cycle of a seed potato.
Besides over forty varieties of sweet potatoes, Yanna grows other endangered vegetables—Hercules cowpea, Purple Knucklehull cowpea, Greasy bean, and a spice pepper that came home from St. Croix with her lunch. She plants herbs to make tonics; one friend credits the teas for her long-awaited pregnancy, Yanna told me happily.
Throughout the orderly beds volunteers spring up helter-skelter. One is Hopi amaranth, which will turn bouquet water a lovely purple. Another is Bright Lights cosmos, like flaming stars or miniature suns in the garden, which Yanna uses to dye wool that she spins and knits into hats. Bright Lights has come to live at my house. There is magenta lamb’s-quarter that came from the neighbors. There is shiso, with which a Japanese visitor showed Yanna how to wrap sushi.
Everything has a story. Yanna says she lost the tithonia (Mexican sunflower) once. For a couple of years no volunteers sprouted and she had not saved seeds. But she had given the tithonia to her neighbors, the Websters, and she was able to get it back from them. Yanna’s son, Todd, has joined us. He is a healthy and bright teenager with a lot of energy, eager to interact. “A similar thing happened with evening primrose,” he says to me with a sparkling grin. “Jimmy Cooley gave it to Russell Cutts who gave it to Denise McClellan. The gift keeps moving but not in the direction it came.” Todd calls the reciprocity “giving it forward.”
Despite her boundless generosity, Yanna does not offer her seeds through the Seed Savers Exchange, although she is a member. She only shares interpersonally. “Everybody who comes, if they like a plant, I give them seeds,” she said. “I like to follow through.” Yanna sometimes attends the seed swap of Southern Seed Legacy and one year was named its seed saver of the year.
Luckily Yanna invited me to spend the night. I got to see her jars of seeds, her bags of potatoes, a rotational chart for tomatoes handwritten in pencil. We talked into the evening, before I was shown to an artful guest room above the barn.
The next morning Doug cooked breakfast outside on an open fire. The morning was beautiful, cool and softened by dew and wispy fog. Soon we were seated at a picnic table between a greenhouse and a grape arbor, eating steaming platefuls of venison, scrambled eggs with broccoli, bread with honey, and potatoes. Everything was homegrown or local.
By the next spring, I had determined one of my own criteria for a good sweet potato—one that is creamy, one that is not too starchy, and one that when baked exudes a sugary syrup, which we called tar when I was young, across the baking pa
n. That seems to indicate a really sweet potato. I remember the sweet potatoes I knew as a child being full of tar and this trait getting harder to find in modern varieties.
As for all the other possible traits I asked for, Yanna chose two varieties she thought I’d like. Soon an overnight package arrived with a bundle of damp slips of Ginseng Red and another of Red Gold. Yanna included a third bundle of slips, a medley of many different varieties that I could plant to see if I especially liked something. The slips grew superbly and filled four garden beds, then overran the beds and traveled through the garden. At the end of summer, I grabbled a couple of Ginseng Red without pulling up the hill and baked them.
They ran tar across the cast iron skillet. They were deep red, creamy, and so sweet they’d make robins sing.
I remember the late fall day that I harvested all the potatoes. The sun was soft and golden in the sky, its rays angling from the southwestern horizon. I began to dig the medley. I was using a pitchfork, wielding it carefully so as not to damage the tubers. The first sweet potato I unearthed was smallish, six inches long. I brushed off a layer of soil and found the potato orange-skinned, flashy as a carrot. The next one was bigger and white, really a creamy shade of ivory. Then there was a slim purple one. On and on, each potato was different from the one before until I had a box of sweet potato crayons, an array of earth-colored armadillos, lumps of beautiful clays. After a while I bundled up the spent vines and dumped them into the goat pen. I carried the next bundle to the hogs.
Afternoons like that I hope I never forget.
— 21 —
keener corn
I HAD HEARD that a man near Rabun Gap, Georgia, was growing an old corn. The man’s name was Bill Keener and his address said Betty’s Creek Road, with no number. One fall day I found myself up in Rabun Gap, in the foothills of the Appalachians, with an unscheduled morning, so I went looking for Betty’s Creek Road and headed up it. I came upon a garage where a receptionist was working who knew Bill Keener and told me where he could be found.
The high diversity of heirlooms in the Appalachian region was established by Jim Veteto in his doctoral research at the University of Georgia. He credits the Eastern Band of Cherokee as the originators of much of the diversity in the Mountain South.
When I pulled into his yard, Mr. Keener was washing a small truck.
“Need some help with that?” I, a stranger, called as I got out.
“I’m about to get it,” he said.
“I’m looking for a man named Bill Keener,” I said.
“You’ve found him.”
Mr. Keener seemed happy to stop work and talk to me about old-time crops.
“Just a moment,” I said. “Let me get paper to write on.”
He turned off the spigot. “I don’t want to be in the news.”
“What about a book?”
“Maybe that’s okay,” he said, so I went easy, lobbing him soft questions, the weather first and if he made the birdhouses nailed on trees all around.
“Yes.”
“Is that tree a pear?”
“It is.”
