Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (56 page)
Authors: Unknown
Randy Randle had not allowed a single hit when he fell suddenly to the
ground after striking out his fifth batter. The ambulance finally arrived, and a
girl named Pat Everette gave Randy mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until Dr.
Herbert Keyserling moved her aside and injected a shot of pure adrenaline
into Randy's heart. The doctor said that Randy had been dead when he hit the
ground. In that moment, the lives of every witness to Randy Randle's fall to
the earth had been changed, and changed for all time.
In Eugene Norris's English class the next day, Randy's empty seat exuded a
disconsolate sense of loss. His seat's emptiness filled the room. The whole
world seemed misplaced and ill-fitting. My class and I were in a state of shock
when Gene Norris walked into the room, cleaning his glasses with his tie.
"I was just thinking about grief and how we express it. Or how we don't.
Boys seem to have the toughest time showing how much they hurt, but don't
be afraid to. Not in this room. Not among those who loved Randy with you."
The room came apart, and I cracked like an egg. I wept for two days and
could do nothing to stop myself. I wrote my first poem about Randy's death
and gave it to his mother and father after the funeral. Nor did I have to call off
my trip to Newberry, because Randy was buried there with his mother's people in the Rosemont Cemetery. I rode to Newberry with Gene Norris and
stayed in his Uncle John and Aunt Elizabeth's house, where I fell in love with
Gene's pretty cousin, Liz, or "Cuz," as he called her.
I did not know then that love and death could find each other at the same
dance. Liz was an uncommonly lovely freshman at Columbia College, and I
was smitten the moment I walked into the room. She moved with a dreamy,
sophisticated air that made me and the other high school boys who encountered her unsteady in our loafers.
On the way to Randy's burial service, I asked Mr. Norris, "Does Liz ever
date high school boys, Mr. Norris?"
"Of course not," Gene said, dismissing the fact out of hand. "She wouldn't
be caught dead with a high school Harry like you. Liz only dates the cream of
the crop. College boys. From the very best fraternities. Her boyfriend's going
to be a doctor. Yes, sir, a doctor."
"If she ever breaks up with her doctor friend, I'd sure be interested, Mr.
Norris."
"Of course you'd be interested, boy," he said. "But she's got big plans with a
Clemson man. She left you boys back in the playgrounds a long time ago. Now
quit mooning over my cousin and start thinking about Randy."
When I got to Randy's grandmother's house, I could smell the food all the
way up the hill on Main Street, where we parked the car. His grandmother,
Mrs. Smith, who would soon become Mamaw to me, introduced me to Dunbar macaroni. She gave me the history, lore, and legend of the dish as she
served me a large portion.
"No one knows who Mr. Dunbar was, but we are absolutely sure he was a
Newberrian. The dish is native to this town. You'll never find another single
soul eating this anywhere. And it's delicious. Though there are two or three
versions, I'm letting you eat mine. I make it the classical way. No frills or fuss."
I knew so little about food and the way it was prepared that all I remember
about her Dunbar macaroni was that she watched me closely as I ate her concoction of cheese and macaroni and onions. It was my first South Carolina funeral, and everything about that day remains bright, vivid, and profoundly
sad.
Though I had never felt sadder, I had never eaten better in my whole life.
There was something scandalous to me about combining mourning Randy
with the exquisite pleasures of the Newberry table.
I did not eat Dunbar macaroni again for thirty years. I was in the middle of
finishing the novel Beach Music when I got a call from my old English teacher,
Gene Norris, late at night. He could hardly speak as he told me that his cousin,
Liz, the one who had infatuated me as a boy, had died in her sleep at the age
of forty-nine. Liz had followed her plan with immaculate precision and married that Clemson fraternity man, who then set about becoming a doctor.
They had lived out their lives as important citizens of Newberry, raised two
children, attended the Lutheran Church, and had some fine years before it
began to go wrong with them. Their divorce was almost final when she was
found dead in her bed.
Sadness had attached itself to her final years, and Gene would periodically
ask me to call Liz to cheer her up when things were really bad. I tried to get her
to come to a screening of The Prince of Tides in New York City with Gene, but
her lawyer said it could be used against her in court. I sent her the bottle of
champagne that Barbra Streisand had had delivered to my hotel room after
that screening. Liz called me to tell me she and several of her girlfriends had
made an elaborate ceremony out of drinking it. When I gathered with her family after her burial, I saw the note I had written when I sent her the champagne. It was hanging by a magnet on her refrigerator door.
I was reading my note to Liz when one of her friends tapped me lightly on
the shoulder and said, handing me a plate, "You've got to eat this. It's a Newberry County specialty. We call it Dunbar macaroni."
I had never seen Liz Norris after that day of Randy's funeral. We had, of
course, spoken on the phone, but our paths never crossed again. As I ate Dunbar macaroni for the second time in my life, I said a prayer for Liz and thought
how strange it was that her high school Harry had finally caught up with her
when it was far too late for either one of us.
Susan Allport writes about food and the difficulties of being a human omnivore.
Her most recent book is The Primal Beast: Food, Sex, Foraging, and Love.
Brett Anderson is the restaurant critic and a food feature writer at the New Orleans
Times-Picayune.
