Buttermilk Graffiti

by Edward Lee

  “What you think you gonna find in Clarksdale?” she asks me. She is not menacing, just unimpressed. Her gray afro ripples from her head like a wave crashing against the world behind her. She tells me her name is Mary. She grew up in Clarksdale, lived in Atlanta for twenty years, and recently moved back. She doesn’t say why.

  “You don’t look like one of them blues tourists,” she says to me as she finishes her coffee.

  “What does that look like?”

  “A muthufucka with a camera and a book about Robert Johnson.”

  We laugh. In my bag, I have book about Sam Cooke that I now can’t take out.

  She’s a seamstress, she tells me. I ask her if she made the dress she’s wearing. She makes everything she wears, she says. I tell her my parents used to run a garment factory, so I know a little about sewing. I compliment the featherstitch on her dress. She warms up to me. I ask her where I should go eat. She tells me about Delta tamales; she tells me to eat at Ramon’s, at Abe’s BBQ. I ask her about soul food.

  She shakes her head. “Most black people cook out of their homes. The casino’s got a cook making decent food,” she says. “Or go to the Chinese buffet—they got soul food o’er there.”

  She doesn’t find it the least bit ironic that she is sending me to a Chinese restaurant to get soul food. I ask her how she likes the food here at the Blue and White. She tells me she drives up here once a week to get a good meal and to get out of Clarksdale for a bit. She never intended to come back to Clarksdale. It just happened. She keeps looking into her empty coffee mug.

  The food is good. The catfish is firm and mossy, with tender flakes encrusted in a fried batter that bends before it cracks. The greens are withered and tender, with a potlikker that is cloudy and rich. We’ve been sitting at the counter with an empty stool between us, but now I move closer to Mary to share my coconut pie with her. The waitress smiles at me and says, “Where’d you come from, you sweet thing?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. Everyone here is either white or black, mostly white. The clatter of plates comes nonstop from the kitchen. The scent of strong coffee makes the air smell like dirt.

  Mary leans back to look me up and down. “You came all the way down here looking for soul food?”

  “I’m not exactly sure why I came here, but yes, food was one reason.”

  “I’m sure you’ll find what you want.” She smiles and thanks me for the pie. On my way out, I almost buy a T-shirt, but I don’t want Mary to see me doing anything so touristy.

  I’m trying to find a blues station on the radio, but all I get are Christian songs. I stop at a song with a gentle male voice full of conflict and falsetto. It takes me a few verses to realize this is gospel. It is Jonathan McReynolds. A young man’s pretty voice describes the inner turmoil of wanting to indulge in worldly delights but also to follow the word of God. You can’t serve two masters, he says. I’m not a fan of Christian music, but I’m transfixed by McReynolds’s voice, his delivery. It’s so hypnotic, you don’t want him to stop. But he paints a picture of an inflexible world, one that does not allow for a middle ground, for unorthodox interpretations of the Gospel. It is white or black, he says. He sets up an either-or paradigm. You are either in heaven or in hell, either good or evil. This is Clarksdale, and religion is strong here. This is a place of stark opposites: earth or sky, wealth or poverty, power or servitude, white or black. You are either from the Delta or you are not.

  I don’t believe that the world is a two-sided coin. Living in the American South as I have for more than fifteen years, I’ve collected so many stories that vibrate in the middle, stories that add to the culinary narrative without diminishing the history of the struggle between binary poles, or black and white. I am also Asian American, so I don’t fit inside this convenient dichotomy. To be in Clarksdale, though, is to be reminded that, in some places, the world has yet to be reconciled.

  The first time I traveled to Clarksdale, in 2015, I cooked a dinner at Dockery Plantation with the Delta Supper Club, a group of young chefs trying to bring economic and cultural vitality back to the region. We cooked Delta rice and local birds. We ate chess pie with dense local ice cream and drank bourbon until we couldn’t see straight. We ended up at Po’ Monkey’s house, to see if he would open up his juke joint, only to get cussed out. Po’ Monkey’s is a legendary juke joint in the middle of nowhere, where people gather once a week to drink and dance and get nasty. Anthony Bourdain featured it on an episode of Parts Unknown about Mississippi, and it has since gotten attention from all over the world.

