Up in the Old Hotel (Vintage Classics)

by Joseph Mitchell

  We started up an oyster-shell lane that ran beside the river, and I said, ‘It must be convenient to have the streetcar line end right in front of your pavilion.’

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ Mr Barbee said, ‘that’s no accident. In a way, that’s how the terrapin farm began. My daddy, Alexander Barbee, was a conductor on that road back in steam-engine days. He was French descent, and he liked to eat. He used to buy terrapin the colored people along the railroad would capture in the marshes. At first he just bought a mess now and then for his own table, but in time he took to trading in them, shipping them up to Maryland by the barrel.

  ‘Well, around 1895, diamondbacks got so scarce the price shot up. They had been fished-out. When an old millionaire up North got ready to throw a banquet, he sometimes had to send men up and down the coast to get a supply. So in 1898 it came to pass that my daddy decided to make a stab at raising terrapin in captivity during his off hours from the railroad. Some Yankee scientists he wrote to said it was a foolish idea, absolutely impossible, but he went out at night with the colored people and bogged around in the salt marshes and got so he understood terrapin better than any man in history. When he got ready to buy land for his terrapin farm, he naturally thought of the end of the railroad line. The land there had always looked good to him. It was the most beautiful scene in the world; when he reached it he could knock off and have a cigar. So he bought a few swampy acres, built a shed, and stocked it with terrapin. Every time he got to the end of the run he would jump out and tend to them. He got them in a breeding mood, and by 1912 they were breeding to such an extent he quit his job on the railroad. From time to time he bought more land down here. He was an unusual man. He played the cornet in a band up in Savannah and he had a high opinion of fun, so he built a dance pavilion down here. The pavilion isn’t any gold mine, but we still keep it going. I sort of like it. People come out from Savannah on hot nights to smell the ocean and cool themselves off, and you know how it is – you like to see them.’

  We reached the end of the oyster-shell lane and came upon a long, rather dilapidated shed in an oak grove. Green moss was growing on the shingled roof and the whitewash on the clapboards was peeling. There was a big padlock on the door. ‘This shed is the breeding farm,’ Mr Barbee said. ‘They’re born in here, and they stay here until they’re around nine summers old. At the beginning of the ninth summer they’re put in the fattening pen and allowed to eat their heads off. In the autumn, after they’ve been fattened for four or five months, they’re sent to market. You can eat a terrapin when it’s five years old, but I think they taste better around nine. Also, it’s wasteful to eat young terrapin, when you consider it takes two nine-year-olds to produce a good pint of clear meat.’ He unlocked the door but did not open it. Instead, as if he had suddenly changed his mind, he turned around on the steps of the shed and resumed the story of his father.

  ‘Daddy passed away ten years ago and I took charge,’ he said. ‘He was quite a man, if I do say so. That white house we passed up there at the bend in the lane was his home. His room is just the way he left it. It’s called the Barbee Musical Room, because everything in it plays a tune. Touch the bed, and a music box in the mattress plays a tune. Hang your hat on the rack, and the same thing happens. Pick up anything on the table from a dice cup to a hair-brush, and you get a tune. Why, there’s one hundred and fifty objects in that room that’ll play a tune if you just touch them. There’s a rubberneck wagon up in Savannah that brings tourists down here to the island just to see it, and we employ a colored girl to stay in the room and answer questions. I bet half the yachtsmen that go to Florida in the winter have visited it.

  ‘Three things Daddy truly admired were diamondbacks, music boxes, and William Jennings Bryan. In 1911, just before he quit the railroad, he put a clutch of terrapin eggs in his grip and went up to Washington and called on Mr Bryan at his hotel. He had one egg that needed only a few minutes to hatch, and he said to Mr Bryan, “Sir, I have long been an admirer of yours and I want to ask you a slight favor. I want you to hold this here terrapin egg in your hand until it hatches out.” Mr Bryan leaped out of his chair and said, “I never heard of such a fool idea. Get away from me with that nasty thing.” But Daddy was known for having his own way. People said he could argue his way through a brick wall. They said he could argue the tail off a dog. So he argued Mr Bryan into holding the egg, and in about twenty minutes a little bull terrapin hatched out right in Mr Bryan’s fist. Daddy thanked him and said he was going to name the little fellow William Jennings Bryan, but Mr Bryan begged him to have mercy on him and call it something else. So Daddy named it Toby. He kept that Toby terrapin for years and years. He would carry it in his coat pocket everywhere he went. He had it trained so it would wink its right eye whenever he said, “See here, Toby, ain’t it about time for a drink?”’