Maude Andrews wrote about the importance of barbecue long before any of us were
born, in 1896.
James Applewhite, a professor of English at Duke University, is the author of Seas
and Inland Journeys: Landscape and Consciousness from Wordsworth to Roethke
and seven books of poetry, including Daytime and Starlight.
Jim Auchmutey is a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and author of
two books on Southern food.
Earl Sherman Braggs is a professor of English at the University of Tennessee at
Chattanooga. His publications include Crossing Tecumseh Street, House on
Fontanka, Walking Back from Woodstock, Hat Dancer Blue, and Hats.
Max Brantley of Little Rock was a food writer for the Arkansas Times.
Bethany Ewald Bultman of New Orleans has written for Town & Country and
Elle Decor and served as a contributing editor at House & Garden. She is the
author of Redneck Heaven: Portrait of a Vanishing Culture.
Al Clayton of Jasper, Georgia, took photographs for a U.S. Senate committee
investigation on hunger. His photographs aided in the passage of the food
stamp program and were collected in Robert Coles's book, Still Hungry in
America.
Pat Conroy is the author of seven books. In 2001, he was awarded a James Beard
Foundation award for excellence in writing about food.
Eddie Dean is a contributing writer for Washington City paper. His work has
appeared in Harper's, the Wall Street Journal, SPIN, and Da Capo's Best Music
Writing zooo, among other publications.
John T. Edge is the director of the Southern Foodways Alliance. He writes for
numerous magazines, including Gourmet. His latest book is Fried Chicken:
An American Story.
Lolis Eric Elie, a columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, is the author of
Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country.
Amy Evans is a freelance photographer, painter, art instructor, and cofounder of
PieceWorks, an arts and outreach organization for the Deep South. She is the
oral history coordinator for the Southern Foodways Alliance.
Marcie Cohen Ferris is a visiting professor in American studies at the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is interested in the history of Jews in the
American South and how their foodways bridge Southern and Jewish culture.
Randy Fertel, a writer and teacher based in New York and New Orleans, specializes
in the literature of the Vietnam War. His forthcoming book, The Gorilla Man and
the Empress of Steaks, is the tale of his parents and their fascinating worlds.
William Price Fox of Columbia, South Carolina, is the author of a number of books,
including the comic classic, Southern Fried Plus Six, and, more recently, Wild Blue
Yonder.
Barbara Renaud Gonzalez is a writer and journalist based in San Antonio, Texas.
She is currently writing the novel, "Golondrina," a Texas Story, which inspired her
essay in this anthology.
Juliana Gray teaches English at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. She is the
author of a poetry chapbook, History in Bones.
Jessica B. Harris is a food historian and cookbook author who lives in New York City
and New Orleans. Her latest work is Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food from the
Atlantic Rim.
Ripley Golovin Hathaway would like to thank Shirley Maul and Clyde Gritten for
the help they gave her twenty-five years ago when she wrote her senior thesis,
from which her essay is adapted.
Jenine Holmes is a poet whose work came to the editor's attention in Literary Lunch,
a collection of food writing from the Knoxville Writers Guild.
Rufus Jarmon was a writer with a penchant for documenting the American South.
His work appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and elsewhere.
Pableaux Johnson is a New Orleans-based food and travel writer. His essay, "End of
the Lines?," received a 2004 James Beard Foundation nomination.
Peter Kaminsky writes about food and the outdoors. His work appears regularly in
the New York Times, New York Magazine, and Food & Wine. His newest book is
Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine, from which his essay is excerpted.
Jeff Daniel Marion's most recent books are Letters Home and Ebbing and Flowing
Springs: New and Selected Poems and Prose. A native of Rogersville, Tennessee, he
now lives down the road in Knoxville.
Linda Parsons Marion, a native of Nashville, Tennessee, is a widely published poet.
She lives in Knoxville, where she is an editor at the University of Tennessee.
Michael McFee has published six poetry collections, most recently Earthly. He
teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Matt McMillen is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer whose work has
appeared in the Washington Post and Gourmet. His primary beats are food and
health.
Molly O'Neill writes for the New Yorker. She was the longtime food columnist for
the New York Times Magazine. She is the host of the PBS series Great Food and
has published three cookbooks.
John Shelton Reed is William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and coeditor of the journal Southern
Cultures.
Julia Reed was born in Greenville, Mississippi. She is a senior writer at Vogue and
writes about food for the New York Times Magazine.
Sara Roahen lives in New Orleans, where she writes about food and restaurants for,
among other publications, Gambit.
Diane Roberts is an eighth-generation Floridian, a commentator for National Public
Radio, and a university professor. Her new book is Dream State.
Fred W. Sauceman is executive assistant to the president for university relations at
East Tennessee State University.
Stephen Smith is a native Arkansawyer, a certified trencherman, a professor of
communication at the University of Arkansas, and author of Myth, Media, and
the Southern Mind.
Vince Staten is a writer, author, and barbecue eater. He has eaten barbecue at
more than i,ooo barbecue joints, more than any person alive and quite a few
who aren't.
John Martin Taylor is the owner of
author of several cookbooks, including Hoppin' John's Lowcountry Cooking.