My Southern Journey Page 7

  I make it myself now. I coarse-cut red cabbage—we call it purple cabbage—and fresh carrots.

  They need to really snap when you break them. Mix in mayonnaise to taste. I use my hands.

  Some people like seasonings, but it is the taste of the cabbage and carrots that I like, so I just sprinkle on a little black pepper.

  I will eat it the second day, but never, ever the third, and certainly not if it has anything resembling a whang. We all know the whang. More than half the time, when we eat slaw, there is the whang.

  Life is too short for the whang.

  Rise up.

  Make T-shirts.

  A whang, with a slash through it.

  The Colonel would wear one, if he was still alive.

  You know Popeye would, too.

  NEVER-ENDING GRACE

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: November 2012

  When I was a little boy, the words seemed to last forever. It seemed like we were walking the Exodus ourselves, one paragraph at a time. Surely, I figured, thousands of little boys had starved to death between the words “Let us pray…” and “Amen.”

  The bad thing was, from where I sat, hands clasped but one eye open, I could see it all, and more than that I could smell it all, this wonderful feast laid out hot and steaming: Thanksgiving, my favorite day on the calendar, better than the Fourth of July, Halloween, and Presidents’ Day all lumped into one. The pinto beans bubbled in the battered pot, molten with the fat from big chunks of ham. Hot biscuits rested under a warm towel. Mashed potatoes, creamed onions, cornbread dressing, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese—all waited, each one sending its own perfume wafting through the house. And in the middle of it all sat the big turkey, its sides trickling with melted butter, specked with black pepper, so close—why, a drumstick was just a side step and quick grab away—and yet so far.

  But it would all be cold as a Confederate statue on Christmas morning by the time we got any of it. Between me and all this bounty stretched what we have called and will always call “The Blessing.” It consisted, as near as I could tell, of reading the King James Bible front to back, then holding a discussion on its finer points. While I now see the beauty in those words and in this tradition, I was an ungrateful heathen back then, thinking only of my belly and my own little self.

  Before anyone fires off an angry letter pointing out the heathenness I have already confessed—I have learned that admitting to such things in some preemptive hope just makes people mad at you for robbing them of the opportunity to flog you unencumbered—let me say that I know how selfish and ignorant I was to wish for a shorter blessing, a more truncated thanks. I know. I get it. I was a bad child. But I was suffering.

  I grew up with Pentecostals, and they do not have a short blessing in their lexicon. They are not like some denominations that see prayer as a fixed ritual; the Congregational Holiness go to town with a prayer, and they do not turn loose of one till they have wrung it dry. So I suffered.

  Sometimes, they would have a child do a blessing, and I would grow hopeful, because surely they would not have so many words at their disposal, and older ladies would pat the good child when he was done and say “How precious.” But I came to know that this was only a warm-up to the main event, and that a grown-up, a deacon even, would take over, to close the show.

  What would happen, I once wondered, if I just broke down in the middle of the litany of things we were thankful for, and snatched a wing? I could be halfway across the pasture and into the deep woods before they ran me down. But it was too awful, the eventual consequences, to even talk about with nice people.

  So I suffered.

  Now, it is one of those things I wait for all year. My uncle John does the blessing now, and he is a man of honor and brings to us a gentle message of great warmth and dignity. It is a simple prayer of thanks for this one day, for the grace that has allowed us to gather here for one more year. I think anyone, of any faith, or of no faith at all, would see great value in it. It is never too long, this message, though the older and older I get, it is sometimes over much too soon.

  THE PLANE TRUTH

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: March 2015

  If you fly in from Birmingham you’ll get the last gate, If you blew in from Boston, no, you sure won’t have to wait, And I’m learning …

  —Hank Williams, Jr.

  All I wanted was a peanut.

  “We have no food on this flight,” the flight attendant said.

  A sip of water, then? Or, though I knew it was an impossible dream, a drop or two of ginger ale?

  The duration of the flight did not permit it, I was told … in coach.

