Southern Belly

by John T. Edge

  A NORTH CAROLINA ’CUE PRIMER

  When it comes to barbecue, North Carolinians fall into two camps: devotees of eastern-style or western-style barbecue, with the latter often labeled Lexington-style in deference to the Piedmont city that most accept as the capital of ‘cue. Along a line that runs roughly approximate to Highway 1, which traces a route north and south from the town of Raleigh, the state divides into two factions, and allegiances are drawn based upon the relative merits of eastern vinegar-pepper sauces versus western tomato-spiked concoctions, and eastern whole-hog versus western shoulder-meat barbecue.

  Guess what their specialty is?

  Easterners go so far as to argue that since their sauces tend to lack even a kiss of tomato, theirs is the oldest style, dating back to the days when popular belief held that the tomato was poisonous. Westerners counter that everyone knows tomatoes are God’s gift to smoked meat. Though there are myriad variations in the different styles that a local might be willing to spend an afternoon explaining—like the tendency of eastern aficionados to offer boiled potatoes dusted with paprika on the side and the western habit of serving a reddish coleslaw shot through with barbecue sauce—the novice eater is advised to stick to analysis of meat and sauce when trying to get his geographical bearings. A peek around back of the building might also be in order, especially when you are in the eastern part of the state, for, of late, many of the state’s venerable smoke shacks have taken to cooking on thermostat-controlled pits. When in doubt don’t just look for a pile of hickory stacked by the pit. Instead, bend down and take a look at the woodpile. Are there cobwebs collecting between the split logs? If so you might be staring down at what amounts to little more than window dressing for one of those heretical gas- or electric-fired ovens.

  Ayden

  Still life with pig and cabbage.

  SKYLIGHT INN

  The late Pete Jones claimed lineage in the barbecue business dating to the days of his great-great-grandfather, Skilton Dennis, who was widely recognized as hosting one of the first commercial barbecues in the state. In February of 1830, he dug a pit and smoked a few pigs for a Baptist church convention, serving the assembled masses from the back of a wagon. “The TV folks say the date was February 14, but you never can tell about what they say,” Pete once told me.

  Pete, a chain-smoker with the scarred forearms of an experienced pitman, died in 2006. He had been in business for himself since 1948. But his instruction in the ways of the pit started at the age of seven under the watchful eye of his uncle, Emmett Dennis. “I guess if anybody showed me how, it was him,” Pete told me.

  Today, his nephew Jeff Jones runs a smoke shack that seems little changed from the days when the elder Jones shoveled his first load of hickory and oak embers onto an iron grate covered with a splayed hog. “We still cook all night—get through around 9:15 in the morning,” Pete liked to say. “Somebody’s got to be here with the meat. They got to add coals every thirty or forty minutes if they want to do it right. We go slow, but we don’t go at one temperature; it just depends. And we put our coals around the pig, never under it—that is if you want to do it right.” With that kind of schedule it should come as no surprise to you that Pete lived across the street.

  The restaurant is a no-frills operation, a stop-sign-shaped brick building on the outskirts of town, hard by the local airstrip. There’s no sign out front. Indeed the only thing likely to catch your eye is the rustic rendition of the U.S. Capitol dome—made with vinyl siding, wood, and tin—that Pete had mounted up top when National Geographic magazine declared his place to be the barbecue capital of the world back in 1984. Pete’s rationale was simple: “You’ve got to have a dome if you’re the capital, now don’t you?”

  Choices are limited: small tray, large tray, or sandwich; that’s about it. And trays are the way to go, for they combine a cardboard boat of sweet, moist ’cue, topped with a slab of grainy cornbread suffused with meat drippings, and another tray of brightly-flavored coleslaw, each layer separated from the other by a sheet of wax paper, and the whole affair balanced precariously on the counter while you fish in your pockets for cash. A sauce tasting of red pepper and vinegar sits on the table, but most folks forgo any further adornment. No matter how many times I visit, my eyes are always drawn to the fellow stationed behind the back counter, wielding a cleaver, hacking the meat to pieces, and tossing bits of crispy skin with dove-white tenderloin, working all the while to get the right mix of fat and lean, crunchy and soft meat.

