Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (30 page)

My own iron skillet once belonged to my grandmother, Willodene. It is
pure black, glossy as fresh tar, weighs three pounds, and has a number 8
stamped into the bottom. This 8 is a mystery. I thought it was a measurement
until my trusty ruler showed the skillet to be nine inches wide at the bottom,
over ten at the top. I could almost pretend the 8, turned on its side, is the symbol for infinity, but even the most lovingly cared for iron skillets won't last that
long.

This skillet was one of a few items Willodene gave to my parents when they
married in 1967. She didn't have much money for lavish gifts, but neither did
my parents, and they were glad to receive it. How long she owned it before
then is uncertain; my father was a boy when it was new, still dull gray and
rough, unseasoned. As she went through the seasoning process of heating,
greasing, reheating, regreasing, and so on, she sent my young father into the
yard to polish the skillet with sand. That must have been in the late forties. For
twenty years or so she used it, baking and frying innumerable suppers, dinners, breakfasts.

My mother, working girl that she was, used it less often. She preferred pots
and pans with cheap nonstick lining; they weren't as good, but they were less trouble to clean and care for, not as hefty, less likely to burn her hand if she
unthinkingly grasped the handle. I can only remember her using the skillet to
bake biscuits, following the recipe Willodene had taught her. So exclusively
was this method used that it wasn't until after I went to college and married
that I realized that most people baked biscuits on cookie sheets and used those
prissy little biscuit cutters to make each one the same shape and size.

Willodene's skillet passed to me when I went away to the University of Alabama in 199o. I remember the sobriety with which my mother settled it in the
bottom of a cardboard box labeled "JULIANA-KITCHEN." As she crumpled
newspaper and arranged lesser pots and pans around it, Mom eyed me warily.
I was eighteen, gangly and unsure, just starting to learn about the world and,
more importantly, cooking. Clearly, I needed instruction.

"Always wash it right after you use it," she said sternly. "Never leave it wet.
Always heat it on the stove eye until it's completely dry, and then oil it while
it's still warm. Don't cook tomato sauce or anything acidic like that in it." I was
on the verge of telling her that if she was so worried about me ruining it that
she could keep the damn thing, when my father spoke up.

"Take good care of it," he said, his voice quiet. "It belonged to my mother."

Willodene was a pretty woman, though my memories of her as a grandmother are less flattering: dyed brown hair, slightly rounded shoulders, cateye glasses on a beaded chain around her neck. In old photos, she is lovely,
slender, smiling. The droplet of Creek Indian heritage shows in her high
cheekbones, which my father says I have inherited. In one picture taken in the
early forties, she leans against a car, laughing at something, maybe a joke the
photographer made. Her hair blows carelessly around her face, and her lips
are full and dark, as if she's just been kissed.

It didn't last. Her marriage to my grandfather was unhappy, and after thirty
years-not long after my birth-they divorced. A few years later she remarried, to a man who owned chicken houses in South Alabama. His name is
never mentioned in my house, but then I called him Granddaddy. It was during this period that I knew her. My parents would send me down to her house
for weeks at a time. They enjoyed the break from child-rearing, and I loved
being pampered. She catered to my finicky eating habits, keeping a cabinet
stocked with Campbell's soups for me to slurp while she cooked peas, squash,
country-fried steak, banana pudding, lemon squares. In her iron skillet she
fried okra and chicken and baked the heavy biscuits she had taught my
mother to make, as Mom would teach me. These are not the typical fluffy biscuits the size of a fifty-cent piece that most grandmas make. These are formidable biscuits, fist-sized, with bottoms made crunchy by the meeting of cool dough and the hot, oiled pan. Add a slice of fried ham or a spoonful of homemade fig preserves and bliss will follow.

Her house was full of wonders: a butter churn whose paddle I inexpertly
banged around, a swivel chair in which I spun until made to stop, a coffee
table vase of what appeared to be roses but were actually pink-tinted seashells
attached to wire stems. I was given free rein of the house and sometimes even
accompanied my stepgrandfather to his chicken house, where I was allowed to
take eggs off the conveyor belts and proudly line them up in cardboard flats.
The new grandfather didn't talk much. At the chicken house, he'd leave me to
my work for a few hours and give me a pocketful of change when he returned.
At home, he mostly lay in his recliner and slept, his shallow snores rumbling
like distant thunder beneath our kitchen laughter.

Parents are the original masters of misinformation. When Willodene came
to stay with us, she came alone, and I was told she was just paying a grandmotherly visit. Sometimes she stayed a few days, sometimes weeks. On one of
these longer visits, when I was about ten years old, her house burned down.
No official cause was ever named; possibly something was left on in the
kitchen, possibly the wiring shorted out. Her husband was not at home at the
time. Luckily, he'd gone into town to eat dinner. Even luckier, some of his favorite possessions were in his truck, others being repaired in town, others
loaned to friends. Willodene lost everything but the rings on her fingers and
the few things she had packed for her visit with us. She had to go home.

The next time we saw her, she and her husband had erected a double-wide
trailer over the old house's charred foundation. She hated it, hated living in
this box that pretended to be a house, hated the tiny, prefab kitchen, hated the
slightly raised seam that ran down the center of her cramped new living room,
joining the two sections. I thought she was unhappy over losing her things, so
I sorted through the ash piles under the trailer, looking for lost jewelry or
other valuables. I pried up a few scraps of blackened linoleum that had once
been her kitchen floor and hid them away. I still have them, little chips of
yellow patterned with lacy brown like butterfly wings, sooty and crumbling
around the edges.