  Time, like all things, is just bigger in first class.

  It is hard these days, to be a Southerner in the wild blue yonder, to be a boy from Alabama who tries to slip the surly bonds of earth. The grand days of Southern flight might not be over, but it is sure different, if you need to go from Memphis to Mobile or Baton Rouge to anywhere.

  You can get a peanut up North, on a long flight, but you will play heck getting one as you fly over Georgia and Alabama, which is where they come from. But I can do without a salty snack. I do not need ginger ale. It’s everything else that makes me want to Go Greyhound.

  The conversations have a sameness to them these days, up high. I noticed it when I was halfway through a long book tour, doing the same crossword for the third time. People around me thought I was real smart. Night was falling, and the young traveler next to me was trying to get home to Tampa after working in Louisiana. The young traveler showed me a picture of a bulldog puppy and said they would see each other again, someday, after connections in Miami and I think Saskatchewan. I did not tell the young traveler that, by the time he finally got home, the dog might not love him anymore.

  It did not used to be this way for the ragged, hypertensive Southern flier. I remember a gilded age, when carriers here flew to actual places we wanted to go—in the region and beyond—on real planes with seats designed for adult humans, an age when every single flight from every decent-size city did not have to connect in Atlanta or Charlotte or Nepal. I remember flying nonstop from Birmingham to Tampa, New Orleans, Fort Lauderdale, Nashville. I remember when planes were not pitiful; now, some are so skinny I feel like I am being shot out of a cannon. Disembarking, now, reminds me of those tiny cars in the circus, the ones that emit an endless stream of clowns. Some days, I think I shall not fly at all. I will just burn $500 on the sidewalk, line up 50 strangers, and see how many of us we can stuff in a phone booth. With a one-bag minimum.

  You can say times are tough all over, but down here the airlines have canceled so many flights that the only way to get around is to hop a freight. It would not be so bad if they did not rub it in. Many nights I sit in front of my television as sparkling, majestic planes glide through the clouds, the reclining passengers sipping Champagne on the way to Paris. The next day I board a Sopwith Camel and stumble off wild-eyed, smelling like jet fuel and something called Bloody Mary Mix.

  And you can keep your dadgum pretzels.

  MAGIC ON THE PLATE

  Louisiana Kitchen: June 2012

  It may be the magic is real. Here amid marked-down voodoo and dime store gris-gris, between piney-woods preachers and deep-swamp fortunetellers, may swirl real spirits that enrich this place, or at least permeate the food that delights us and drinks that lubricate us. Here, where something as humble as a wooden spoon can seem like a magic wand, where ghosts of ancestors stir a little something extra into recipes passed down 150 years, things routinely taste better than the chemistry of ingredients or the alchemy of preparation should allow. I tasted it for the first time more than a quarter-century ago, swirling up and into and through me, from the bottom of a glass.

  It was on the balcony of the Columns Hotel on St. Charles Avenue. I was sitting in a wicker chair, just decrepit enough to be comfortable, drinking a glass of Jim Beam on the rocks. I am not a big drinker, but there has always been somethi
ng comforting about brown liquor. After one, I always felt like I was covered in a warm quilt. The secret, across my life and my ancestors’ lives, was not to drink seven more, turn the quilt into a cape or a parachute, and jump off something tall.

  This time I only had the one. I was down to ice and watered-down whiskey—wasn’t it Sinatra who said you had to let it lay in the ice a little while?—when that special peace slipped over and around me, but in a way I had never felt before. The old streetcar, the color of a WWII surplus jeep, clanked and rattled on the neutral ground below with a rhythm I had never heard. From the bar below, a scent of candied cherries and orange slices and spiced rum and good perfume seemed to reach up and out into the dusk around me. The live oaks creaked. The night flowed through the ancient trees like a river. And I could have slept, if that glass had held just one half-inch more. I sipped the last of the liquor—the same liquor you can buy in almost any bar in this world—and my mind emptied for just a few precious minutes of contention and ambition, and filled with the essence of this place, this street, this city, this state. And all the conjurer behind the bar had to do was unscrew a bottle, and pour.

