by Andrew Moore
We drive farther, toward Yorktown, but I have to pull over a second time for an even larger patch. I fill a small bag and follow a deer trail back to the road. Exiting the woods I pass a giant southern magnolia—its own glossy leaves seeming all the more tropical in this forest of fragrant fruit—only to find a park ranger parked behind my car. “Just picking up pawpaws!” I call out, hoping I’m not breaking any ordinances. I hold up the bag as proof. Thankfully he gives me a wave and lowers himself back into the car, then drives on. I must look like a feverish madman, shaggy-haired, way too wide-eyed and excited, holding a bag of mushy green orbs. But he’s a ranger here; maybe he’s seen this before. Pickin’ up pawpaws.
Later in the evening, at a motel in Williamsburg, I pull one of several dozen pawpaws from the room’s jam-packed mini fridge. The fruit tastes wild, for sure, but not bitter, the texture slightly grainy; fruity and sweet. And chilled, as Washington would have had it.
— CHAPTER FIFTEEN —
NORTH CAROLINA
I
CAROLINA’S NEW FRUIT
Milton Parker is fired up. I approach him at the end of the fourth annual North Carolina Paw Paw Festival, which, though considerably smaller than Ohio’s, has been a resounding success. The turnout has doubled each year, with today’s attendance estimated at around five hundred. In part, its success is a testament to the fact that people still read local publications—two write-ups in local North Carolina magazines built considerable interest in the fruit leading up to the event. Parker has sold out of everything: forty pounds of fruit, forty trees, and ten pounds of puree. In fact, Parker and other vendors grossly underestimated demand, and there’s been nowhere near enough pawpaw products to go around. Because of this excitement—Parker gives me a high-five and is beaming—his full head of white hair seems today more a youthful blond. He wears a black T-shirt with LOVE ALWAYS WINS written in bold white, jean shorts, and sandals. Seated in the bed of his truck he is framed by two stickers on the rear windshield, one praising Jesus, the other, a rather serious declaration: I’D RATHER BE PAW-PAW HUNTING. It’s not at all an exaggeration.
“I think what’s been accomplished between the article in our state magazine and this event today, we’ve created a huge tsunami of interest in the pawpaw,” Parker says. “I’m excited. I’m really excited. Not from the standpoint that I was successful in selling the trees, the fruit, and puree, but the amount of interest now. People found out.” Parker’s excitement makes sense in context. You could ask, What is forty pounds of fruit compared with the thousands of fruit sold at the Ohio Pawpaw Festival? But here in North Carolina, particularly the eastern portion of the state, there is a significant learning curve.
Derek Morris, a Forsyth County extension agent, created the festival in 2008. Almost twenty years earlier, he tasted his first pawpaw off a landscape tree in Old Salem, North Carolina. “I knew what it was, but I’d never seen it in person before, so I brought it home and tasted it,” Morris says. “I could not believe how good that fruit was, and it was just lying there wasting on the ground.” When he learned about the success of the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, Morris decided North Carolina needed one of its own.
“It’s amazing how many people don’t know about it,” Morris says. “I had a lot of people [at today’s festival] say they’d never heard of one. Even the old people. And I don’t remember my grandparents—my grandparents were from Virginia, just across the state line—I don’t remember any of them talking about pawpaws.” Unlike, say, southern Ohio, West Virginia, or eastern Kentucky, for example, where anyone with a touch of gray hair is more often than not entirely familiar with pawpaws. “I think a lot of it depends on exactly where you were raised,” Morris says. “If you had a creek or river or stream on your land, or had neighbors who did, and they were growing there, you knew about them. If you didn’t, you didn’t.” Parker too is clearly encouraged. “I think we’ve got some opportunities in North Carolina,” he says.
KSU’s Kirk Pomper has said that North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio, and Maryland make up the current range of the commercial pawpaw industry. In Ohio and Kentucky, growers are seated in cultures that are familiar with pawpaws. In North Carolina, the presence of pawpaws is not because of the fruit’s long-standing role in folk culture; it’s because of a few individuals, including Morris and Parker, and just a few dedicated farmers. Its revival has taken decades of work, but it appears to now be paying off.