  Noting that the chopping block is almost concave, I once asked Pete how often he had to buy a new one. “If I tell you about that,” he said, “I’ll have to tell you about the midgets.” I told Pete that I was game and we were off on a thirty-minute romp of a story. Along the way I learned that Pete sold the concave chopping blocks for fifty dollars per and that his best customers were a pair of midget Florida real estate developers who, enamored of his barbecue, liked to take the blocks, top them with Plexiglas, fix them with legs, and use them as coffee tables. “Last time they were in, I posed for a picture with them,” Pete said. “I got down on my knees and I was still taller than the little fellers. One of them looked up at me and said, ‘We’ve had our pictures taken with the president before, but this is the first time we’ve gotten a picture with a king, the king of barbecue.’”

  1501 SOUTH LEE STREET / 252-746-4113

  Beulaville

  ANN’S WAGON WHEEL

  Though collards are revered throughout the Southland, with some folks going so far as to argue that a sip of murky potlikker from the bottom of the kettle is the first line of defense in curing a head cold, or a poultice made from collard leaves and a flour sack the perfect balm for arthritis, the citizens of North Carolina have a peculiar affection for the crucifer.

  Jazz great Thelonious Monk, a native of North Carolina, wore a collard leaf in his lapel when playing New York clubs. Archibald Leigh, a black American expatriate living in Paris, penned a poem for the 1984 collection of Leaves of Green: The Collard Poems, a wide-ranging compendium of more than 300 efforts. Commissioned on behalf of the Ayden, North Carolina Collard Festival, the pamphlet included poetry by such established literary figures as Fred Chappell. Leigh, for his part, claimed for collards a righteous and proud blackness, calling them “colored people’s greens.”

  What’s more, the state boasts a number of distinctive styles of collard cookery. For the longest time, the Wagon Wheel was base for a comparatively unconventional camp. Rather than strip the leaves from the tough stems, Wagon Wheel cooks chopped the leaves whole. And there was no smoked swine bobbing in the pot. Instead the Wagon Wheel, still a modest clapboard building on the outskirts of town hard by a trailer park, cooked exclusively with fresh pork backbones. And they tossed stewed cabbage into the mix to cut the bitterness. Last, the collards were whipped into a state that borders upon a puree, leaving not a trace of the traditional leaves of dusky green swaddled in a puddle of potlikker.

  Eaten with a side of cornmeal dumplings swimming in backbone broth, they were a platonic dish of the highest order, worthy of gassing up the Humvee on a Wednesday morning and barreling across the countryside. A few years back, the Wagon Wheel changed hands. It’s now formally known as Ann’s Wagon Wheel. And the collards now lack the sweetening effect of cabbage. Some locals say this allows the true essence of the collards to shine through, but I would be lying if I didn’t tell you I missed them.

  169 HIGHWAY 111 / 910-298-4272

  Charlotte

  COFFEE CUP

  From the outside, the Coffee Cup, with its cinder-block walls and barred windows, looks like a Cold War–era bunker. Set on an industrial side street where forklifts have been known to share the road with commuters, the restaurant is Charlotte’s premier purveyor of plate lunches, the kind of place that draws white-stocking attorneys and blue-coverall-clad mechanics alike.

  It’s also the spot to which a native of Charlotte is likely to point when asked whether the civil rights struggles of th
e 1950s and 60s paid any real dividends, for here, where black Southerners once were served only at the take-out window, what is arguably the city’s most integrated crowd sits down to plates of skillet-fried chicken and creamy macaroni and cheese, buttery mashed potatoes, and earthy black-eyed peas.

  Until recently, Chris Crowder still ruled the roost at the Coffee Cup. A North Carolina native, an African American of farm stock, she’d returned home from New Jersey in the 1960s when her aunt, Myrtle Heath, bought the place and offered to put her to work as a waitress. At a juncture in the South’s history when many blacks were fleeing for Chicago and Detroit, Crowder picked up a cork-lined tray and an order pad and waded into the fray.