  Think of the magic that Celestine Dunbar and her family created in their place on Freret Street, before the waters took it—fried seafood platters that came so fast from the fryer that you could scorch your hands and fried chicken that made grown men damn near cry, served with stewed okra, and sweet potato pies, and good cornbread. You could eat all the barbecued chicken and stewed cabbage you could stand on a weekday, give the nice lady at the cash register ten dollars and have enough left to tip like a sultan, ride the streetcar, and buy a grape snowball. The allure of that fried chicken held me so tightly that after the city drowned I traced it to Loyola, where Mrs. Dunbar would make young people the best lunch in the whole academic world—many of whom had no idea from whence the source of that magic came. I have forgotten most of the food I have eaten in this life. I have never forgotten one crumb of hers.

  I know cynics will say it is just cooking. Maybe. I mean, how complicated is this food, really?

  You simmer some beans, roast some fat hog, boil some shrimp or some blue crabs, concoct some gumbo. You have been taught, over generations, not to fear the saltshaker, or the butter, or the garlic, and you do not sprinkle cayenne so much as you ladle it. You give onions, green pepper, and celery a celestial name—trinity—to raise them above the mundane of simple ingredients, but it is still just a seasoning.

  But how do you explain the difference in grabbing lunch elsewhere in this poor ol’ sorry world to sitting down to a plate of creamy red beans and braised ham shank at Betsy’s Pancake House on Canal Street, where the fat from the meat slowly, slowly drips down to season the already perfectly seasoned beans, as much like other beans as a Tiffany necklace is like a string of old beads left in a tree. How do you explain how anything—anything—served on a melamine plate with a side of potato salad can rival meals you have paid $200 to enjoy, and, if you were true to yourself, you would actually rather have the plate of beans? For the rest of my life, I will remember watching my teenage stepson devour a plate of Betsy’s beans and smoked sausage without taking time to talk or apparently even breathe, then announce that he really, really wanted to go to school in New Orleans. He lived the first 16 years of his life on chicken fingers and cheese pizza. But he knew magic when he tasted it.

  It is the same outside the city, from corner to corner, pocket to pocket in this state. You can even be hexed in a Holiday Inn.

  In Gonzales, just off the interstate and affixed to a chain hotel is a Mike Anderson’s restaurant that prepared a crawfish bisque that is nothing like the chalky, fake mess most places prepare. It is a rich, brown stew, redolent—I have always liked to say redolent—with onions, bell pepper, crawfish tails that do not taste like they came from a hold of an oceangoing freighter, and crawfish heads stuffed with a dressing that is best devoured by fishing it out with a crooked finger. Local people—not just tourists and weary travelers—piled in by the carload on weekend nights, proof that it is not just the visual or sensual appeal of this state that fools us into thinking things taste better here. I mean, it’s in a damn Holiday Inn…

  Sometimes, though, the spell this place casts settles around me so completely that I wonder if I can ever leave it and eat the way regular people eat. It happened in the warmth of a corner table at the Upperline in New Orleans, on something as humble as cornbread. But here the sweet cornbread came topped with grilled, spiced shrimp, and shaved purple onions, and something that looked like rich folks’ mayonnaise but I now think might have been some kind of potion. They only gave me two little squares, about six bites in all. I looked at the empty plate with such awful regret, thinking, “If I had just taken smaller bites…”

  It happened again at Commander’s Palace, white lights glinting in the trees on the other side of the glass. A waiter brought out a dish called bread pudding soufflé and poked a hole in the top of it with a spoon so he could ladle a rich, sugary sauce deep into the thing. I forgot, after a spoonful or two, that I was bound up like an asylum inmate in my too-tight sport coat, forgot every warning my doctor ever gave, forgot that when you leave this place there are potholes of doom ready to swallow you whole and daiquiridazed drivers waiting to run you down.

  You forget everything here, in this Louisiana, for a spoonful of time. If that is not magic, I by God don’t know what magic is.