I traveled to North Carolina with my friend Jon Yahalom. Jon had yet to explore much of the Southeast, but was no stranger to fruit hunting. His father, in fact, is a fruit nut himself, and was not shy about picking falling fruit from other people’s yards in their home state of California. He once loaded the backseat of a car, to the top of Jon’s head, with avocados. It was good then that Jon came prepared: There can be no shame in pawpaw hunting.
Our first night on the road, we camped at a site along the New River, a onetime boomtown turned ghost town: Brooklyn, West Virginia. It was dark and late when we crossed the New River Gorge Bridge—the largest steel single-span arch bridge in this hemisphere, standing 876 feet above the New River below. But we saw none of the river that night, just fog and mountains, and the droning hum of tires on bridge. We took the exit for Fayetteville and passed a few other even smaller towns until we reached the national park entrance, making a left turn onto a tree-canopied road and a small bridge over Coal Run. A tense series of switchbacks carried us out of the mountains and down into the bottoms of the New River.
In the morning, I explored our surroundings, which included the ruins of a stone building. Growing within and around it were dozens of young pawpaw trees, though none bore any fruit. As the heavy fog cover receded from the river, the forested slopes of the gorge were unveiled, though the mountaintops stayed covered. We were deep in the bottomland pawpaw habitat.
As we drove into eastern North Carolina—our eyes scanning for roadside pawpaws—the Appalachian terrain eased into the Piedmont. The solitary peak of Pilot Mountain—a remnant of the ancient Sauratown Mountains—was a punctuation mark between landscapes. The Cheraw Indians (also known variously as Saura or Saraw) called the formation Jomeokee, or “great guide.”1 In A New Voyage to Carolina (1711), John Lawson included the Cheraw with the Esaw Indians, “a very large nation containing many thousand People,” in whose country he reported killing and eating “scarlet ey’d duck . . . very good to eat.”2 Lawson also ate pawpaws in the Carolinas, where “rare Puddings of this Fruit,” were once made.3 I recalled this history as we drove farther east, past tobacco fields whose frumpy crops were splayed out in orderly rows. On occasion, I wandered into woodlots behind gas stations and restaurants, but found no pawpaw trees.
I stopped at a large roadside produce market to see if any pawpaws were on the shelves. I purchased sorghum syrup and a few peaches, but found no pawpaws. However, there were other region-specific native fruits, including Scuppernong grapes, the large, local muscadines named for the river that runs through the state’s coastal plain. The Scuppernong, like the pawpaw, is wild and native to the Southeast, though it was taken under cultivation at least four hundred years ago.4 Although many advocates say pawpaw belongs in orchards, right alongside apples, peaches, and pears, it should at least be cultivated in the small-scale manner of Scuppernongs: Where people once ate them wild, they’re still offered for sale at select roadside stands, farmers markets, and the like. Which is the point of this weekend’s pawpaw festival: to raise the fruit’s profile.
Milton Parker earned a master’s degree in horticulture from North Carolina State and spent his entire working life in agricultural extension. Toward the end of his career, he was introduced to pawpaws, and he and his colleagues encouraged several local farmers to grow the fruit. For the past six years he has been promoting and selling fresh pawpaws at the Columbus County Farmers Market. And since he can’t be there today, his wife is pushing pawpaws in his place. Like many pawpaw enthusiasts, partn
ers tend to get drawn in, willingly or not. “When I retired I just got, pshew, I mean it was like it came off the wall and hit me,” Parker says. “And I said, ‘Yeah, let’s go with it.’ So I have. And I just, I’ve fallen in love with the pawpaw.”
A few weeks ago I called several growers in eastern North Carolina in the hope that I could meet them and tour their farms. I eventually got their blessing, but also got a call from Parker, as the farmers had first contacted him. “I’m the pawpaw man in North Carolina,” he said in a voice mail. And indeed he is. Parker, through encouragement, persuasion, and often relentless insistence, has worked to bring pawpaws into commercial cultivation on at least three separate farms in North Carolina, four including his own small home orchard near Whiteville.
