Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (23 page)

Early November is a picture-postcard time to drive through North Carolina.
The oak leaves are turning-not the flaming scarlets and golds of New England
maples, but rather a dark red to dry brown. The air is cool, but there are still the
remnants of summer warmth in the sea breeze. And since it was only a fourhour detour, which is nothing at all for a barbecue fancier, I drove from a fishing trip on the coast up to Mitchell's Barbecue in Wilson, just east of Raleigh.

The highways were numerous, well maintained, and fairly empty, a sign
that it pays to have Jesse Helms as your senator: gazillions of dollars for magnificent thoroughfares that seem to go nowhere. On the feeder roads, one
finds another sign of government largesse: at lunch hour, every barbecue
stand has a full complement of highway maintenance trucks parked on the
roadside, as their crews sit down to trencherman portions of cue. In that way,
those millions of highway dollars, far from being wasted, are helping to support the small barbecue businesses of the Carolinas.

If the call for barbecue has not summoned Eddie Mitchell from his large
and modern restaurant, you may see a fifty-three-foot semi parked outside
Mitchell's on Highway 301. On the side panel Mitchell's smile beams through
his salt-and-pepper beard. Mitchell is so energetic and outgoing that the
thought occurs, upon meeting him, that there is easily enough vitality left
over here to fill up another body or two.

Although the term "best" is a completely subjective matter when comparing things in the very top tier of any enterprise, one can say with confidence
that Mitchell's is about as good as it gets for eastern North Carolina barbecue:
that is, whole hog and a vinegar-based peppery sauce.

I followed the smell of wood smoke up the last half-mile or so of highway
where Eddie, a man with the build of a fullback (actually he was both quarterback and running back at Fayetteville State), was in the process of muscling
a couple of hogs off the grate. Not for the first time, the splayed pig brought to
mind a human body about to be cooked. Maybe it is that similarity between naked pigs and naked people that caused Polynesian cannibals to refer to
human meat as "long pig" (as reported by Robert Louis Stevenson in Tales of
The South Seas). It might even have something to do with the Jews' and Arabs'
pork taboo.

As Eddie and his crew pulled the meat from the bones, hot and steaming,
the tantalizing smell of fat and flesh hung heavy as night air in August just before a cloudburst. Eddie piled the meat in front of him and pounded out a
steady beat with two hatchets as he chopped the cooked pork.

I prefer bigger pieces of meat to the finer mince commonly served in the
Piedmont region, and Eddie accommodates my request for bigger pieces,
making sure to include moist and tender meat from deep within the pigs'
flesh, mixing it with crispy skin and "outside brown" (the dark red meat completely permeated with smoke and fire). He serves it on a bun, drenched in piquant vinegar sauce and piled with cool, sweet coleslaw. It has an intense, almost overpowering taste, the spicy seasoned meat tempered by the coleslaw.
The soggy bun-mooshy from the sauce and slaw-helps the barbecue slide
down your gullet, as Howlin Wolf once said "like Baby Jesus in satin pants."

Mitchell's is among the biggest barbecue establishments I have seen, much
bigger even than its large clientele would warrant. But Eddie Mitchell sees his
place as a future school for barbecuers who want to preserve the old-time
tradition.

That tradition is never far from Eddie's conversation. For that matter it is
never far from the customer's view, as Mitchell has commissioned a mural in
the American Primitive style that dominates the dining room with its depiction of an old-fashioned "pig-picking." Eddie told me that a young man in
town who was "very artistic" (more on that later) had painted it. The scene, as
Eddie told the story, is typical of what one would have come upon in the
countryside at the end of the tobacco harvest. He added, "Once the last truck
comes to the barn it's time for the pig-pickins."

Eddie's generation is probably the last to attend these farm-family feasts.
His youth was the heyday of tobacco as the driving wheel of the North Carolina economy. The pictures in the mural trace the story, beginning with planting tobacco in the spring and concluding with slaughtering the pigs and rendering the fat, with the women making sausages, the men tending a barbecue
pit, a huge table with seating for fifteen, and a gracious old Southern mansion
in the background. In those years, I imagine, the tobacco plantation pig-picking
was one of the few occasions when whole families of blacks and whites sat
down to dinner at the same table. In addition to platters of meat, the table is
laden with watermelon, fried chicken, sweet potato souffle, ham, corn on the cob, iced tea, cakes, black-eyed peas, lemonade. "A real pig-out," Eddie said.
"You put everything out for the pig-picking, so that is why, I think, you have
the term 'pig-out."'

