My Southern Journey Page 5

  Then I went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and like to starved to death. I lost thirty pounds. I got healthy.

  I hated every minute of it—the healthy part, I mean.

  I ate sandwiches made on brown bread and—because there was no biscuit for 600 miles—bagels. There were a few barbecue joints, but the Yankees, not being fools, had discovered them, and you needed a hammer and chisel to get inside the door. I would eat dinner at 4 p.m. just to get a little corn pudding.

  If it had not been for clam chowder, I would have jumped from a bridge into the frozen River Charles.

  Then I went to New York, to the land of the $15 tuna sandwich. I ate at Sylvia’s in Harlem three nights a week, ate macaroni and cheese and green beans and chicken and cornbread that had a little too much sugar in it to suit me, but who am I to argue with a legend? I haunted the rib joints. I stalked a place in the Village that had a watery biscuit and gravy.

  Then I left for Atlanta.

  It would all be OK now.

  At Harold’s Barbecue, out near the federal pen, I ordered a barbecue plate, sliced, with a mix of tender inside meat and crunchy outside skin, and Brunswick stew, coleslaw, potato chips (they come with the meal, lest you think I am a glutton) and hot cornbread with cracklin’s.

  Within six months, I had gained back every pound I had lost and the doctor was looking at me with something very close to alarm. He told me to lose some weight, and I said yes sir and meant to get started on it right away, but I had been invited to Thelma Grundy’s place near downtown and that day she had sweet potato soufflé and, well, you know how it is.

  I was there a few years, within two hours’ drive of my home in Alabama and my mama’s beef short ribs and spoon burgers and barbecued pork chops, and it is a wonder I did not die on Interstate 20, from joy.

  After a while, I left for Miami again, but I was in my late thirties and had not slung a hay bale for a long time. I got most of my exercise running through airports and worrying about the future, and the latest in a long line of doctors kindly told me what all the others had. Exercise, she said.

  Fine, I said.

  Diet, she said.

  I hung my head.

  I cut down from six croquetas to three. I ordered a tres leches for the table, took two bites, which gave me a reason to live, and pushed it away. I ate the same damn roast-chicken panini—I think that’s a word—sandwich every damn day for a damn year. I drove past the Kentucky Fried Chicken like it was a mirage.

  I slimmed down to a lean, mean 245, and my butt was about as fetching as it had ever been.

  Then I moved to New Orleans.

  Help me, somebody.

  I live around the corner from Franky & Johnny’s joint on Arabella Street. They make pies out of shrimp.

  There ain’t much more that needs to be said about that.

  I live a few blocks from Domilise’s po’boy joint. They make sandwiches out of fried shrimp and oysters and French bread. I eat them with Zapp’s Crawtators and a root beer. I guess there’s not much more to say about that, either.

  About ten minutes away is Dunbar’s, a fried-chicken-and-red-bean emporium that offers potato salad on Fridays. I actually believe they make the potato salad on other days, too, but are hoarding it from me.

  And get this. When you eat all your chicken, a woman who sometimes calls you “Pookie, my baby” will walk up and ask you if you would like another leg and you always say, “No thank you, ma’am,” because, of course, you are on a diet.

  So I wander this land, trying to diet with a Southern belly. I want to do right. I really do. But, Lord, it is just so hard.

  It would be easier to ask me to go ice fishing. It would be easier to ask me to join the ballet. It would be easier to be an astronaut. I think they still squeeze all their food out of tubes.

  I wonder if you could put some cream gravy in there.

  BACK TO THE BAYOU

  Bon Appetit, November 2004

  I loved a Cajun woman once. It was her eyes, I believe.

  When I was a little boy, just because it is the kind of things boys do, I would look at the hot sun through a green, sweating bottle of 7UP. The sunlight seemed to freeze in the middle of the bottle, and glow.

  She had eyes like that.

  I was afraid that coming back here, to her Louisiana, would make me think of Her. And sure enough, every mile, every road sign, tapped me deeper into that green bottle.

  The Bayou Teche, seeming more mud than water, did not flow or even crawl, but just lay.