As much as Parker wants to help develop a pawpaw market, he envisions a future that’s centered on small and part-time farmers, not large agribusiness. The agribusiness model, Parker believes, would advocate for the use of a single pawpaw cultivar. Rather than narrowing the field, though, Parker advocates for, and celebrates, the current diversity of pawpaw genetics. “We need to protect the germplasm collection at Kentucky State University,” he says. “We don’t need to burn our bridges behind us. We need to have stuff that we can fall back on. I think we’ve got a good thing here, but we don’t want to ruin a good thing.”
Parker recalls the southern corn leaf blight, which, beginning in 1969, threatened to destroy the monoculture of hybrid crops from Florida to Minnesota. “If we had not had the corn germplasm down in Atlanta we would have lost our corn,” Parker says. “Historically, man has had a history of use and abuse. And when you have something that’s native, that’s been designed by God, we have a tendency to put our hands on it and ruin it. We don’t want to have the corporate boys stepping in. This is a fruit that has an ideal niche for the small farmer, the part-time farmer. For people that want to do something on a small scale.”
Ken Drabik, biologist and annual Peterson Pawpaws vendor, agrees. “I’m very concerned about any type of monoculture emerging,” he says. “I know that’s ‘good business.’ I know that agribusiness generally likes a limited number of products. They want Coke and Pepsi. There may wind up being a lowest-common-denominator pawpaw that will emerge that will be not terribly interesting, but it will be a pawpaw.”
Until that day comes, though—if agribusiness does ever reduce pawpaw to a plain and uniform fruit—it’s still just small growers producing pawpaws in North Carolina, and their crop remains varied.
Lesley Sanderson has been farming his entire life, in addition to a career at the glass plant in Scotland County, from which he retired. I visit Sanderson at his home two days before the festival. We arrive early in the morning but the day’s picking is already complete. Sanderson gets help from a few local high school boys and his granddaughters down the road. Pulling into Sanderson’s driveway, it’s clear that we have the right address. Beyond a sprawling southern magnolia, pawpaw trees appear, sprouting throughout the lawn: on the side of the carport, on either side of a large wooden swing—all the comfortable places where a pawpaw was eaten, and where spat seeds had sprouted.
Sanderson speaks with the rapid-fire delivery of a country-fair auctioneer, and although in his late seventies, he has the enthusiasm and energy of a much younger man. It’s a good thing too, because he’s busy. In addition to the upkeep of his farm and on-site sales, he’ll even deliver. When we arrive midmorning, he’s got several large bags of collards on his porch, and after a short while he drives them to a customer’s home. As we talk, Sanderson insists on standing. “I’m still a young man,” he says.
Sanderson gives us the pickup truck tour of his orchard, which includes eighty pawpaw trees, then lets us wander around. The trees are about seventeen years old (Parker had suggested on the phone that they’re in decline). It’s late August, and nearly all of the fruit has been picked, and then sold by Parker at the Columbus County Farmers Market. In a good year, Sanderson says a large tree will produce up to fifty pounds of fruit. But this has not been a good year: A late frost wiped out 85 percent of the crop, temperatures dropping below freezing just as blossoms were coming on. Weeds are high in the rows; insects hover and bore into overripe figs. The pawpaw trees, though perhaps in decline, are still striking: pyramidal in shape, with deep-green foliage. A few suckers rise below the main tree’s bottom branches, each vying for supremacy. The earth here is sandy, not the rich, deep alluvial soil pawpaws tend to thrive in.
“I don’t grow soybeans,” Sanderson says, “I grow vegetables.” In addition to the orchard, Sanderson raises collards year-round, mustard and turnip greens, butter beans, peas, and corn. And as for the fruit, it all started with strawberries. The county’s agricultural agents had been hoping to diversify the crops grown by the state’s many part-time and small-scale farmers, and they approached Sanderson and his late wife, Marie, about trying the fruit. The couple discussed the idea and later agreed to plant four acres in strawberries. Then came more fruit, this time blueberries and figs. And then, in 1999, a sixty-five-hundred-dollar grant was awarded to Sanderson—thanks to the work and urging of Parker, Charles Lowery, and Martin Brewington—to grow pawpaws and Asian persimmons on his farm in Robeson County.