  In the intervening years, she didn’t budge one whit. After her aunt retired in the early 1980s, she bought the place with a fellow waitress named Mary Lou Maynor. Mary Lou was white, Crowder black, and as Charlotte grew, their customers became a kaleidoscope of nationality and ethnicity. A few years back Mary Lou passed on, and though the Coffee Cup no longer claims a biracial management team, there are lessons still to be learned from a lunchtime trip to this Charlotte institution. Ask about the sign that was once posted on the back wall, the one that read, “Bathrooms Are Outside,” and you’re likely to get a history lesson: “They’re out there because white folks put them out there, back when black and white people weren’t supposed to eat or sleep or go to the bathroom in the same place.” Crowder told me: “I keep them there so we don’t forget where we came from.”

  914 SOUTH CLARKSON STREET / 704-375-8855

  PRICE’S CHICKEN COOP

  Thinly battered, well-salted deep-fried chicken, dumped unceremoniously from cook baskets and served with hushpuppies, coleslaw, a marshmallowy white bread roll, and a jumble of so-called Tater Rounds. That’s what you get when you quit the more well-traveled and gentrified precincts of Charlotte’s Uptown neighborhood for this South End favorite, in business since 1948 as a chicken market, since 1952 as a kinda-sorta restaurant.

  The exterior is a plane of redbrick, fronted by plate glass windows which, when the place is bursting at the seams—and it almost always is—fog with clouds of chicken grease. The white cinder-block interior is utilitarian. There may well be an air-conditioning unit in use somewhere but, come summer, it’s no match for the combo of roiling oil and broiling Carolina sun. And there are no seats. Most meals are eaten in the front seat of cars or vans parked at the curb or, for those with a bit of lolling-about time, beneath the boughs in nearby Latta Park.

  If you desire a meal of chicken parts, you’re in the right place. The menu, printed on the top of the white pasteboard boxes in which Price’s serves their birds, boasts quarter chickens, chicken livers, and chicken gizzards. (They also dish burgers and barbecue sandwiches, but no one is fool enough to order them.)

  I once believed that in the cookery of fried chicken a cast-iron skillet was elemental. I claimed a seat in the skillet-fried pew alongside Calvin Trillin, who once observed that a “fried chicken cook with a deep fryer is a sculptor working with mittens.”

  But after a decade of traveling the South, eating at the likes of Price’s—not to mention the fabled Willie Mae’s Scotch House in New Orleans—I’ve tasted my share of wonderful deep-fried bird and have, in the process, come to see the error of my ways. I now believe that skillet-fried chicken is not inherently superior to deep-fried chicken. Nor is the inverse true. (The two are, however, different. So keep this in mind: If you like a crust that clings to the meat and offers a bit of chew, you’re in the skillet camp. If you like a brittle crust that shatters upon first bite, you’re a deep-fried fan.)

  One more thing: When you step to the counter at Price’s, have purse or wallet in hand and your order settled, for the white-jacketed employees brook no fulminating and fumbling. There is, however, a payoff in the harried exchange of cash and drum-stick. Standing amid the rugby scrum of hungry supplicants, waiting for your box, you will recognize a place that matters deeply to this ever-evolving New South metropolis.

  1614 CAMDEN ROAD / 704-333-9866

  Gastonia

  R. O.’S BAR-B-CUE

  Slaw is a many splendored thing. I’ve eaten apple-studded stuff in Arkansas. Buttermilk-glazed in Texas. Mustard-laced in Tennessee. Bacon grease–doused in Kentucky. And here, in the Piedmont of North Carolina, I’ve eaten what some, owing to a pour of barbecue sauce, call bloodshot slaw. Yet none of these variations on a theme strike me as more distinctive or more curiously compelling than the almost puree of cabbage, catsup, mayonnaise, pickle relish, and spices served by Robert Ozy Black, his wife, Pearl, and their descendants since 1946.

  R. O.’s began as a barbecue drive-in. And so it remains. Carhops, callow men with pencils tucked behind their ears, still work the blacktop. And barbecue sandwiches of sliced pork are still popular. (So are sandwiches of liver mush and eggs on white toast, but I digress.)