About a year later she paid another visit, and it was clear from the suitcases
and boxes piled in her car that she intended to stay. Dad turned the downstairs
study into a bedroom, reinforcing the sagging daybed mattress with a sheet of
plywood and adding an old chest of drawers, a lamp, a space heater. Mom
seemed relieved when Willodene took over the kitchen. She gently brushed
aside Mom's concerns about sugar and kept a big pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid
in the refrigerator for my sister and me, and brewed iced tea for the adults. She worked in our garden, keeping us in tomatoes, zucchini, and hot peppers, and
baked cookies and fruit breads and pies. I do not remember her using the old
cast-iron skillet, but I know she must have. She must have been pleased to see
it, to feel its heft, to know her gift had saved it from the fire. Once a bouquet
of bright flowers was delivered for her, but I was not allowed to read the card,
and the flowers ended up in the trash.

Hindsight has a way of recasting a series of events, of simple choices and
movements, into fate. My father says now that when his mother left to bring
the rest of her things from her not-house, he had a deep, certain feeling he
would never see her again. My mother claims to have had a "bad feeling"
about her departure. As for me, I remember her taking me aside, kissing me,
and telling me something a grandparent should never tell an already pampered child. "You're my favorite," she whispered, her glasses chain dangling
over my shoulder. "You remember that."

Whatever our premonitions, real or imagined, what happened was neither
mystical nor fantastic. While she was staying with a neighboring couple, waiting for a time when the house would be safely empty, her husband walked in
and shot all three of them. He shot Willodene repeatedly in the face and body,
killing her. He killed the neighbor woman and wounded her husband, then
turned himself in to the police.

This, too, was largely concealed from my sister and me, little girls still
struggling with long division, not yet ready to comprehend death, much less
murder. We were told the bare bones of the story but did not attend the
closed-coffin funeral. Newspapers were hidden as soon as they were delivered,
but a friend clipped the articles and obituary for me. They sketched Willodene
as a victim of a possessive, abusive husband who was enraged by the divorce
proceedings she had instigated, and I suppose this must be true. But it is hard
to reconcile this with the memory of a man who, when I was present, mostly
slept in his recliner, though he occasionally kicked his dog a little too hard and
seemed, perhaps, to enjoy throwing the dead hens from the chicken house
into a neighbor's pen of devouring hogs.

I am a pack rat by nature; compounded with sorrow, this urge to save
things turns compulsive. Before my parents could gather her belongings, I
slipped into Willodene's room and took a few small things-a hair net, an
emery board, a small circle-shaped pin-and added them to the box containing my newspaper clippings and the charred bits of her kitchen floor. Mom
gave me her sewing kit, contained within a Danish butter cookie tin, which I
still have.

But saving those things felt like stealing. The cast-iron skillet is a gift.

The problem with writing about our Southern grandmothers is that so
many have already addressed the topic. Southern grannies are practically a
genre unto themselves, along with the innumerable anecdotes of their toughness, their strength and endurance, their kindness, their love. The problem is,
really, that we all think our grandmothers and their stories are special. And
they are. Mine was.

Willodene has been dead for over sixteen years, buried in a small churchyard outside Clanton, Alabama. The church there still tends to her grave, placing wreaths and Easter lilies on it as they do the Confederate graves at the
cemetery's heart. I have not been there since shortly after her funeral, and my
father says he does not remember the name of the cemetery. But this may,
again, be mere misinformation, intended to protect old wounds.

The cast-iron skillet Willodene bought, seasoned, cooked with for years,
and passed on to her only child is still in my care. But, times-and ownershaving changed, the skillet is as likely now to hold tofu Marsala and vegetarian
chiles rellenos as fried green tomatoes. I don't know what Willodene would
make of these new-fangled dishes; she enjoyed pork brains and eggs at breakfast, so maybe I should give her credit for having an open mind. I hope she
would not object to the strange stuff that sautees, braises, and sizzles in her
skillet. I hope she would be patient with innovations like the golden flecks of
wheat germ that speckle my biscuits-her biscuits. I hope she would not mind
what I have written about her, a little of the only truth I know.

In 1949, Kenneth Holditch traveled with his father from Mississippi to New
Orleans for what would turn out to be a life-changing meal of trout amandine
at Galatoire's. He remembers the meal vividly, particularly what he calls "the
elegance and skill of the waiters." Fifteen years after that first visit, Holditch
left his job in Memphis and joined the faculty at the University of New Orleans so he could "live in this unique city and dine at Galatoire's whenever I
wished," as he explained it in a recent letter to the restaurant's nine-member
board of directors. And dine he has, often at a twice-weekly pace and, for the
past twenty years or so, usually as the customer of his favorite waiter, Gilberto
Eyzaguirre.

Eyzaguirre, "Gilbert" to his legion of customers, was fired from Galatoire's
after a female employee filed a sexual harassment complaint against him. It
was the second such complaint filed against the waiter by an employee in less
than two months. If this were a story about anywhere else but New Orleans, or
perhaps anyplace else but Galatoire's, that would be the end of it. Instead, it
was only the beginning.