Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (4 page)

That's how my father became a sharecropper working in the Panhandle, on
this side of Oklahoma. No land left, you see.

People say he looks like one of those spaghetti-thin cowboys from the
movies, a rougher Clark Gable type with a sleepy voice like Nat King Cole's.
"Verdad que parece negro, comadre?" Only Daddy speaks Spanish and English so well that he doesn't need translation-all one song to him.

Daddy's grandfather had been a real cowboy. "Had to, no place to go-remember the Alamo?" "How can we forget, por amor de Dios, we lost!" dice
Mami. Without land, the men went to work on the cattle drives-from their
homes on the Texas border all the way to the Canadian. Six months to get to
Chicago with God's help, before the snowstorms hit.

When Daddy's talking like this, the Tejano in him plucks a guitar from somewhere out of the summer's blue sky, his baritone voice exploding with a
song in the cotton fields surrounding us, making us see the cowboys beside
him, right here on this land, singing their corridos with dust in their throats.
Burning despite the snow.

"Damned hard work ... not like the movies! What they don't tell you is that
Mexicanos were real cowboys, not like the gringos."

My mother's really tired of his stories. Her family lost their land too, but in
the Mexican Revolution. "Wasn't ours to begin with.... The land belongs to
everyone! That's what Zapata said, and what does your father think happens
to those who steal it anyway? Cabrones!" Mami's in the kitchen, and she calls
Daddy names under her breath cause he lets the gringos make him say jes-ser!
and no-ser! and she wants him to be like Zapata and stand up.

My mother is pura Mexicana. "Don't forget that! Head to toe!" She's not
even five feet tall, and though at twelve I'm already bigger than her, she still
uses the belt on me. Hijos de Maria Morales! But Daddy's six feet tall, and he
laughs at my mother's smallness, her poetic bullets whizzing by, her politics,
for sure.

"You had to cross that border to eat, didn't you?"

Mami says that Mexico is paradise and that Texas is puro hell. Un pinche
infierno. She says that over there across the river there are mountains and volcanoes, orchids, chocolate and dancing at the plaza on Sundays. Explains that
Mexico's problem is she's like a beautiful woman who everyone wants to possess. Like land. But nobody can have her, she doesn't belong to men.

I don't understand this, but Mami sure doesn't let Daddy boss her around.

She wants him to leave the rancho and get a real job in town. But Daddy's
expecting a good harvest this year, making up for all the bad years before. Already know this 'cause I heard them arguing late into the night about all the
money they're owing for school clothes, for my brand-new flute and the
sewing machine from Sears that Mami wanted so that she could help Daddy
pay the bills.

Then the harvest finally, really, came. Daddy's humming Hank Williams,
pinching Mami's nalgas when he thinks nobody sees. We're going to the town
barbecue! With all the big gringo ranchers and everything! Daddy himself
slaughtered a cow so that there's gonna be plenty of good comida. Everybody
smackin' their lips, because the barbecue out-smells the cotton gin any day. Better than Christmas with those chili-beans, mashed potatoes and coleslaw,
peach cobbler and buckets of iced tea. Daddy's harvest. And of course, miles
of barbecue extending like rich, jagged acres of brown-sauced dreams.

Daddy remembers the way his family used to cook their meat in a special
pit in the ground lined with stones and mesquite wood. Now that was a party!
Bautismos! Birthdays! Easter! Welcome Home! Slow-cooking a whole cow's
head until, after several days, "it would melt in your mouth and make you forget all your penas!" Those barbacoa days with his family kept him alive during
the worst days of the Big War, he said.

Reminds us that the cowboy's barbecue comes from the vaquero tradition.
How it was the sweet and spicy dribbling from the handmade corn tortillas all
the way down to the elbows at his grandfather's wedding fiesta. Staining his
French great-grandmother's linens with the red chile salsa before that and the
fringes of his Indian great-great grandmother's rebozo way before that.

"Who cares if I didn't get a Purple Heart." This barbacoa proved that he was
a good man after all. Even if he didn't have land anymore.

But the bossman stole his harvest anyway. Mami and Daddy divorced a few
years later, and I never had barbacoa again.

Until I moved to San Antonio. And here, every Sunday morning, there are
lines of cars outside places like Adelita's and Big Joe's. The kids are waiting at
home and they've placed their order early with Daddy for pura carne, and
they've never seen a whole cabeza bundled with maguey leaves in the ground,
but they know what they like with their breakfast. Corn tortillas! Flour! Salsa!
Gorditas! Refried beans! Papitas! Scrambled eggs! Sunny-side up! Pico de
gallo! Avocado! Juice! Coffee!

A cold bottle of Big Red! Please, Daddy! Por favor, papi!

And all over San Anto, families gather round the table as the father brings
home a carton of just beef or just cow's head, after getting up extra-early to be
in line at six on Sunday morning. That's what a good father does.

And the hot meat is silky and juicy and, ay, how good it tastes, how the kids
are laughing, and the grease delicious, like memories slipping from the mouth
to the chin to the table. Staining us with the past. Like blood. Like the land.

Just like it did that summer when we were a family.

Barbecue scholars tell us that the American barbecue belt runs through the
Carolinas, but they often ignore the fact that a parallel belt runs among the islands of the Caribbean Sea. Certainly the conjoining of meat and flame has
taken place for millennia, but it is the Caribbean region that first perfected the
uniquely hemispheric cooking form and that gave it its name: barbecue.

According to barbecue historian Lolis Eric Elie's Smokestack Lightning,
Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's 1526 account, De la historia General y Natural
de las Indias, is the first work to use the word "barbacoa" speaking of the Indians of Tierra Firme who roasted meat on sticks and then placed them in the
ground, "like a grating or trivet over a pit." He was perhaps the first European
to witness this method of cooking. It should be noted that the Spanish hidalgo
uses the term to describe not a food or a method of cooking but the grill upon
which the food was cooked.