  Po’ Monkey, aka Willie Seaberry, died in 2016. At his funeral, a fight broke out when a woman claimed he owed her money. Everyone is convinced he had a great deal of cash stashed away somewhere inside his club. There is an ongoing debate over whether the club should be kept going without Po’ Monkey. For anyone who ever met him—he often wore a pink suit—it is clear that there was only one Willie Seaberry and there will never be another.

  One of the participants in that Dockery Plantation dinner is meeting me in town. Tom, a Mississippian from Jackson, is a chef and writer. I agree to meet him for lunch. With some time to kill, I drive around the empty streets of Clarksdale, watching, like a stranger in a postapocalyptic town, the occasional person walk down the street. The downtown is dotted with a few notable blues places for tourists, but the rest is a ghost town of precious yet abandoned buildings. Morgan Freeman owns a popular blues club here. I spot signs for Muddy Waters’s cabin, for Dockery Plantation, for the hospital where Bessie Smith died, and I wonder what exactly the tourists are here to experience. A few landmark buildings long abandoned? A blues concert? Nostalgia for something that was never theirs to begin with?

  I drive past a small cotton field along the outskirts of Clarksdale. The cotton harvest happened months ago, but a few snowy white puffs cling stubbornly to thorny black stems. At first glance, it is beautiful, until you think about the history of inhumanity underlying this one crop. My mind vacillates between the beauty and the violence. I ask myself what I’m doing here. I may not be one of the blues tourists, but am I not another kind of tourist, a culinary tourist seeking a nostalgic food experience that I am hoping to write about? How many bowls of collard greens will be enough to make me feel included? For me, the conflict is always the tension between nostalgia and the present. If we live in nostalgia, we will strangle the possibility for a future. But without it, we don’t have stories; we don’t have people preserving a culture before it slips away into an elusive memory, a kind of oblivion.

  I was fifteen the first time I went to CBGB in the Bowery. I went with two girls who looked a lot older than I did. The place was dark and sticky, with decals and graffiti covering the walls and beer soaked into the floorboards. The band that night was loud and dissonant, the musicians pale, thin ghosts and high as fuck. I loved every minute of it. I was too young to have seen the Ramones, Patti Smith, or Debbie Harry, so these gaunt musicians would have to do. While I was peeing in the bathroom urinal, someone vomited on my jeans. He didn’t apologize. The girls I was with were grossed out, and left without me. I disappeared into a corner, paralyzed by the heat, the energy, and the crazed smell of beer and urine. I couldn’t see the band from where I stood, but I could feel the vibrations coming from the speakers. The crowd was going nuts. I remember thinking, This can’t be real. If they let someone like me in here, then, really, how authentic can it be? But then I wondered what it must have been like to be here in its heyday, when the real shit was happening. Maybe the answer is that CBGB was just a place where people came to play, and they chose this spot not because it was special but because no one else wanted it. It was just a place where people came to play music before it became a sacred site for the antiestablishment—just as Clarksdale was not the home of the blues when Muddy Waters was living in a dilapidated cabin; it was just a place where life was hard and music was one of the ways people coped.

  I suppose that’s w
hat I’m looking for in Clarksdale—not a legend, not a signpost, just a place where people come to cook.

  Agnes and Toni are sisters not by blood but by marriage. Their husbands are half brothers, or were. One has been dead almost twenty years, and the other divorced from Toni for nearly as long. Agnes and Toni run a small clothing store in downtown Clarksdale. They have a sign on the curb that advertises “High Fashion,” along with magnets, spoons, lapel pins, and cosmetics. A handwritten piece of paper taped to the upper-left-hand corner of their sign reads “Pecans.” I’m intrigued. Inside are sequined dresses on hangers, wrapped in heavy protective plastic. There is a section for choir suits next to a small lingerie section. Behind the glass counter is a row of purses and weave wigs. Costume jewelry adorns the glittery, fabric-lined cases. A tall woman in her sixties appears from behind the counter. Agnes has perfect posture; her accent is a strain of Mississippi that is polite and proper, at an octave ever so gently raised. Her coiffed hair does not move as she glides toward me like an apparition.

  “Can I help you with something, young man?”