Somewhat to my puzzlement Eddie recounted that it was a real challenge
for him to work with the artist. "The thing with him is if I can just keep him
focused it takes about a day to work with him to get it all doing and get it all
working and so."

"Why is that?"

"Like I said, he's autistic."

"Oh, it's your accent," I explained. "I understood you to say `He's artistic,'
which I already knew from looking at the painting."

We laughed. In our era, when the stand-alone barbecue stands that sprung
up after the Second World War (before which time eating out meant church
dinners or a feed put on by a campaigning politician) were starting to look,
and taste, a bit run down, barely holding their own with franchise fast food,
there is a dynamic air about the Mitchell place. Mitchell, with his attachment,
both sentimental and financial, to old-fashioned barbecue, is a New South
success story. A high school and college football star, he moved up North to
work with the Ford Motor Company, first in Detroit and then as a regional
manager in Waltham, Massachusetts. But when his father fell ill in the early
seventies with what they thought were early symptoms of the lung cancer that
finally killed him, Eddie moved back South to be near his mother, who ran a
mom-and-pop grocery store (at that time increasingly more mom than pop).
Eddie took a position as assistant director for the Employment Standards Division of the State Department of Labor.

The death of his father in 199o threw his mother into despair. The family
store, which had suffered declining business for some time, was in very bad
shape. One night, in an effort to cheer her up, Eddie said to his mother,
"Mom, I see you got some collard greens cooking, what else do you feel like
eating?" And she said, "I have me a taste for some good old-fashioned barbecue." "That was my signal to go out to the local store and buy a little thirtyfour pound pig and come back and put the guy on the barbecue," he said.
"Later that day, someone came in to buy a hot dog or a hamburger, and he
could smell the smoked meat.

"`Mrs. Mitchell, you got barbecue now?' he asked.

"I stuck my head out and answered for her, `Yeah, we have barbecue, sell
the man something.... So she made the guy a couple of sandwiches, and I left
to go back to work. When I returned about 7:30 to escort her home, she was
all bubbly.

"I said, `It's nice to see that you have a difference in personality.!

"And she said, `You know I sold that barbecue, don't you-yes I did. I sold
every bit of it!'

"As we got ready to go out the door, someone was trying to come in, and
I'm thinking someone's trying to rob us. So I put a little bass in my voice, I say,
`Yeah, who is it?'

"`We want to know if you got anymore barbecue.'

"`No, we don't have anymore today, but we'll have some more tomorrow,'
which we didn't have, but I just played along to get the guy from the door. For
the next two weeks everyone kept asking my ►nom about barbecue. So she said
to me, `You know, folks still asking me about the barbecue and none of the
other stuff is selling; the groceries are still on the shelves.'

"So I got her another pig, and when that sold out, I went and got a third
one, on my own without her having to ask. And sure enough, that went too.
At that point in time, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out that
something's going on here.

"Momma said, `Son you'd be surprised, you go back cooking this stuff the
old-fashioned way, like they did, you add some collard greens and mustard
greens. You'd be surprised.'

"That's Momma talking and I'm a momma's boy, and I listened, but I didn't
put a lot of starch in it. But time progressed, buying a pig, buying a pig, it became too much for me, the two jobs. I found myself coming from work in
Raleigh, literally changing into my cooking clothes in the car. Finally I was in
the full-time barbecue business. And that's how I found Mr. Kirby."

I noted he used the honorific "mister," observing the old-time tradition
still kept alive among African Americans of a certain generation as a genteel
way of showing respect for one's elders.

Like many kids in the South, Eddie remembers growing up with barbecuers. "I would always hang around when my dad and grandad and uncle
were cooking. I got interested when I was eight or nine, and I cooked my first
pig when I was about fourteen, and they realized I was good at it, so the next
time, the older men let me cook the pig while they hit the moonshine. It kind
of evolved into a job, and once it became a job, like most kids I wasn't interested any more.