  Mr Barbee laughed. ‘Yes, siree,’ he said, ‘Daddy was a sight.’ He swung the shed door open. A rickety catwalk extended the length of the shed, and on each side of it were nine stalls whose floors swarmed with thousands of terrapin of all ages. Some were the size of a thumbnail and some were as big as a man’s hand. There was a musky but not unpleasant smell in the shed. The diamondback is a lovely creature. On both sides of its protruding, distinctly snakelike head are pretty, multi-colored lines and splotches. The hard shell in which it is boxed glints like worn leather. On the top shell, or carapace, are thirteen diamond-shaped designs, which may be pale gold, silvery, or almost black. Sometimes a terrapin shows up with fourteen diamonds on its shell; Mr Barbee said that people on the Isle of Hope save these rare shells for good luck. The belly shell, or plastron, is the color of the keys of an old piano. ‘We measure them by placing a steel ruler on the belly shell,’ Mr Barbee said, bending over and lifting a terrapin out of a stall. The creature opened its sinister little jaws, darted its head from left to right, and fought with its claws. ‘This cow will measure six and a half inches, which means she’s around eight years of age. Next year she’ll be ready for the stewpot. The price a terrapin brings at retail is largely based on shell length. In New York you’d pay between three and a half and five dollars for a seven-inch cow. An eight-inch one might bring seven dollars.’ Mr Barbee noticed that I was watching the terrapin’s jaws. ‘Oh, they never bite,’ he said.

  ‘Are bull terrapin used in stews?’ I asked.

  ‘A bull’s meat is tougher but just as palatable,’ he said. ‘A bull doesn’t grow as big as a cow. You seldom see one longer than five inches. Also, from eggs hatched in captivity we get eighteen cows to every bull. That’s a fact I can’t explain. The bulls have a tendency to get a little overexcited at breeding time, and to keep them from working themselves to death we always put some wild bulls in the pens to help them out. This strengthens the herd. We employ hunters to go out and capture wild terrapin in the winter, when they hibernate. Wild terrapin don’t eat a thing from frost until around March. They burrow in the marsh mud and sleep through the winter. They always leave an air hole in the mud, and that’s what hunters look for. Some hunters use dogs called terrapin hounds, which are trained to recognize these holes. When a hound finds a hole he bays, and the hunter digs the terrapin out. We buy wild terrapin and ship them right along with our home-grown stock. My terrapin are raised so naturally they taste exactly like wild ones just pulled out of the mud. The difference is impossible to detect.’

  Mr Barbee returned the terrapin he had been holding to its stall, and she crawled off. He said that, just as in the wild state, captive cows begin laying eggs in the late spring, nesting in shallow holes which they dig with their hind claws in sand on the stall floors. A cow may lay twice in a season, depositing a total of twenty eggs. The eggs are about the size of pecans and are elastic; they do not crack under pressure. In the tidal marshes the eggs hatch in from two to three months; on the farm they are stolen from the nests and incubated. Just how this is done, Mr Barbee flatly declined to tell. ‘That’s the Barbee family secret,’ he said.

&nbs
p; An old Negro came into the shed. ‘Looky, looky, here comes Cooky,’ he said. He was carrying a bucket. ‘Jesse Beach, my foreman,’ Mr Barbee said. ‘His bucket is full of crab legs and chopped-up oysters.’ The old man went down the catwalk, tossing a handful of food into each stall. I had noticed that the moment he entered the shed, the terrapin commenced crawling toward the front of their stalls. ‘They know Jesse,’ Mr Barbee said. The terrapin converged on the food, shouldering each other out of the way, just as puppies do. They ate greedily. ‘Diamondbacks make wonderful pets,’ Mr Barbee said. ‘I sell a lot of babies for that purpose. They are much more interesting than the dumb little turtles they sell in pet shops.’