  I tell her I’m curious about the sign for pecans, and maybe spoons. She sells me a pound of pecans for seven dollars. They come in a small brown paper bag. I take one out and pop it in my mouth. It is surprisingly aromatic, nutty and earthy, with an oiliness that you get only from fresh pecans. “Where did you get these?” I ask.

  “My son farms them near our house.”

  I start fishing through my wallet to see how much more cash I have.

  Another woman emerges from the back. She is short and perky, and looks at me with suspicion. She is about a decade younger than Agnes. She is brown-skinned, with the features of the Middle East, but she speaks with the common Mississippi drawl.

  “Are you Lebanese?” I ask her.

  “Well, sure, honey,” she replies.

  “Do you know where to get good Lebanese food?”

  The women chuckle, and Agnes leans in and tells me that Toni makes the best cabbage rolls and kibbeh in Clarksdale. She makes them from her house and advertises them on Facebook whenever she has a bunch to sell. People come from all over.

  I ask what makes hers the best.

  This starts a roiling debate. “If you put cinnamon in your kibbeh, well, now, you are just wrong. The folks in Vicksburg might do that, but not here,” Agnes informs me.

  Toni tells me her forefathers were Maronites, Christians fleeing persecution in Lebanon. Most knew they were not going back, so when they landed in Mississippi, it was not to seek temporary refuge. This was to be their new home. They did manual labor, peddled anything they could (soap, lotion, towels) to tenant farmers. They spoke Arabic and French. They were businesspeople. They made and sold food, too.

  “We’ve been here a long time,” Agnes tells me. “And kibbeh became our calling card. If you were Lebanese, you came to Clarksdale and walked the dirt streets saying the word kibbeh over and over again until a Lebanese family would hear you and take you in. That’s how kibbeh became so popular here.”

  Toni says she is thinking about going to school to learn more about cooking.

  “Quite frankly, you have more to teach than to learn,” I tell her. This warms her up.

  I take a picture with her as I leave, but Agnes refuses to pose.

  “It’s just not proper,” she says as she runs her fingers across the immovable shell of her hair. She tells me to dine at Chamoun’s Rest Haven, which is where I’m meeting Tom, the chef from Jackson, for lunch.

  Chamoun’s Rest Haven is an old diner with low drop ceilings, heavy gray curtains to block out the sun, and a collection of random family photos decorating the wall behind the counter. Paula owns and operates it now, almost single-handedly. Her parents, Louise and Chafik Chamoun, bought it from its original Lebanese owners. The Rest Haven has been open since 1947. Paula wears thick glasses, and her dark hair curls in a hundred different directions. Her hot-pink nail polish matches the pink flower petals on her shirt. She hustles across the restaurant to take an order.

  She is the only one on the floor, talking to Tom and me while waiting on three other tables. She doesn’t stop talking or moving. Sentences from one conversation trail into a question to another table, all one long, uninterrupted soliloquy. When coffee runs low, one of the customers gets up and refills his cup and those at the table next to his.

  The menu is split into three sections: Southern favorites, Lebanese foods, and Italian dishes such as spaghetti and lasagna. I order something from each section. Tom is impressed by my appetite. He has the girth of a chef who likes to eat and a handlebar moustache that he teases with his fingertips when he speaks. Tom and I talk about the history of Clarksdale, about food and authenticity, about what it means to have a culture sewn so tightly into the fabric of everyday life that it is normal for a white blue-collar worker to come here and ask for his kibbeh on a roll as though he were ordering a cheeseburger. This isn’t Lebanese food anymore, Tom tells me. This is Delta food and, more specifically, Clarksdale food.

  You can order the kibbeh two ways, raw or fried. The raw kibbeh is eaten like steak tartar. It is dense and red, more like an uncooked hamburger patty. It is rich and filling. And then it hits me: this kibbeh is made with beef, not lamb. I have never seen kibbeh that was anything but lamb. I ask Paula about this, and she stops to catch her breath before answering. Lamb is too expensive and hard to find; the beef here is cheap and good, and it is a local favorite. All around us, there are customers eating it. Some have it fried and put in a roll, which makes it really just a hamburger.