Mr. Keener and I settled into a pair of lawn chairs in the yard. “I was sent by Woody Malot and Cary Albright,” I said. “I’m looking for old varieties of vegetables. They said you have an old corn and I’m interested in hearing more about it.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Is that it growing yonder?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s a tall corn. Ten or twelve feet tall.”
“And only one ear per stalk.”
Even before I drove up Betty’s Creek Road that day, I had entertained ideas of collecting this corn, since I knew Mr. Keener was aging and somebody needs to keep his family heirloom alive. When I heard that the corn only produces one ear per twelve-foot stalk, however, I immediately lost interest. If it was left up to me, this variety would go extinct, I guessed. Part of me wants to save everything. Another part of me wondered what good a corn can be that only bears one ear per stalk.
“One ear?” I exclaimed.
“It used to have more,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has it always been that tall?”
“It has gotten taller.”
“Where did you get it?”
“Aw, my daddy grew it. His daddy before him. Maybe his daddy. I’ve grown it all my life.”
“Does it have a name?”
“We knew it as Keener corn.”
“Do you mind showing it to me?”
“Not at all.”
A tall man, Mr. Keener plucked himself from his lawn chair and sauntered across the mown grass to his quarter-acre garden that had been plowed under except for a few rows of corn and some of beans. The corn had matured and dried on the stalks.
“Why haven’t you harvested it?”
“I never pick it until November. I want it to be good and dry.”
In the corn patch, we walked among giants, high above us the tassels like tan fingers of tall skeletons.
“I’ll give you a couple ears,” Mr. Keener said.
“You don’t have to,” I said, dubious. “Keep your corn for grinding. You don’t have that much.”
“Oh, I have plenty. I have another garden full.”
“Well, I’ll take an ear. But just one.”
“Oh, you’ll want it,” he said. “No corn makes better meal than this.” Mr. Keener approached a stalk. I saw no ears on it until I looked up and saw one above my head. This corn didn’t need scarecrows. It was so foreboding that it would scare the crows away. Mr. Keener reached up and tried to break off the biggest ear of corn I’d ever seen. From dry silks to the stem where it attached to the stalk, it was nineteen or twenty inches long. It was like a club. And it wasn’t detaching easily. Mr. Keener bore down and wrenched on it. He handed the ear to me like he was handing me a baby and reached for another ear.
“One’s enough,” I said to him. I felt guilty taking corn that grew one ear per stalk. Secretly I hoped he’d give me three or four ears, enough for diversity, because I’d changed my mind, that quick.
“If you’re going to grow it, you need at least two ears,” he said, as if reading my mind.
“You are very kind.” That day four corn plants sacrificed their entire year’s labor to me and I was thrilled.
“Every time I hear that the neighbors are going to plant corn, I get nervous,” Mr. Keener said.
I was intrigued that Mr. Keener brought this up. “Why?” I asked.
“Because it will contaminate my corn,” he said. “I’m afraid of the GM corn getting in here. And most people don’t plant anything but that.”
This man was almost eighty years old and he understood genetic engineering.
“Once I planted one of the modern corns right alongside Keener corn,” he said.
“What happened?”
“It took me almost ten years to back it out.”
“How’d you get it out?”
“Selection,” he said. “The Pioneer corn had a different look.”
We stashed my vintage maize in the car and I knew that I had to do something quickly or my visit with this interesting and outspoken man would be squealing to a halt.
“I’d love to see your setup for grinding,” I said.
“Let’s go take a look.”
In a small and dusty barn, Mr. Keener showed me two corn shellers, one a hand rig and the other electric. The floor of the barn was littered with long cobs. Some of the cobs were red and some were white.
“What’s this about?”
“Years ago I introduced a Tennessee Red into the corn,” he said.
“Was it GM?”
“No. It was
open-pollinated too.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I thought it needed it.” That’s all he would say. Really, what difference would it make? The Keeners have been keeping this corn for generations. He can breed his corn however he likes and it’s still Keener corn.
“You don’t see much evidence of the Tennessee Red except for a few red cobs,” he said. “This corn makes fine cornbread. I’ve got people coming back for it year after year.”
“Because they like the taste?”
“You will too. And because I nub it.”
“Nub it?”
“I take off those hard little kernels on the pointy end of the cob before I grind it. My daddy showed me how to do that. But I invented a better way.”
“May I see how you do it?”
He bent and picked up a metal cylinder a bit smaller than a full ear of dry corn. “That shouldn’t be on the floor,” he said. Inside the cylinder were welded metal wedges with little teeth cut in them. The wedges followed the conical shape of the tip of a corn ear. Their teeth take off the tip kernels, which should have a name if they don’t already. “I call it a nubber,” he said.
“You made this?” I asked.
“I did.”
“That’s genius.”
I’ll admit here and now that I coveted everything the man showed me: the corn patch, the barn, the corn sheller, the crib he had lidded with mouse-proof hardware cloth, the nubber. I coveted even the cobs strewn on the floor.
Before I left, Mr. Keener picked a mess of Greasy Back beans, an old-fashioned Appalachian cultigen so named because their pods have a greasy appearance, good for snaps or shellies, which were drying on the vines. As well, Mr. Keener gave me a few half-rotten tomatoes of a heirloom variety he called Box Car Willie, an orange-red beefsteak with average yields.