  We followed the old Negro out of the shed and Mr Barbee locked the door. ‘We’ll take a look at the fattening pen now,’ he said. We went to one of the shacks alongside the pavilion. It housed a crabmeat cannery, another of the thrifty Mr Barbee’s enterprises. Between the shack and the riverbank, half in the water and half in the shore mud, was a board corral. The shallow, muddy water in it seethed with forty-five hundred full-grown terrapin. ‘This is a terrapin heaven,’ Mr Barbee said. On one side of the corral was a cement walk, and when we stepped on it our shadows fell athwart the water and the terrapin sunning themselves on the surface promptly dived to the bottom. The tips of their inquisitive heads reappeared immediately and I could see hundreds of pairs of beady eyes staring up. ‘They’re fat and sassy,’ Mr Barbee said. ‘There’s a pipe leading from the shucking table in the crab cannery right into the pen, and the legs and discarded flesh from the shucked crabs drop right into the water. The terrapin hang around the spout of the pipe and gobble up everything that comes along. Sooner or later those terrapin down there will appear on the finest tables in the country. God knows they’re expensive, but that can’t be helped. I feed a terrapin nine years before I sell it, and when you think of all the crabmeat and good Georgia oysters those fellows have put away, you can understand why a little-bitty bowl of terrapin stew costs three dollars and a half’. While we stood there gazing down into a muddy pool containing more than $11,000 worth of sleek reptiles, the Negro foreman walked up toting an empty barrel and a basket of tree moss. After dousing some of the moss in the river, he made a bed with it on the bottom of the barrel. The barrel had air holes cut in it. Then he reached in the pool and grabbed six terrapin. He scrubbed them off with a stiff brush and placed them on the wet moss. Then he covered them with moss and placed six more on this layer, continuing the sandwiching process until the barrel contained three dozen. While he was putting the head on the barrel, Mrs Barbee came to a window of the pavilion and called, ‘Come to dinner.’

  The table was laid on the back porch of the pavilion, overlooking the Skidaway, and there was a bottle of amontillado on it. Mr Barbee and I had a glass of it, and then Mrs Barbee brought out three bowls of terrapin stew, Southern style, so hot it was bubbling. The three of us sat down, and while we ate, Mrs Barbee gave me a list of the things in the stew. She said it contained the meat, hearts, and livers of two diamondbacks killed early that day, eight yolks of hard-boiled eggs that had been pounded up and passed through a sieve, a half pound of yellow country butter, two pints of thick cream, a little flour, a pinch of salt, a dash of nutmeg, and a glass and a half of amontillado. The meat came off the terrapins’ tiny bones with a touch of the spoon, and it tasted like delicate baby mushrooms. I had a second and a third helping. The day was clear and cool, and sitting there, drinking dry sherry and eating terrapin, I looked at the scarlet leaves on the sweet gums and swamp maples on the riverbank, and at the sandpipers running stiff-legged on the sand, and at the people sitting in the sun on the decks of the yachts anchored in the Skidaway, and I decided that I was about as happy as a human can be in this day and time. After the stew we had croquettes made of crabmeat and a salad of little Georgia shrimp. Then we had some Carolina whiting that had been pulled out of the Atlantic at the mouth of the Skidaway early that morning. With the sweet, tender whiting, we had butter beans and ears of late corn that were jerked off the stalk only a few minutes before they were dropped in the pot. We began eating at one o’clock; at four we had coffee.

  Three afternoons later, back in Manhattan, I visited the terrapin market of New York, which is located in three ancient buildings near the corner of Beekman and Front streets, in Fulton Market. The largest of these is occupied by Moore & Co., an old black-bean, turtle-soup, and terrapin-stew firm now owned by a gourmet named Francesco Castelli. Each winter it sells around two thousand quarts of diamondback stew. In Mr Castelli’s establishment I saw the barrel of terrapin I had watched Mr Barbee’s foreman pack on the Isle of Hope. ‘I order a lot of Barbee’s stuff and I ordered it from his father before him,’ Mr Castelli said. ‘I also use terrapin from the Chesapeake Bay area, from the Cape Hatteras area of North Carolina, from New Jersey, and Long Island.’ Mr Castelli believes that turtle and terrapin meat is the most healthful in the world and likes to tell about a fox terrier which lived in his factory and ate nothing but turtle meat until he died in 1921, aged twenty-five. He uses all his terrapin in his stewpots and sells no live ones.