  Hereabouts, slaw has supplanted barbecue as the center-of-the-plate focus. On a recent visit, I watch people drizzle it on hushpuppies, smear it on saltines, and use it as a dip for onion rings. Between pulls on a Cheerwine, one woman eats the stuff with a spoon. A love for slaw has even upended the Gastonia sandwich paradigm. In conversation with locals, I learn that the best meat to get as a slaw accessory is not barbecue pork but a flattop-cooked burger.

  Later that same afternoon, I stop at Black’s Barbecue, south of town. The same tenets hold true: carhops, slaw, and burgers. Although the slaw at Black’s is a mite coarser, perhaps a bit spicier, it is undoubtedly born of the same palate.

  Sitting at table in Black’s, I conclude that the tradition will remain hyper-local. Sure, R.O.’s now sells its slaw in area grocery stores and has plans to expand nationally. But exceptional of displaced Gastonians pining for a taste of home—and acknowledging my own acquired taste for the stuff—the consistency and flavor of this sort of slaw does not strike me as a food outlanders will come to claim as their own. As I dip my fry in a pool of the slaw that drips from the backend of my burger, I take heart in that realization and rationalize a loop back to R. O.’s, where I will pick up a to-go quart.

  1318 WEST GASTON AVENUE / 704-866-8143

  Goldsboro

  WILBER’S

  Wilber’s is a devoutly Democratic institution. Tacked to the knotty oak paneling are black and white photos of FDR and other gods of the yellow-dog pantheon. It’s a vestige of the day when North Carolina was a one-party state. Much has changed since the Republicans began luring rural Southerners into their lair. But Wilber’s has not.

  On my most recent visit, after wolfing down a sandwich of moist, chopped pork flecked with bits of red pepper and doused with a splash from the cruet of thin vinegary sauce they keep on every red-checked tabletop, Dennis Monk—owner Wilberdean Shirley’s son-in-law—took me on a tour of the pit house out back, where whole hogs spend eight or nine hours on racks of steel rods perched above a bed of smoldering hardwood coals. Of the infernal pit room, Rick Bragg once observed, “It would seem a little bit like hell, if it didn’t smell so good.”

  Not too long before my visit Wilber’s lost the services of its pitman, Ike Green, a veteran of nearly thirty years on the job. “He was still working the pits on a Thursday,” Dennis says. “But by that next week he was gone. It was a big loss. We’re still trying to figure out what to do.”

  When I tell Dennis that judging by the quality of the barbecue I just ate, Wilber’s has coped just fine, he smiles and allows that it’s all about wood smoke and pig meat. “Ever since my father-in-law bought this place back in ’62, salesmen have been calling on him, trying to get him to switch to gas and electric cookers. They like to have worried him to death. Some people will tell you that—like the old tobacco barns where they cured the leaves with wood smoke—before long this will be gone, but Mr. Shirley doesn’t buy that. As long as we got wood to use we’ll be cooking with it. We use oak and hickory for the most part, and with all these storms that have come through lately—Dennis, Floyd, Fran—
we should be cooking for a while.”

  HIGHWAY 70, FOUR MILES EAST OF TOWN / 919-778-5218

  Greensboro

  Inspired by students in Greensboro, sit-ins and marches soon spread to nearby Chapel Hill (pictured here).

  WOOLWORTH’S LUNCH COUNTER

  On the afternoon of Monday, February 1, 1960, four black college students—Ezell Blair, Joseph McNeill, David Richmond, and Franklin McCain—took seats at the long L-shaped lunch counter that ran along the back wall of the Woolworth department store in downtown Greensboro. Like other customers on that sunny winter day, they sat on chrome-backed swivel stools and pondered the menu choices: a chicken salad club sandwich for fifty-five cents, a roast turkey dinner for sixty-five cents, and a slice of layer cake for fifteen cents.

  The four students ordered coffee. A black waitress refused, for the seats they had chosen were in the “whites only” section of the lunch counter. The white manager, Clarence Harris, stepped into the fray, and rather than raise a ruckus or call the police, he did nothing. The students kept their seats, stood their ground, but were not served. And when the store closed for the night, the four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College bid Harris a civil good night, promising to return in the morning. Surely they took note of the Woolworth slogan, “Everybody’s Store,” emblazoned on signage posted throughout the building.