My Southern Journey (11 page)

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

W
hen 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

I
f 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

I
t 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 something 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.