  Morgan City still existed on a bubble of oil. Its conjugal beds left half empty by men who worked rigs out in the deep blue. Along the Atchafalaya River, blue herons, their beaks like stilettos, stabbed into the dark water and came back out with wriggling silver victims. Alligators and rumors of alligators haunted Lake Henderson, where gray trees raised stumps of arms into the haze.

  All of it gritty, lovely, like Her.

  My heart hurt, a little.

  And my stomach growled.

  The air on the side streets and outside the wood-framed restaurants smelled of crab boil and crawfish and hot lemons. In the roadside stores, big countertop Crock-Pots simmered with boudin, the sausage made from pork, liver, onions, rice, and spices. Iron pots in open-air cookshacks rendered tiny cubes of fatback into golden cracklin’s, and old men and little children stood in gravel parking lots and ate them like M&Ms. In the evenings, in dives and fine-dining establishments, chefs took the ingredients of their liquid country—the rice, crawfish, shrimp, oysters, okra, duck, trout, crab, catfish, turtle, and drum—and turned them into dishes that tasted better than the mere ingredients should have allowed.

  With every bite I felt a little better, as if there were a tonic in the turtle soup—as if, since I had been hexed in the swamp, it was the swamp itself and its people that had to heal me.

  They did their best. Descendants of French Canadian exile who drifted south to these swamps and prairies in southern Louisiana more than two centuries ago, they have long been accused of fusing magic with their food. I ate it in oil towns and shrimp shacks and interstate gas stations, in themed restaurants with stuffed alligators swinging from the ceilings, and in late-night bars where there was more swinging than I care to remember.

  I ate to forget.

  LE TRAITEUR

  The smell swirled from underneath the roof of the cooking shed and permeated the air over the parking lot, the smell of a million skillets of bacon all sizzling at once.

  But it was a witch’s cauldron of fatback, roiling, the cracklin’s bopping up, the size of postage stamps, all crunchy skin on one side and thin layers of crisp-fried fat on the other.

  Some people argue that Eddie Goulas makes the best cracklin’s in Acadiana in his cook shed in Ruth, not far from Breaux Bridge. “I never did like cracklin’s,” Goulas said, as he and a few helpers trimmed the lean from big slabs of fatback, diced it, and fed it into the pots.

  “I guess I thought if I can make them where I would eat them, they must be pretty good,” he said. His face intent, he watched the trimming process, kept an eye on the heat. “It’s not hard to do something,” he said, “when you ain’t guessing.”

  In the parking lot, I ate cracklin’s from a paper sack. I listened to people speak to each other in French and smiled like an imbecile.

  “The food, the music, it’s the joy of life,” explained 68-year-old Claude Simon Jr., as he handed me his business card—“Custom Woodwork, Antique Repair, Cowhide Furniture.” At the bottom of the card, he has written in a single word: Traiteur.

  Like his papa before him, he is a treater, a healer, someone the Cajuns—the ones who still believe—would ask to heal bellyaches, arthritis, or general malaise with herbs, roots, and prayers. His papa was a grand traiteur. Even when he was very old and in a nursing home, people came to be treated.

  Sometimes evil spirits invade us, Simon explained, and make us forget to enjoy life. I nodded, my mouth full of cracklin’s.

  Before
he left, Simon mentioned that he also does exorcisms.

  “I don’t charge. It’s the Lord’s work,” he said. “I do accept donations.”

  LENA AND PAUL

  I was healed a good bit more in Carencro, about a block from City Hall. Here, in a place called Paul’s Pirogue, a spirit helped stir the pot.

  It was a poor man’s dish called catfish court bouillon, just a few catfish pieces smothered in stewed tomatoes, onions, and other good things. Paul’s served it with some of the best potato salad, with Cajun spices in the mayonnaise.

  I asked the man at the cash register: “Who cooked the catfish?” He told me he had, mostly, but his grandma, who has gone on, might as well have.

  “It comes from her—I learned from her,” said 43-year-old Terry Soignier, who manages Paul’s Pirogue. “She lost her first husband in the yellow fever, I believe, of ’46. Her name was Lena. My oldest brother had epilepsy, and she would sing to him in French. When she cooked, he was always on her hip.”