  Rest Haven’s lasagna is a mess of tortured pasta and thick red sauce. The cabbage rolls are tender and fragrant. They are slightly sweet, and I can’t tell if this comes from added sugar or the large amount of onion that dominates the beef stuffing. The coconut pie is the best I’ve ever had. The little coconut bits on top are charred to a charcoal black, a contrast to the shiny mass of white meringue holding a firm texture.

  Paula sits with us for just a few minutes. Her parents still come in to make the kibbeh, she says. No one else can make it right. I can feel the restlessness in her bones that only another chef can truly understand.

  “I never thought I would end up in Clarksdale all my life, but oh well, here I am. I do it for the customers—they need me.” She is happy here, she tells me with a bit of hesitation. She corrects herself: she is needed here.

  I don’t ask for an explanation. I understand her. For most of us, that is enough to make us stay in the kitchen for a lifetime. Before I get a chance to compliment her on her cabbage rolls, she is already talking to a customer who has just walked in the door. The two talk as if they’ve known each other their whole lives, and they probably have.

  While we’re on our way out, Paula mentions that her parents owned a grocery shop in Friars Point before buying Rest Haven. It is where they first started selling Lebanese food. The shop is now run by Chinese, she says, and they have good fried wings, apparently.

  I ask Tom to drive me there. It is in a part of town with one museum and nothing but a few stores on a single dilapidated block. The grocery store is the only place open. The Chinese lady taking our order speaks no English. The handwritten menu features everything from chicken gizzards to egg foo yung. We point to the chicken wings. While waiting for the food, I study the place. The shelves of the store are scantily stocked but offer enough for a family to live on. Jars of pickled pig’s feet sit bemusedly next to packs of instant ramen. A grandmother emerges from a back room and sits at the only other table in the place. She lifts a basket cover, and in it I glimpse her lunch: a cloudy soup of pork bones and scallion, rice, and a side dish of cabbage. I smile at her, and she nods sternly before turning her back to me and slurping her food.

  On our way back to Clarksdale, I ask Tom to take me to the Chinese restaurant called Hibachi Buffet. Yes, the one that serves up a generic brand of Chinese food for
$7.99 a plate. It sounds like a horrible idea, so of course we go. The buffet station is split up into categories: sushi, fried foods, Chinese, salad, and soul food. I make myself a plate of fried chicken, greens, lima beans, cornbread, mashed potatoes, and a fortune cookie. It is good, really good. I try the lo mein, and it is horrible. I can’t even look at the sushi. The owner goes by the name Simon. He’s from Hong Kong, via Atlanta. He’s been here only a few years. He’s got a good business, he tells me. I ask him if a Chinese person is cooking the soul food. No, he tells me. His kitchen is run by three people: a Chinese man, a young Mexican cook, and an African American woman. They split up the menu, and each prepares his or her station.

  “Do they get along?” I ask him.

  He hesitates, clearly not ready for a question like this. He shrugs and smiles. Sometimes, he says, sometimes. I ask him if I can talk to the cooks. He says no and then gestures for me to move so the next customer on line can pay for his food.

  I step aside but ask him one more question: Why doesn’t he serve more authentic Hong Kong food? It has to be better than this generic version of Chinese food.

  “People not ready for it. Not yet.”

  I feel at home here. This is America. Maybe not the white-picket-fence version we are used to seeing, but the one that exists in every town just beneath the surface, embodied by the diversity in the labor economy. I’ll bet the kitchen here is a fascinating place. I’ll bet it is an uneasy collaboration at times, bound together by the necessities of food and culture and commerce. I’m glad to have found some good soul food. I’m even happier that I had to go to a Chinese buffet restaurant to find it.

  That night, I go to Red’s Lounge to hear some live music. Tom used to be in a band, and we talk about the last days of CBGB. We were both there during the decline. The last time I went was about a year before they announced it was closing. The band onstage was just as angry and pierced, their music just as cacophonous as anything you might have heard a decade before. It was actually good music, but it didn’t matter anymore, not there, anyway, in the heart of the most desired piece of real estate on the Bowery. It was no longer Skid Row. Across the street, you could buy a six-hundred-dollar leather handbag. The tanned and wealthy youth were hanging out drinking saketinis in lounges just a few blocks to the north. The first time I went to CBGB, I was fifteen, and it meant a lot to me. By the time it closed, the city had no need for it anymore.