  Live ones are sold by a rather sharp-spoken old Irishman on Front Street named D. R. Quinn, who has been in the business most of his life and has not developed a taste for the meat, and by Walter T. Smith, Inc., also on Front Street. Smith’s is sixty-two years old and is one of the largest turtle firms in the world; its cable address, Turtling, is known to many European chefs. It sells all kinds of edible turtles, including treacherous snappers and great 150-pound green turtles out of the Caribbean, from which most turtle soup is made. Snappers, prized for soup in Philadelphia, are not popular here. They can knock a man off his feet with their alligatorlike tails and have been known to snap off the fingers of fishermen; few New York chefs are hardy enough to handle them. I had a talk with Mr Kurt W. Freund, manager of the firm, and he took me up the sagging stairs to the room in which his tanks are kept and showed me diamondbacks from every state on the Eastern seaboard except Maine. A few were from sloughs on Long Island. He said that in the local trade all terrapin caught from Maryland north are called Long Islands. He said that in the North, terrapin hunting is a fisherman’s sideline and that few hunters north of Maryland catch more than a couple of dozen a year.

  ‘I imagine you’re under the impression that millionaires buy most of our terrapin,’ Mr Freund said. ‘If so, you’re mistaken. The terrapin business was hard hit by prohibition, and it never has got on its feet again, and for years the poor Chinese laundryman has been the backbone of our trade. I’d say that seventy per cent of the sixteen thousand live diamondbacks sold on this street last year were bought by old Chinese. Come look out this window and see my sign.’ Hanging from the second-floor window was a red-and-white wooden signboard smeared with Chinese characters. Mr Freund said the characters were pronounced ‘gim ten guoy’ and meant ‘diamondback terrapin.’ He said that each autumn he hires a Chinese to write form letters quoting terrapin prices, which are distributed by the hundred in Chinatown.

  ‘An old Chinese doesn’t run to the doctor or the drugstore when he feels bad,’ Mr Freund said. ‘He saves his pennies and buys himself a terrapin. He cooks it with medicinal herbs and rice whiskey. Usually he puts so much whiskey in it he has himself a spree as well as a tonic. In the autumn and in the spring crowds of old Chinese come in and bargain with me. They balance terrapin on their palms and stare at them and deliberate an hour sometimes before making a selection. They tell me that the turtle has been worshipped in China for centuries. It’s supposed to be a kind of holy reptile. Most of my steady Chinese customers are old laundrymen, and I know that some of them are practically penniless, but they think terrapin meat will do them more good than a month in the hospital, and they’re willing to pay the price.’

  I told Mr Freund that Mr Barbee professed to believe that the consumption of terrapin meat is better than monkey glands for regaining youthfulness.

  ‘Seriously,’ I said, ‘
do you think there’s anything to it?’

  ‘I’ve been around terrapin for years and years, and I eat the meat myself, and I’ve talked the matter over with dozens of old Chinese fellows,’ Mr Freund said, ‘and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.’

  (1939)

  II

  Goodbye, Shirley Temple

  I’VE BEEN GOING to Madame Visaggi’s Third Avenue spaghetti house off and on since speakeasy days, and I know all the old customers. Madame Visaggi calls them ‘the regulars.’ Peggy is one. She is an Irish girl, around thirty-five, who works in the office of a wholesale butcher on First Avenue. She is in Madame Visaggi’s practically every night. Most often she is full of brandy when she leaves, but her apartment is only a few blocks away, in Tudor City, and she always gets home all right. The butcher is her uncle and doesn’t say anything if she shows up late for work. Peggy is an attractive girl despite a large birthmark on her left cheek, which makes her self-conscious. When she comes in, usually between five-thirty and six, she is always tense. She says, ‘I got the inside shakes.’ Then she sits in one of the booths across from the bar, orders a brandy, and opens an afternoon newspaper. By the time she has finished with the newspaper, she has had two or three drinks and has conquered her self-consciousness. Then she doesn’t mind if one of the other regulars comes over and sits in the booth with her. She knows many bitter Irish stories, she uses profanity that is fierce and imaginative, and people like to listen to her. All the regulars are familiar with the fact that Eddie, the bartender, has been in love with her for several years. Eddie has an interest in the restaurant. He is big, cheerful, and dumb. He is always begging Peggy not to drink so much and asking her to go out with him. Once Madame Visaggi sat down with Peggy and said, ‘Say, Peggy, sweetheart, what’s the matter you don’t like Eddie? He’s such a nice boy.’ Peggy snorted and said, ‘The back of my hand to Eddie.’ Then she laughed and said, ‘Oh, Eddie’s O.K.’