  He spoke about them both, the food and his grandmama, with such love that I expected to see her standing there. “A black cast-iron pot,” he said, thinking back. “Fresh onions. Catfish, pulled from the bayou.”

  “Not a bad memory at all,” he said.

  I ordered a shrimp po’boy because I had seen one go by, and I lusted after it. It was deep-fryer hot, the shrimp spiced and peppery and served on the best French bread that I have ever tasted. It did not crumble into dust, like delicate, airy French bread, but was chewy, buttery, comforting.

  I am sure someone’s long-dead grandpapa kneaded that bread.

  I walked out feeling loved.

  T-SUE’S BREAD

  I met the hands that had kneaded that bread, and I was half-right. Phillip “T-Sue” Roberts owns the bakery in Henderson that furnishes Paul’s Pirogue—and much of the Atchafalaya Basin—with bread. The recipes go back to his grandparents, Pete and Delia Patin, who ran a family bakery in Cecilia from 1934 until 1975. It is not designed to be French bread at all, but just good bread.

  Roberts’ grandparents gave him his skill, and even his name.

  “What does T-Sue mean, anyway?” I asked.

  “Little drunk,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  It involved a bottle of Crown Royal. “I was 13,” he said, “and it was the first time they let me out of the house. It was an adventure.”

  I told him I reckoned so.

  “I danced all night at the American Legion,” he said, “whether the music was playing or not.”

  Someone told on him. His grandfather started calling him, in French, tee soux, or “little drunk.”

  That became T-Sue, and that is what he named his bakery.

  I ate a piece of bread stuffed with boudin from Charlie-T’s Specialty Meats in Breaux Bridge. I can’t write well enough to tell you how good it was.

  LIKE CHICKEN

  The waitress was pushing the alligator at Prejean’s, the big Cajun restaurant in Lafayette, but I don’t like to eat things that are said to taste like chicken—snake, alligator, iguana—when what they really taste like is snake and lizard. Instead, I ate delicious corn-and-crab bisque, and asked about dessert.

  How about the gateau sirop, the syrup cake?

  “I don’t like it,” she said.

  It was dense and dark and tasted of molasses.

  “Did you like it?” the waitress asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “A lot of the older people do,” she said.

  The bakery chef’s name is Roe Zenon, a smiling but no-nonsense woman who eyed a single fly in her bakeshop like it was a flying gopher. She told me she learned from her mom, Bulia Zenon, who called it spice cake.

  Her mom would call to her from the porch, “and the kids in the neighborhood would smell that cooking and all come with me. ‘Your mama cooking?’ they’d ask me. She always was. Mama would say, ‘We always got something burning.’ ”

  The children ate their spice cake with Kool-Aid.

  I ate mine with gratitude.

  Before I left, the folks at Prejean’s made me try the alligator. “We just use the tail meat, not the lung meat, and never from a gator over 6 feet,” said Dean Dugas, the general manager. I didn’t know what that meant, but it was good.

  FOOD OF LOVE

  Dickie Breaux and Cynthia Breaux, once married but still partners in Café Des Amis, the restaurant they founded more than a decade ago, are still bound. Their love of the Breaux Bridge restaurant, and its food, survived their breakup.

  “I believe you and I were brought together to create this thing,” Cynthia said to Dickie one night at dinner.

  If that is true, then maybe I was left standing in a driveway in Miami, watching taillights fade, just so I could be healed by barbecued shrimp and a slab of white-chocolate bread pudding. All I know is, it is hard to feel heartsick when you are eating crawfish étouffée served on hot cornbread.

  “You have to be raised in the atmosphere of the food,” said Dickie Breaux. “We just cook better than anybody else. A Cajun knows he’s got it right when, after it’s done, you can throw away the meat and just eat the gravy.”

  The gravy, then. The gravy is the antidote.

  That night, I ate the best turtle soup I have ever had. I listened to people who love food talk about how it can hold something fine together that might otherwise have come apart. I knew I couldn’t face my bed-and-breakfast on the Teche.

  I knew I wouldn’t sleep.

  So I asked the question millions of men like me have asked.

  “Know a good beer joint?”