  SEASONED IN THE SOUTH

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: November 2014

  The first time I noticed them, Thanksgiving was coming. The knives in my mother’s kitchen were black with age, the blades paper thin, wickedly sharp. They made better steel when steel was dear, in a time before world wars, maybe long before.

  But most of the points were broken; the wooden handles—only a Philistine would use a plastic-handled knife—were also worn thin, slick and smooth. When I was a boy, I saw hoe handles that looked like that. You don’t give up on a good hoe handle, not for a generation or so. You drive a nail through the split, twist some electrical tape around it. And one day, when you are gone from this earth, your grandson will finally break it in two and prop the handle, just the handle, in the corner of the shed, like some old man who has finally retired and does not know what else to do but lean.

  But I wanted my mother, the best cook in the entire universe, to have new, proper tools for her most important job of the year: fixing Thanksgiving dinner. I gave her some fancy kitchen knives—it must have been almost a decade ago now.

  “Go to town with ’em, Ma,” I told her.

  I never saw them again. I think maybe she buried them in the backyard, or furtively disposed of them at a yard sale.

  There is no good food, she finally explained to me, “cooked on new stuff.” It is like there is a memory in it, in the iron and the old wood, maybe some magic. You cannot see it or feel it, only taste it.

  “I have biscuit pans older than me,” she said.

  She will cook Thanksgiving dinner with tools passed down to her from the great cooks of antiquity, not only in pots and pans given to her by my grandmothers, Ava and Velma, but passed along from their mothers, and even deeper back in time. “My cornbread skillet—you know you can’t have good dressing without good cornbread—come from your Granny Bragg, and I know she got it from somebody, probably her mama, who got it…”

  My mother’s little house burned down some 20 years ago, around that skillet. She went and got it from the ashes. How do you hurt a skillet, in a fire?

  My Aunt Jo won her turkey pan in a raffle at Coleman’s Service Station in Jacksonville, Alabama, about, she believes, 1961. My Uncle John wrote his name on his gas ticket, and the owner of the station, Mr. Coleman, drew it from a jar. It cooked an average of four turkeys a year for about 50 years. It cooks pretty good, my mother allows, for new stuff.

  They do not look, these tools, like anything on the food channels. They do not have gleaming copper anywhere on them, except in the riv
ets on the old knives. They are battered and dented but not rusted. Rust waits on idle metal. These pans, these skillets, are never idle.

  “People may not believe it, but you can get iron—that good iron for your body and your blood—from an iron skillet,” my mother said.

  If that is not true, it ought to be.

  SUMMER SNOW

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: August 2014

  It was long before Katrina, in those hot, sticky, normal years when people complained how dry things had been. The drought made the already insubstantial dirt weak and powdery, and the piers of the shotgun houses sank into the earth. It is not unusual in New Orleans for an old house to lean, drunkenly. My favorite story was about a house that leaned so much it fell on a bar—just collapsed. Top that.

  But it is not what you want to hear when you are looking for a home. You want your house to appear, well, sober. The sweet real estate lady gently reminded me that New Orleans was just special like that. The potholes were eternal. The termites were, too. It was all part of the charm.

  Then, perhaps afraid I was wavering, she bought me a snow cone.

  Some few days later, I bought a house.

  Since then, I have come to believe that the only real antidote to the mean or troubling things of late summer is a paper cone of shaved ice and a squirt of Day-Glo yellow pineapple syrup.

  I am not silly enough to believe any crisis can be cooled this way. If you get a tax lien from the State of Georgia or get pulled over for speeding in a school zone in McIntosh, Alabama, a snow cone may not suffice. But if a red wasp nails you on your eyebrow, or you bounce across a New Orleans pothole and your manifold falls off into the abyss to hit a poor man in China upside the head, then a cherry shaved ice might do it. Or a grape one—you pick. Either way, your mouth turns red or purple and you look like you are 5 years old, and even that makes you happy somehow, so it’s all okay.