In 2000, Sanderson became the first commercial pawpaw grower in North Carolina, 337 years after the first successful English colony was established here. After more than three centuries of commercial agriculture, pawpaws were finally brought into the mainstream.
Sanderson was raised in Robeson County, one of six children, and grew up on his family’s farm, where his father grew tobacco, cotton, and corn. Sanderson went to school at Old Prospect—two miles from his home—the same school where Marie would later teach. Like Lesley, his brothers and sisters got jobs in the local factories and cotton mills.
Robeson County is home to the Lumbee Indian tribe, a state-recognized tribe of fifty-five thousand enrolled members. Sanderson, a Lumbee himself, says his people knew nothing of pawpaws before he began this orchard. “This was new to all of us here in this county,” he says, “this fruit, this was completely new.”
It’s true: For the average eastern North Carolinian, regardless of ethnicity, pawpaw is as unfamiliar as nispero, ylang-ylang, and yangmei. But it wasn’t always the case in this region; pawpaw was once an important food source in the Carolinas. Native Americans, including Muskhogean-, Siouan-, Algonquian-, and Iroquoian-speaking groups, were eating the fruit when Europeans arrived—beginning, briefly, with the French in 1562, and later with permanent English settlements. Native American villages and individual homesites were surrounded by large fields planted in beans, corn, and squash—which, when you think about it, isn’t too different from Sanderson’s homestead.5 Additionally, they were also growing many other now largely forgotten food crops of the Eastern Agricultural Complex—likely including little barley, goosefoot, erect knotweed, maygrass, sumpweed, and sunflower—quite unlike homesteads today. Nearer to the coast, the hearts of cabbage palms were harvested and, along with Indian hemp, used for food as well as fiber. From the forest they gathered and cultivated chestnuts, hickory nuts, and acorns; the roots of greenbrier, arrowhead, and Jerusalem artichoke; and fruits likes crab apples, blackberries, blueberries, persimmons, and pawpaws.6 With the arrival of Europeans, the Indians soon added orchards of figs, apples, and peaches—fruits themselves not native to Europe, but rather Asia and the Middle East.7 The continental merging of orchards began right away.
But European diseases soon devastated those tribes, and coupled with displacement, American Indian populations were drastically reduced in the Carolinas. One tribe, the Catawba, had gone from an estimated population of forty-six hundred in 1682 to merely four hundred souls at the time of American independence.8 Lost were not only individual lives but also culture and foodways—and often the foods themselves. Marsh elder and maygrass were gone, replaced by vast fields of tobacco, indigo, and corn.
Alth
ough the Lumbee were among the earliest tribes to adopt European-style agriculture, they continued to know and depend on wild foods—as most rural Americans did—for meat, nuts, berries, and greens. So when Sanderson tells me that the Lumbee in North Carolina had no clue of the pawpaw’s existence, it strikes me as surprising and a little sad. The idea that a Native American tribe in an eastern American state—one that survived both displacement and disease—would as a whole be unfamiliar with this most unique of native American fruit spoke to the fall of fruit, and of how many other foodways may have been lost. But perhaps I had romanticized the fruit too much. Here in eastern North Carolina, where the plains were once covered in vast longleaf pine savanna (and then clear-cut in subsequent centuries for tobacco, cotton, and other crops), perhaps it’s as simple as what Derek Morris says: If they grew on your property, you knew about them. If they didn’t, you didn’t. And it happened that where the Lumbee settled—in the swamps of Robeson County—they were without pawpaws.
Sanderson believes that when he stops growing pawpaws, that will be their end in Robeson County. “The Indian people is not used to this fruit, so they will never go into that fruit.” And though he would like to see a few young farmers pick up the crop, he says there aren’t really any young farmers in the area. “Now the blueberry, back over here now”—Sanderson points toward his plump bushes—“that’s a good mover in Robeson County. And it’s well known in Robeson County from years ago, ’cause we used to pick a lot of them in the woods.”