  SQUEEZE BOX

  The dance floor at Pat’s Atchafalaya Club was packed with a hundred, more. Geno Delafose wore his squeeze box low, like a gunslinger, singing in French and English as white people and black people and old people and young people danced like it was their last night on this earth.

  Crawfish corpses littered the tables. The band never took a break. The dancing never stopped. A big woman in a pantsuit looked at me a little too long, and I got scared.

  The next morning, a Saturday, Café Des Amis opened for breakfast, but a breakfast like I had never seen. A zydeco band tore up the small stage at the front of the restaurant, and people danced between tables loaded with bacon and eggs.

  A lot of the people dancing were the same ones I had seen the night before. One of them, Ted Couvillion, said hello.

  “My wife died of cancer two years ago,” he said. He vanished into his grief, until his friends dragged him out dancing. Now, every week, he dances and dances his way out of heartache.

  I can’t dance a lick. But I have two bags of cracklin’s in the trunk of my car.

  TRAVELING FOOD

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: May 2011

  It was always dusk and, it seems, always summer. My aunts would steer their Chevelles and Monte Carlos onto the gravel at Pee Wee Johnson’s joint. Change purses clutched in their fists, they would step into line with mill workers, pulp-wooders, and downy-faced soldiers destined for Vietnam. That takeout window in Jacksonville, Alabama, united us all with a common desire: the perfect footlong. These came skinny, dressed with yellow mustard, thin, hot chili, and Spanish onions, the whole mess weeping into waxed paper. Their aroma filled the car and the world beyond, and every turn of the tires tortured us until we finally found a picnic table or shade tree somewhere down Alabama 21. But often we just ate on the go, wiping chili off vinyl, listening to the Happy Goodman Family on the radio, and feeling, somehow, a little more free.

  It was not fast food but traveling food, a paper-sack delicacy we grabbed before an all-night gospel singing in Sylacauga, or on the way to buy a truck in Cedartown. It can be found on gas station countertops and off forlorn interstate exits, advertised on badly wired marquee lights that blink FRIED CHICK N, or on plywood that screams BOU-DIN!!! It might be pickled eggs at a fish camp on Lake Okeechobee, Saran-wrapped fried pies at a truck stop outside Laurel, Mississippi, or good wings and
crisp potato wedges at a Shell Station on Highway 78 near Winfield, Alabama. In a wasteland of tepid tomatoes and mummified chicken fingers, there still exist across the South some fine dishes, served on paper plates, prepared by people who have solved the great mystery of simple food.

  Drake’s Citgo on Highway 411 in Leesburg, Alabama, served a mouthwatering pork cutlet on hot biscuit, or about any other part of a pig that can be made to lie flat. Drake’s is now Coosa Corner, but to my big brother, Sam, it will always be Drake’s. “The ol’ boy who owned it had a dog that, if you threw a rock in the river, would dive down and get that rock,” Sam said. “That exact rock.”

  Stories like that season a place. Most food joints leave you with, at best, a commemorative cup. Louisiana may be the wonderland of traveling food. Years ago, after being dumped by a Cajun, I drove through that wet country to eat my way free of a broken heart. I ate rice dressing on Bayou Teche, and boudin at every other gas station. I ignored signs for alligator, because it tastes like an unholy union between a chicken and a Gila monster, and my heart never has been broke that bad.

  Some foods need to travel with you, taste better if they do. At Ted Peter’s Famous Smoked Fish in St. Petersburg, you can eat a plate of mullet, potato salad, and coleslaw at the restaurant, or out a few miles away, propped against a hump of sand, looking out at the Gulf. Mullet are like bad whiskey, cheap and strong, but not at sunset, not here.

  It is the same with a Hicks’ tamale, in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It tastes fine indoors. But when you peel it at the edge of an endless field, on the hood of your car, there is just the pudding-like texture and smooth, hot, garlicky taste, because there is nothing else out here, as far as you can see, but lonesome.

  There used to be so many more such places, before the chains. But there are still good fries at T-Ray’s in Fernandina Beach (they must fry them twice to get them that crisp and greasy) and drive-by barbecue at 1,001 places in North Carolina. In my hometown, there are still perfect, dripping hamburgers, at the Rocket and Cecil’s, and at Tweeners, owned by Pee Wee Johnson’s girls.