"Still the cooking process was always present in my home. On the holidays
we would cook our own barbecue; my family, most of which had migrated
north, (largely to New Jersey) would come home at Christmas time and we
would all barbecue.

"As time progressed the old guys died out, but the art itself had been some what passed on. I still knew how to cook a pig and so did my brothers. But
there were certain things the old guys did that I hadn't paid attention to. When
I decided to really get into this business my mother said to me, `You go learning this barbecue the old-fashioned way, you'll be surprised.'

"So I asked my mom, `who's still alive?' and I went to some of the older
guys, but they weren't into getting back into it-the labor was so intense if you
were serious about doing it. The last guy I went to was James Kirby."

Eddie began this tale as a prelude to a visit to Mr. Kirby, who lives in a neat
little bungalow nearby. The day was fair, about seventy degrees or so; however
inside Mr. Kirby's knotty-pine living room it was warm. I noted the thermometer read eighty-two, which, coincidentally was the age of the handsome
gentleman who sat in a recliner, holding on to a cane and half rising to greet
us while he hit the remote to turn down the volume on General Hospital.

"I just keep the TV on for company," he explained in a deep country accent,
barely intelligible to my New York ears.

"They want to know how you got me into all this crap," Eddie said. And
while Mr. Kirby nodded or interjected an occasional "Yes, that's so," Eddie told
the story.

"Mr. Kirby and I used to play poker together. When I first approached him
about learning barbecue from him he said, no, he really wasn't interested. But
as it turned out, that night at the poker game his luck was down, and he ended
up going broke. Now James was an older guy than most of us around the table,
and he could get very ornery."

Mr. Kirby gave the huff of an old lion, half skeptical and gruff.

"So he sat there with no chips, no money, and the guys who were waiting
to get into the game were afraid to ask him to get up because they didn't want
to face his orneriness. So he just sat there as the deal went around.

"Now, my luck was pretty good, so I just reached in my pocket and gave
him fifty dollars. He didn't pick it up. He just looked at me. Honestly, I didn't
know if he was going to take it or not. I just did it out of a gesture. The deal
went around once. He didn't throw in any money that time. The deal came
around again, and he picked up ten dollars and anted up. I had won all I
wanted to win so I got up so that another guy could sit down at the table. I
stood around having a drink or two while Mr. Kirby's luck caught on and he
won a few hands. After a while I was ready to go, and he said, `Wait up. I want
to talk to you.' So I waited.

"He said, `Do you still want to learn about barbecue?'

"And I said, `Yeah'

"He said, `I'll show ya. I'll be by your place tomorrow.'

"Now I had been searching around before Mr. Kirby came forward, and I
had heard about Mr. Herbert Woodard, who is a gentleman who was noted
back then for cooking barbecue, and he used to own a hotel/motel. For whatever reason he changed the old tradition. He bought a cooker (an electric
smoker) and stopped cooking in the ground. When I got into the business, I
wanted to do something to speed up the process, and I thought about buying
that cooker. I told Mr. Woodard I would be out at his place to look at it. So
when Mr. Kirby came by that next day I asked him come on and look at this
electric cooker with me."

At this point Mr. Kirby, a woodsmoke traditionalist, affirmed, "Yes, that's
right," and at the same time gave a shiver of disapproval, as one might do in
recalling a meal that made you sick to your stomach.

Eddie picked up the tale. "So we go out there. Mr. Woodard had the cooker
out to show how it works. Mr. Kirby is standing there. He never says a word.
So I cut a deal for $200 for the cooker. I began to reach in my pocket to get my
wallet to pay for it. And every time I did that Mr. Kirby, who was standing behind me, would tug on my arm. So I would start to hesitate and carry on a
meaningless conversation trying to figure if there was something about the
cooker that Mr. Kirby saw that he didn't like but also didn't want to come out
and say. You see, Mr. Woodard and Mr. Kirby and all the old-timers grew up
together and were real competitive barbecue cookers, real pit masters. So the
bottom line was Mr. Kirby didn't want to say anything in front of Herbert because Herbert was his friend. So the last time I tried to pay Mr. Herbert, Mr.
James started to tug on my arm again. I said, `Excuse me a minute, I'll be right
back.' And I told James, `Come with me outside. I can't seem to find my
money or something: And he came on out, and I said, `What is it? What is it?'